How Spotify’s Premium Piracy Panic Played Out & What Pirates Did Next
Reports last week that Spotify had suddenly gone down worldwide were a little overblown. The ‘outage’ may have felt that big to those affected, and it may have been of some comfort if everyone had the same problem; after all, nobody likes to suffer alone. That doesn’t mean the perceived outage was insignificant or had limited geographical reach. Spotify has neither confirmed nor denied anything, it’s possible it never will. But...
TorrentGalaxy Staff Fear the Worst as Site Stays Dark and Upload Bots Fail
At the start of the year, TorrentGalaxy was one of the most-visited torrent sites, welcoming millions of users a day. The site was originally launched by former members of ExtraTorrent, a popular torrent site that shut down in 2018. The founders aimed to provide a home for ExtraTorrent ‘refugees’ but, over time, it transformed into much more than that. Last summer, there was a drastic change at TorrentGalaxy as the founders sold the...
Disqus is Deleting Pirate Site Communities on Short Notice
When peer-to-peer file-sharing was in its heyday, communities were the glue that held everything together, but not in the global sense evident today. File-sharing communities typically gathered on various forums. Operating in isolation, most embraced a central theme – file-sharing – everything else was a footnote. Embracing anyone and welcoming any topic of conversation, fancy high-tech social media platforms made short work of...
Early Pirate Bay Backer Carl Lundström Dies in Plane Crash
Yesterday, Carl Lundström stepped into his Mooney M20 propeller-driven plane, heading from Zagreb to Zurich in a solo flight. Not long after takeoff, the plane reportedly crashed into a mountain cabin located in the Slovenian Big Pasture Plateau. Lundström, who was 64 years old, did not survive. The crash of Lundström’s plane was picked up by both Slovenian and Swedish media. A body reportedly found at the crash site is yet to be...
Intermediaries Are (Still) Slow to Disconnect Pirate Live Streams, Report Finds
In recent years, the European Commission has proposed and adopted various legislative changes to help combat online piracy. The Copyright Directive and the Digital Services Act both envisioned tighter copyright takedown rules for online service providers. Sports rightsholders and other organizations felt that these new rules were not sufficient to tackle specific challenges in respect of live streaming piracy. They wanted more...
Authors Put a Spotlight on Meta’s BitTorrent Leeching Activity
In the race to build the most capable LLM models, several tech companies sourced copyrighted content for use as training data, without obtaining permission from content owners. Meta is among a long list of companies now being sued for this allegedly infringing activity, including a class action lawsuit filed by authors including Richard Kadrey, Sarah Silverman, and Christopher Golden. This case has a clear piracy angle, as Meta used...
