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...
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...
