How Seized Firesticks in a Plastic Bag Opened Up a Pirate Rabbit Hole
Here at TF we track a lot of lawsuits, not to mention buy, research, and then ultimately report on them. While that can be a lot of work, in the United States detailed information is mostly easy to find. The same can’t always be said when piracy-related news is made available by various third-parties, often with a commercial interest in how information is presented. Through selective emphasis, useful information may not even be...
Pro-Plex News Articles on Facebook Deleted By Markscan On Behalf of Plex
On January 1, 2024, TorrentFreak published a review of the wrongful DMCA notices filed against us in 2023, either directly via email or at Google demanding deindexing of our articles. Our small request for 2024 was not unreasonable: stop sending us bogus copyright notices. At the start of 2023, anti-piracy outfits managed to leave us alone for almost three weeks but this year couldn’t manage 24 hours. On January 2, we received another...
Estonian Government Eyes a Pirate Site Blocking Regime
In recent years, website blocking has become one of the most widely-used anti-piracy enforcement mechanisms in the world. ISPs in more than forty countries prevent subscribers from accessing a variety of ‘pirate’ sites, in response to a court order or through a regulatory regime. Estonia Explores Site Blocking European countries have been particularly receptive to these measures with Estonia now considering a similar framework. The...
Lithuania’s €140 Piracy ‘Fines’ Will Pay Off, Lawyer Says
While streaming piracy dominates in many parts of the world, quite a few Lithuanians prefer sharing content using BitTorrent instead. Private torrent tracker Linkomanija is often the top choice. The site has been around for two decades and has weathered many storms, including a high-profile lawsuit from Microsoft. The tracker’s users have also been called out repeatedly. Fourteen years ago, local anti-piracy outfit LANVA reported the...
Silenzio! ‘Anna’s Archive’ Shadow Library Blocked Following Publishers’ Complaint
Over the past decade, platforms including Sci-Hub, Libgen and Z-Library have broken through a sea of movie, TV show, music and similarly unlicensed platforms to take their own places on the piracy front lines. In 2022, a platform called Pirate Library Mirror appeared on the scene, courting controversy right from the start after obtaining a full copy of Z-Library before the site’s legal troubles began. “We deliberately violate the...
BitTorrent Tracker Blocks Thousands of ‘Infringing’ Hashes
Every day, millions of people from all around the world use BitTorrent to download and share files. Most of these transfers are facilitated by third-party torrent trackers, which help file-sharers connect to each other. When someone asks for information referenced by a specific torrent hash, the tracker will respond with a list of peers, if available. This is a pretty straightforward but resource-intensive process. While there are...
