Study Reveals a Malware Problem on Pirate Sites, but How Bad is It?
The link between online piracy and malware is far from new. More than two decades ago, LimeWire users were already plagued by malicious software masquerading as music downloads. Today’s online landscape continues to face similar issues, if not worse. With more attack vectors and potential victims than ever before, security risks are front and center. Even if operators of pirate sites and services are not actively looking for trouble,...
Copyright Lawsuit Accuses Meta of Pirating Adult Films for AI Training
Over the past two years, rightsholders of all kinds have filed lawsuits against companies that develop AI models. Most of these cases allege that copyrighted works are used to train models without authorization. This applies to text, but also to images and video. A new lawsuit filed at a California federal court by two adult production companies focuses on a specific type of video downloaded from pirate sources. Meta Sued for Massive...
Police, LaLiga & Alianza Target MagisTV With ISP Office Raids & Arrests
With around 400 million Spanish speakers and tens of millions of passionate football fans, Latin America is a natural overseas market for top-tier Spanish football league LaLiga. At least initially market prospects look quite good. Data reported in 2023 by LATAM-focused anti-piracy group Alianza (DirecTV, SimpleTV, SKY Brasil, Warner, Disney, LaLiga & more) around 98.2m households in the region have access to broadband. The fly in...
President Trump: It’s Not Doable for AI Companies to Pay for All Copyrighted Input
Over the past few years, AI technology has progressed at a rapid pace. This includes large language models, which are typically trained on a broad datasets of text; the more, the better. When AI hit the mainstream, it became apparent that rightsholders were not always pleased to learn that their works had been used to train AI. Those works include millions of books and articles, as well as libraries of music and photographs. There are...
Labels Don’t Want Supreme Court Review to Delay Piracy Lawsuit Against Verizon
Last month, the Supreme Court granted Cox Communications’ petition for a writ of certiorari in a landmark copyright liability battle. The internet provider challenged the $1 billion damages award by a Virginia jury in 2019, which went in favor of a group of major record labels, including Sony, Universal, and Warner. Cox successfully convinced the Supreme Court that the contributory infringement standards, which determine how ISPs...
Jetflix Streaming Piracy Ringleader Sentenced to 7 Years Prison
According to his profile on LinkedIn, Las Vegas resident Kristopher Dallmann became the CEO of Jetflicks, LLC, in June 2007. Fueled by pirated content obtained via sites including The Pirate Bay, RARBG, and Nzbplanet, Jetflicks’ operations came to an abrupt halt in 2017 with an FBI raid on Dallmann’s Las Vegas home following a Motion Picture Association investigation. Disagreement and the Long Haul to Trial Dallmann subsequently...
