Jake Paul PPV Boxing Piracy Amnesty Misled The Public, Lawsuit Claims
In a matter of weeks, the controversial Jake Paul vs. Ben Askren PPV boxing event will turn three years old and still be remembered for all that went wrong. After the H3 Podcast aired a short clip of the event on YouTube, featuring a fight that lasted just 119 seconds, Triller filed a copyright infringement lawsuit against creators Ethan and Hila Klein. Even today, it still seems nowhere near done. What began as a fairly bitter and...
ISP Suggests That Record Labels Can Sue Torrent Client Developers
Late 2022, several of the world’s largest music companies including Warner Bros. and Sony Music prevailed in their lawsuit against Internet provider Grande Communications. The record labels accused the Astound-owned ISP of not doing enough following complaints about pirating subscribers. Specifically, the labels alleged that the company failed to terminate repeat infringers. The trial lasted more than two weeks and ended in a...
World’s Most Notorious Pirate Sites Listed in New USTR Report
Each year around the end of January, the Office of the United States Trade Representative (USTR) publishes its annual review of so-called ‘notorious markets’ known for their connections to intellectual property crime. In common with previous years, the 2023 edition published Tuesday highlights “prominent and illustrative” examples of mainly online sites and services that either engage directly in piracy, facilitate it, or simply turn...
Film Companies Counter Reddit: “An IP Address is Not a Person”
Over the past decade and a half, hundreds of thousands of alleged BitTorrent pirates were taken to court for sharing mostly video content without permission from rightsholders. While this activity is still ongoing, at least to a degree, not all courts have welcomed this type of lawsuit. On several occasions, courts dismissed piracy claims after ruling that “an IP address is not a person”. In 2014, for example, Florida federal court...
Authorities Secure $2 Billion in Bitcoin from Pirate Site Operators
Pirate sites were early adopters of cryptocurrency. The Pirate Bay, for example, started accepting bitcoin donations in 2013. At the time, a single bitcoin was worth roughly $120, just a fraction of today’s price of $43,000. If The Pirate Bay had kept all donations received it would have millions in bitcoin today. Movie2K was another pirate site that showed an early interest in bitcoin. In its heyday, the site was the dominant pirate...
Music Labels ‘Gramophone’ Copyright Lawsuit Comes Too Late, Internet Archive Says
Founded in 1996, the Internet Archive has built an unparalleled library of digital artifacts in less than three decades. Many people are familiar with the website archiving project “Wayback Machine” but the non-profit also has many other preservation projects underway. These meticulous archiving skills are a vital part of the digital history books, which are being ‘written’ as we speak. However, good intentions themselves are not...
