Oscar Winner ‘Anora’ Sees Massive Surge in Pirate Downloads
Almost two decades ago, The Pirate Bay supported the “OscarTorrents” project, which aimed to be a pirates’ counterweight to Hollywood’s annual awards show. At the time, mass movie piracy was still a relative fringe activity, with no instant streaming options available. Nonetheless, more than 100,000 people voted for their own movie favorites. While the OscarTorrents project was a clear display of defiance, the outcome of the voting...
Pirate Streaming Site Malware Campaign Infected One Million Devices
Public pirate sites accessible by anyone with an internet browser have been under financial pressure for years. Rightsholder-led campaigns urged mainstream advertisers to boycott the platforms to cut off their revenue streams. This was supposed to put sites out of business but in many cases that simply meant the deployment of lower quality ads from any entity still prepared to place them. Sites that used to be relatively safe quickly...
Employee Charged in ‘Spider-Man’ Pre-Release Blu-ray Theft Linked to Mass Piracy
Three years ago, pirated Blu-ray copies of “Spider-Man: No Way Home” began circulating on pirate sites, weeks before their official release. The early online leaks were attributed to the infamous release group EVO, that was known for distributing copyrighted movies and TV shows, including pre-release content. EVO was dismantled by the Portuguese authorities in late 2022, leading to multiple arrests. However, there is no evidence that...
Ad-Funded Piracy’s ‘Biggest Open Secret’ Revealed By Researcher
Tranco publishes an updated ranking list of a million domains every day. In today’s report the usual suspects dominate the top slots – google.com, microsoft.com, mail.ru and facebook.com. After scrolling through a 22mb .cvs, monosurveys.com eventually completes the million. Zonatmo.com can be found at #1576 but, until this week, the domain had yet to appear on our radar. During a brief visit to the site lasting less than 20 seconds,...
Nintendo Defeats Filehoster ‘1Fichier’ at French Supreme Court
1fichier.com burst onto the scene around 2009 when file-hosting/sharing platforms were thriving. In the years that followed, many competitors collapsed under the pressure of copyright complaints, but 1Fichier and French parent company DSTORAGE SAS stood tall. The file-hosting platform faced its fair share of copyright complaints, including a long-running legal dispute with Nintendo which began in 2018, sparked by 1Fichier’s failure to...
RootedCON: Pirate IPTV Blocking Appeal Accepted as Crisis Continues
Under pressure from widespread IPTV piracy freeloading on the league’s live matches, LaLiga chief Javier Tebas warned that he would do whatever was necessary to protect the sport. Whether Tebas’ intent was taken as seriously as it should’ve been is difficult to weigh. A reputation for being fearless and uncompromising can be an asset in top tier football, but would it boost asymmetric blocking warfare against mostly anonymous pirates?...
