U.S. Government’s Focus on Sports Piracy Puts Spotlight on Streameast Saga
Sports piracy made headlines this week when anti-piracy coalition ACE announced the shutdown of the world’s largest illegal sports streaming ring. The operation, carried out by Egyptian authorities at the end of August, resulted in two arrests and the seizure of roughly 80 domain names. A website carrying the ‘Streameast’ brand was one of the main targets. This was indeed one of the larger pirate sports streaming portals. However,...
Behind the Curtain: The Three-Year Journey to the Block BEARD Site Blocking Act
During the first half of 2022, U.S. Senator Thom Tillis was working on a proposal to put forward in a new pirate site blocking bill. The text of the No-Fault Copyright Remedy Act (NFCRA) was shared among stakeholders but wasn’t announced to the public. A decade had passed since the first attempt to introduce site-blocking legislation backfired in 2012. For NFCRA, copyright holders and Internet service providers were brought on board...
Threat Intelligence Researchers “Uncover a Massive Pirate IPTV Operation”
Research and investigations concerning internet platforms can be incredibly time-consuming, despite most of the necessary tools being readily available to the public free of charge. Threat intelligence platform Silent Push combines the essence of these tools into a graphical interface that does much more than the sum of its parts. Historical data, for example, allows connections to be built in cases where evidence no longer exists on...
ACE Shuts Down Giant ‘Streameast’ Piracy Ring, But the Original Survives
Last year, Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) seized several domain names linked to Streameast, a popular live sports piracy site with millions of users. The seizures were carried out by the book but did not achieve the desired effect. Streameast remained available through alternative and regularly updated domains. At the time, the operator of the original Streameast operation, known by the handle ‘Quick’, noted that many...
LaLiga Touts ‘Historic’ IPTV Piracy Crackdown, Key Questions Remain Unanswered
Anti-piracy action in Argentina continues to expand, with tight collaboration between the Spanish football league LaLiga and local authorities. Following raids in Argentina targeting MagisTV and Al Ángulo TV, new information reveals that a global network was taken down recently. LaLiga says the historic enforcement action dismantled dozens of IPTV services with an estimated 8 million paid subscribers. Following an investigation by the...
Court of Appeal Throws Bell Canada a Lifeline in $291m Movie Piracy Lawsuit
In the United States, Europe, the UK, Australia, Japan, and many other countries respectful of copyright, rightsholders have a fundamental right to take action against alleged infringers. How that takes place in practice has been source of friction, especially when rightsholders target thousands of individual infringers, aiming to collect cash settlements of thousands of dollars from as many as they possibly can. Such schemes place...
