Napster Sparked a File-Sharing Revolution 25 Years Ago
The invention of the MP3 format in 1993 didn’t make any mainstream news headlines. In hindsight, however, it was a pivotal moment that would revolutionize music consumption, and more. Invented by the German engineer Karlheinz Brandenburg and colleagues at the Fraunhofer Society, the coding format made it possible to reduce the size of music files without any significant loss of audible sound quality. Due to the size reductions, these...
Link-Busters Flagged Over 56 Million ‘Pirate’ URLs to Google in a Week
Little over a decade ago, Google expanded its transparency report with a new section dedicated to DMCA takedown requests. For the first time, this allowed outsiders to see which URLs were being targeted by copyright holders and in what quantity. In the years that followed, we meticulously covered a steady increase in takedown notices. From just a few thousand reported links per week, soon it was hundreds of thousands, eventually...
Spain’s Ongoing Pirate Site-Blocking War Targets Thousands of Subdomains
Amendments to Spain’s Copyright Act (Law No. 2/2011) in 2011 led to the formation of an administrative body known as the Second Section of the Intellectual Property Commission (S2CPI). S2CPI launched in 2012 under the Spanish government’s Ministry of Culture and Sports and has the authority to instruct the country’s internet service providers to block subscriber access to confirmed pirate sites and services. Data just published,...
Court Denies Filmmakers’ Renewed Attempt to Get Redditors’ IP Addresses
Reddit has gone head-to-head with a group of filmmakers over the past year, aiming to protect the privacy of its users. In three separate cases, the filmmakers subpoenaed Reddit for details of users who commented on various piracy related topics. The movie companies said they were not planning to go after these people in court but wanted to use their comments as evidence in ongoing piracy liability lawsuits against Internet providers....
FBI Carries Out Fresh Round of Z-Library Domain Name Seizures
Z-Library is one of the largest shadow libraries on the Internet, hosting millions of books and articles that can be downloaded for free. The site defied all odds over the past two years. It continued to operate despite a full-fledged criminal prosecution by the United States, which resulted in the arrest of two alleged operators in Argentina. According to the latest available information, these two defendants are still fighting their...
Activision Wins $14.5m Judgment After EngineOwning Cheat Makers Bailed Out
In a lawsuit filed at a U.S. district court early January 2022, video game giant Activision targeted German company EngineOwning UG, plus a number of individuals associated with the cheat-making and distribution business. With a flood of similar cases, some filed by competitor Bungie, providing a template, Activision’s complaint alleged, among other things, that the defendants trafficked in circumvention devices, in violation of the...
