beIN Says Issues at RIPE NCC Help Piracy-as-a-Service Entities Stay Online
For those interested in how policy takes shape under pressure from a constantly adapting piracy landscape, submissions to the USTR for its annual review of ‘notorious markets’ often carry clues on the performance of current strategies. Beyond the work of the USTR, some issues raised in submissions aren’t easily fixed but can develop into topics for wider discussion. A joint submission by broadcasting group beIN and Miramax, a company...
MPA Highlights Rapidly Expanding “Hydra Sites” as an Emerging Piracy Problem
The Motion Picture Association (MPA) has been a key player in the anti-piracy fight for decades, a position that has only strengthened in recent years. As the driving force behind the Alliance for Creativity and Entertainment, the MPA finds itself at the center of an international enforcement apparatus. For example, MPA and ACE helped to shut down a popular ring of sports piracy sites last month, which reportedly received over 1.4...
Sports Piracy Operator Goes from Jail to Getting Hired by a Tech Unicorn in a Month
Every year, dozens of pirate site operators and their affiliates are arrested worldwide. Aside from highlighting the damage to rightsholders and the risks involved, little context is provided. The case against the Argentinian operator of Al Ángulo TV provides a welcome exception, with a rather unique plot twist. With assistance from top-tier Spanish football league LaLiga, on August 20 Argentinian police arrested Alejo Warles. The...
New Pirate IPTV Crackdown, Déjà Vu, and the Resilience of Organized Crime
Italy generates more headlines concerning boots-on-the-ground anti-piracy operations than any other country in Europe. If we consider volume of events, no other member state comes anywhere close. If the claimed number of subscribers of every service allegedly shut down in the last decade were added together, the whole of Europe combined couldn’t mount a credible challenge. Yet, the larger the subscriber numbers, the more difficult it...
U.S. Rightsholders Urge China to Take Action Against ‘Export-Only’ Piracy Services
The American copyright industry generates billions of dollars in annual revenue and its content is generally viewed as one of the country’s primary exports. Whether they produce movies, music, software, or content for the publishing sector, U.S. companies are among the market leaders. U.S. companies also have a clear presence in China, and with more than a billion potential consumers, it’s a massive market. This offers enormous...
Kocowa Seeks Domain Takeovers to Permanently Shut Down Dramacool Pirates
Dramacool and several associated sites suddenly shut down last November, with the operators mentioning copyright pressure as a prime reason. The move disappointed millions of Asian drama and anime pirates but the nature of Dramacool’s legal troubles was initially unknown. A few months later, legal paperwork eventually revealed that a U.S. court order, obtained by Wavve Americas (wA), the owner of legal streaming platform Kocowa, was...
