Reddit’s Copyright Removals Drop to Multi-Year Low
With millions of daily users, Reddit is undoubtedly one of the most visited sites on the Internet. The community-oriented platform has “subreddits” dedicated to pretty much every topic one can think of, including several that are linked to online piracy and related issues. As the platform continued to grow into the $17 billion company that it is today, rightsholders started to pay attention to these discussions. Eight years ago,...
MPA & ACE Subpoenas Target Dozens of Potential ‘Burner’ Pirate Streaming Sites
A trio of DMCA subpoena applications filed in the United States this week aim to extract any information held by three well-known internet companies, on potentially dozens of pirate site operators using their services. The vast majority of the requests appear in a single DMCA subpoena targeting Cloudflare. Of the 52 main domains in that application, six also appear in another application directed at Tonic Corporation’s .to registry....
Alleged Anna’s Archive Operator Dropped from U.S. ‘Scraping’ Lawsuit
Anna’s Archive is a meta-search engine for shadow libraries that allows users to find pirated books and other related resources. In late 2023, the search engine Anna’s Archive expanded its offering by making data from OCLC’s proprietary WorldCat database available online. Anna’s Archive scraped several terabytes of data over the course of a year and published roughly 700 million unique records online, for free. These records contain...
OpenDNS Quits Belgium Under Threat of Piracy Blocks or Fines of €100K Per Day
Without assurances that hosts, domain registries, registrars, DNS providers, and consumer ISPs would not be immediately held liable for internet users’ activities, investing in the growth of the early internet may have proven less attractive. Of course, not being held immediately liable is a far cry from not being held liable at all. After years of relatively plain sailing, multiple ISPs in the United States are currently embroiled in...
Nhentai Operators Ordered to Expose Themselves in U.S. Copyright Lawsuit
With an estimated 240 million visits during the first three months of the year, Nhentai is one of the most trafficked websites online today. The site serves adult-oriented anime and manga, also known as hentai. These spicy Japanese comics are popular worldwide but not everyone is happy with Nhentai or its massive audience. Some rightsholders consider the site a deviant pirate operation. California-based rightsholder PCR Distributing,...
Non-Transparency Resumed After Pirate Site Blacklist Publicly Exposed in Error
As debate heats up in the United States over proposed site-blocking legislation, opinions of what that might mean in practice are already beginning to emerge. Introduced by Rep. Zoe Lofgren late January, the Foreign Anti-Digital Piracy Act (FADPA) attempts to distill well over a decade of site blocking experience amassed by U.S. rightsholders overseas, into a package carefully curated for use on home soil. Site-Blocking Debate Returns...
