Hollywood Studios, Amazon & Netflix Sue ‘Evasive’ Pirate IPTV Operator From Texas
Operating a pirate IPTV service can be a dangerous endeavor, no matter where one’s located. In the United States, home to Hollywood and other major entertainment outfits, the risks are arguably even higher. In the past, we have seen several pirate IPTV businesses being taken to court, with rightsholders almost always on the winning side. These cases can result in million-dollar damages awards or even multi-year prison sentences, if...
Ukraine Commits to Piracy Crackdown, Draws Up Blacklist, Joins WIPO ALERT
After more than two years of incalculable losses following Russia’s full-blown invasion in 2022, Ukraine continues to defy the odds as it fights for the right to exist as an independent state. With no obvious end in sight and politics in the United States undermining offensive capability, Ukrainian gains are being reversed in several front line regions, a situation predicted to further deteriorate later this year. Yet for a country...
Z-Library Scammers Use Email Campaigns to Lure Users and Extract Payments
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...
‘Operation 404’ Results in First Prison Sentence for Pirate IPTV Operator
In the fall of 2019, Brazilian law enforcement agencies launched the first wave of anti-piracy campaign ‘Operation 404,’ referring to the well-known HTTP error code. With help from law enforcement in the United States, the United Kingdom, and Argentina, the authorities took down more than a hundred sites and services, while several suspects were arrested. Following its initial successes, several new waves ‘Operation 404’ were...
Piracy Shield Source Code & Internal Documentation Leak Online
Ever since Italian authorities announced their intent to introduce an even more aggressive anti-piracy blocking system than the one already in place, controversy has rarely been far behind. Recent reports of avoidable overblocking, a reluctance to admit that the Piracy Shield system is fallible, and new reports that telecoms regulator AGCOM is now rejecting complaints from wrongfully blocked Cloudflare customers, are just some of the...
Live ‘Piracy Shield’ Data Exposed By New Platform Reveals Akamai IP Blocking
After initially denying that Italy’s new Piracy Shield anti-piracy platform had been responsible for any over-blocking, last week telecoms regulator AGCOM conceded that an IP address belonging to Cloudflare had been blocked in error. While that might be considered progress of sorts, the incident was downplayed as minor on the basis it was rectified a few hours later. No consolation for the many Cloudflare customers affected, of...
