Anna’s Archive Scraping: Court Defers Key Questions to State Supreme Court
Anna’s Archive is a meta-search engine for shadow libraries that allows users to find pirated books and other related sources. The site launched in the fall of 2022, just days after Z-Library was targeted in a U.S. criminal crackdown, to ensure continued availability of ‘free’ books and articles to the broader public. In late 2023, Anna’s Archive expanded its offering by making information from OCLC’s proprietary WorldCat database...
Dramacool Was Targeted by Kocowa as Part of an Ongoing U.S. Lawsuit
Fans of Asian drama and anime with a preference for pirate sites were hit hard last November when Dramacool and several associated sites shut down. The Dramacool team permanently closed its Asianc, Asianwiki, Watchasia, Dramanice and Runasian websites, citing pressure from copyright holders. These streaming sites catered to a massive audience, as was exemplified by the shutdown message on X, which was viewed more than five million...
Judge Confirms LaLiga’s Right to Block Cloudflare in Pursuit of IPTV Pirates
When LaLiga claimed that Cloudflare’s refusal to enforce its terms against piracy made the company responsible for the unintended consequences of site blocking, legal action was all but inevitable. According to Cloudflare, LaLiga knew that blocking a Cloudflare IP address used by a pirate service would also block innocent Cloudflare customers sharing the same IP. What mattered to LaLiga was the nature of the order it obtained last...
UN Database WIPO ALERT Helps to Facilitate Globalized Pirate Site Blocking
In Brazil, the Ministry of Justice and Public Security were scheduled to meet with National Telecommunications Agency Anatel this week to discuss a persistent piracy problem. Known as Gatonet, these unlicensed and illegal TV networks seem to rely on their connections with organized crime. Last week, the authorities said they’d shut down one such operation linked to a powerful drug trafficker known locally as Peixão. Sabotage of...
Anthropic Scores Preliminary Victory in AI-Copyright Clash Against Music Companies (Updated)
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 texts; the more, the better. When AI hit the mainstream, it became apparent that rightsholders were not always pleased that their works had been used to train AI. This applies to photographers, artists, music companies, journalists, and authors, some of whom formed groups to...
Meta’s BitTorrent Uploads of ‘Pirate Library’ Data Equaled 30% of Downloads, Expert Says
Over the past two years, rightsholders of all kinds have filed lawsuits against companies that develop AI models. Most of these cases allege that AI developers used copyrighted works to train LLMs without first obtaining authorization. Meta is among a long list of companies now being sued for this allegedly-infringing activity, including a class action lawsuit filed by authors Richard Kadrey, Sarah Silverman, and Christopher Golden....
