Reddit Doesn’t Have to Share IP-Addresses of Piracy Commenters, Court Rules
Every day, millions of people from all over the world submit posts, comments, and other content to Reddit. In many cases, discussion comments are read and soon forgotten but several old threads were brought back to life recently as part of piracy liability lawsuits. The comments in question were picked up by Kerry Culpepper, a copyright attorney who leads several piracy lawsuits against Internet providers on behalf of independent film...
ISPs Say They’ll Happily Cut Pirate IPTV Streams as Quickly as Law Allows It
In the early 2000s, powerful entertainment industry groups were demanding action to prevent “wholesale theft” of their content online, much of it at the hands of regular customers of the world’s ISPs. That very little content was available to buy legally online not only helped to fuel the crisis, in this underdeveloped market many ISPs still had just one key product to sell; internet access and the bandwidth it consumed. Broadly...
Lawsuit Accuses Anna’s Archive of Hacking WorldCat, Stealing 2.2 TB Data
Anna’s Archive is a meta-search engine for book piracy sources and shadow libraries. Launched in the fall of 2022, just days after Z-Library was targeted in a U.S. criminal crackdown, its self-stated goal is to ensure and facilitate the availability of books and articles to the broader public. A few months ago, the search engine expanded its offering by making available data from OCLC’s proprietary WorldCat database. Anna’s Archive...
Prison for ‘Mr. X’: Headteacher By Day, Pirate IPTV Maverick By Night
One of the key goals of the Premier League’s prosecution of Flawless TV was to send a clear deterrent message to those considering the same line of work. When five people were sentenced to an unprecedented 30+ years in prison last May, that was the most powerful anti-piracy message ever sent in the UK, via a private prosecution billed to the taxpayer. Premier League 6, Rest of the UK 0 (latest score) Following last year’s convictions,...
AirVPN Stops Serving Italians due to “Piracy Shield” Blocking Requirements
Last December, Italy’s much-debated ‘Piracy Shield’ anti-piracy system went live in a limited capacity. With a legal challenge thwarted, the blocking efforts are now gearing up, with Internet services as rightsholders’ weapon of choice. Italy’s telecoms regulator AGCOM is the arbiter and previously declared the technological and procedural rules. In essence, these require ISPs, DNS resolvers, and other intermediaries to block pirate...
Piracy Shield’s First Targets Blocked, Pirate Boxes Discovered in Italian Prison
When over 100 officers of Italy’s ‘Penitentiary Police’ carried out a massive anti-contraband operation inside the Velletri prison last week, the spoils were widely reported in the media. The seizure of a small amount of drugs got a mention, likewise the seizure of six phones, chargers, and a PlayStation console. But what really sparked imaginations was the discovery of pirate set-top boxes, which apparently allowed users to “access...
