EFF Vows to Fight Back Against U.S. Site Blocking Bills
After a decade of focusing efforts overseas, the push for website blocking has landed back on American shores. The fierce backlash against SOPA effectively shelved domestic site blocking initiatives in the U.S., but that hesitation appears to have evaporated. With Representative Zoe Lofgren’s introduction of the Foreign Anti-Digital Piracy Act (FADPA) in February, the controversial mechanism of court-ordered blocking against foreign...
Training AI Using ‘Pirated’ Content Can Be Fair Use, Law Professors Argue
In the race to build the most capable LLMs, several tech companies have sourced copyrighted content for use as training data, without obtaining permission from content owners. Many of those companies are now being sued for alleged copyright infringement. The list includes Meta, which faces a class action lawsuit filed by authors Richard Kadrey, Sarah Silverman, and Christopher Golden, among others. This case has a clear piracy angle,...
Advertising Banned on All Sites Blocked in Russia Starting September
If people insist that most things on the internet must remain ‘free’, the mechanisms that allow that to happen must continue too. Invariably that means more advertising alongside diminishing privacy, at least for those lucky enough to still have any left. Yet life could still be a lot worse, oddly enough by restrictions on advertising designed to hurt certain platforms while ensuring people are unable to profit from them. Blocking...
Premier League Subpoena Requires Cloudflare to Unmask Streaming Pirates
As England’s top football competition, the Premier League draws hundreds of millions of viewers from all over the world. Aside from the sportive stakes, the Premier League also has a vested interest in selling broadcast rights. These rights generate billions of pounds in revenue per year; a staggering amount unmatched by any other football league. Yet, other leagues are not the main threat to these broadcast revenues. Instead, piracy...
Aylo Uses Cybersquatting Complaint to Take Out Pirate Site Domains
The company Licensing IP International S.a.r.l. is not particularly well known, but over a billion people are familiar with its trademarks. These marks include popular adult entertainment brands including Pornhub, Youporn, Brazzers and Reality Kings, which fall under the umbrella of Aylo, the empire formerly known as MindGeek. Just one of Aylo’s many subsidiaries, Licensing IP owns and controls many popular trademarks. The company is...
UK Pirate Movie Cammers Thwarted 104 Times in 2024, Seven Arrested
Movies recorded directly from cinema screens are identifiable online by the tag ‘cam’ and for those prepared to download them, often notable for their poor quality. As theatrical windows are now fairly short compared to those of just a few years ago, the prospect of ruining a movie for the sake of a few weeks has made cams less attractive than they once were. Yet in the summer of 2022, when at least four cam copies were spotted online...
