Some Pirate Sites Received More Visitors After Being Blocked
In recent years, website blocking has become one of the most widely-used anti-piracy enforcement mechanisms in the world. ISPs in several dozen countries prevent subscribers from accessing a variety of ‘pirate’ sites. While new blocks are added every month, research on the effectiveness of these efforts is rather limited. Piracy Blocking Research One of the earliest pieces of academic research, based on UK data, showed that the local...
WatchWrestling.ai Taps Outs Due to ACE/DAZN Tag Team Piracy Piledriver
Another day, another report from the Alliance for Creativity and Entertainment announcing the demise of yet another large piracy site, spanning several domains. On this occasion the main target was WatchWrestling.ai, a site that until recently specialized in wrestling events by leading promotions including WWE, AEW, Impact, ROH and NJPW. These shows are extremely popular and traffic figures cited by ACE back that up, and then some....
Record Labels Shut Down FileWarez, Brazil’s Oldest Pirate Forum
At a time when an older generation of file hoarders were still coming to terms with the disappearance of BBS-based communities, new friendships were being built in support of the next big thing. Peer-to-peer technologies such as Napster, Gnutella, FastTrack, and BitTorrent, revolutionized file-sharing but without the support of dozens of thriving forum-based communities, where people shared P2P tutorials, tips, news, and each other’s...
Instagram and Facebook ‘Flag’ IPTV Searches Over Piracy Concerns
Similar to any other online platforms that deal with user-generated content, Instagram and Facebook process thousands of copyright complaints daily. Simply responding to takedown notices isn’t sufficient for all rightsholders, some of which mentioned Meta’s companies as potential “notorious markets” in recent recommendations to the U.S. Trade Representative (USTR). Meta Rebuts Notorious Markets Claims Meta is not happy with this and...
20 Pirate IPTV Arrests, €1.6m Seized; Held For 7 Months, Suspects Confess
The all-round pirate IPTV ‘product’ widely available today was relatively unknown just a decade ago. When acceptable quality, capacity, presentation, and availability collided, mainstream awareness was just a question of time. The suggestion that broadcasters were taken by complete surprise underestimates their market awareness, but whether most expected the initial hors d’oeuvre to be immediately followed by a perpetual all-you-can...
Naver Webtoon Targets Hundreds of Piracy Sites Ahead of Public Listing
Launched by South Korean tech giant Naver Corporation in 2004, Webtoon gained popularity as a hosting platform for a specific type of short-form digital comic, known locally as ‘webtoons’ Almost two decades later, Webtoon Entertainment has over 85 million active users per month across more than 100 countries. In the United States, where the company now boasts 12.5 million active users, Webtoon seems destined for a public listing,...
