Canadian Court Rejects Reverse Class Action Lawsuit Against BitTorrent Pirates
Movie studio Voltage Pictures has targeted alleged movie pirates in court for well over a decade. The company and its subsidiaries filed numerous lawsuits against internet subscribers in the United States, Australia, and Europe, using various strategies. In Canada, Voltage and other film companies attempted to target a large group of copyright infringers through a reverse class-action lawsuit, which is relatively rare. The movie...
Top 10 Most Pirated Movies of The Week – 08/04/2025
The data for our weekly download chart is estimated by TorrentFreak, and is for informational and educational reference only. Downloading content without permission is copyright infringement. These torrent download statistics are only meant to provide further insight into piracy trends. All data are gathered from public resources. This week we have one newcomer on the list. “28 Years Later” is the most shared title. The most torrented...
U.S. Anti-Piracy Bills See Headline Blocking Claim Squeezed By Democracy
In 2012, America missed a golden opportunity to show the world how site blocking and other internet restrictions could be deployed at scale to protect rightsholders’ revenues. Vast opposition led to the SOPA bill being withdrawn but elsewhere, site blocking was being introduced in one country after another, driven by the same core rightsholders. Claims that the United States needed to catch up led to a new push towards site blocking....
Pirate IPTV Operator Destroys Evidence Then Agrees to Pay Sky €580,000
Rightsholders call them illicit streaming devices, others prefer the catch-all term pirate boxes. Millions are happy with Firesticks, a name so well known that in some cases it’s used to describe other devices, regardless of manufacturer. But of all names used to describe piracy-configured TV devices, the default option in Ireland – dodgy boxes – is short, descriptive, memorable, and on home soil, almost universally understood. For...
Belgium Targets Internet Archive’s ‘Open Library’ in Sweeping Site Blocking Order (Update)
Traditional site-blocking measures that require local ISPs to block subscriber access to popular pirate sites are in common use around the world. Note: this article was updated to add that Open Library does not appear to be actively blocked. More details here. The aim is to deter piracy by making sites more difficult to find, but these measures are only partially effective. More recently, site-blocking requests have begun to target...
U.S. Senators Introduce New Pirate Site Blocking Bill: Block BEARD
After a decade of focusing efforts overseas, the push for website blocking has landed back on American shores. Earlier this year, U.S. Rep. Zoe Lofgren introduced a new pirate site blocking bill, titled the Foreign Anti-Digital Piracy Act (FADPA). This week, a similar proposal was introduced by Senators Tillis, Coons, Blackburn, and Schiff. The bipartisan bill, titled Block Bad Electronic Art and Recording Distributors (Block BEARD),...
