Judge Gives MindGeek ‘Pirate’ Domains After Porn Pirate Violates Injunction
Adult entertainment company MG Premium has left no stone unturned in its three-year legal standoff with the operator of piracy sites including the hugely popular ‘DaftSex’. The first public sign of the battle ahead arrived courtesy of a huge MG Premium DMCA takedown campaign that aimed to remove 832,000 DaftSex URLs from Google search. Mass copyright takedowns like these should a) make sites like DaftSex harder to find and b) trigger...
Warning: TorrentFreak’s Twitter / X Account Has Been Hijacked
This is a bit of an unusual post, but we believe that it’s important to let people know that our Twitter / X account was been hijacked and put to new use without our knowledge. The username and handle were updated as well, and there doesn’t appear to be an easy way to sort this out without direct help from X, which isn’t proving easy. The account still has our followers so please know that everything that’s posted by the account can’t...
Lead YouTube Content-ID Scammer Requests Reduced Prison Sentence
In 2021, the US Department of Justice launched a criminal proceeding against two men suspected of running a massive YouTube Content ID scam. By falsely claiming to own the rights to more than 50,000 songs, the pair generated more than $23 million in revenue. Last year, the first defendant confessed to his part in the copyright swindle by pleading guilty. Webster Fernandez admitted it was a simple scheme: find Latin American music that...
Google Search Asked to Remove One Billion ‘Pirate’ Links in 9 Months
Roughly 25 years ago, Google started its business as a simple and straightforward search engine. The startup swiftly captured a dominant market share which it managed to retain and grow as the years passed by. Google’s position as a search leader also brings responsibility, an issue copyright holders hammered on for a long time. Slowly but steadily, Google tweaked its policies to hinder pirate sites. The most direct way for the search...
Premier League Wins 2-Year Pirate IPTV Blocking Order as Sky Targets Identified
Last week the Financial Times reported that UK pay-TV broadcaster Sky had obtained a novel blocking injunction at the High Court in London. The report claimed that the country’s leading ISPs will be required to block pirate IPTV services nominated by Sky, to protect its “best selling” football games and content broadcast on linear channels including Sky Atlantic. Premier League Also Obtains IPTV Blocking Order While Sky attempting to...
Positive Cues Make Online Piracy Confessions More Honest, Research Finds
Piracy is a complicated phenomenon but most consumer research surveys on the topic are relatively straightforward. Since most pirates don’t like to have their online activity monitored, piracy studies generally rely on self-reported data instead. These types of surveys are very common in all sorts of areas but they tend to come with several inherent biases. That’s particularly true if respondents are asked about behavior that’s...
