Real-Debrid Traffic Falls 16% in 3 Months, Anti-Piracy Action Painful But Non-Fatal
If the dismantling of Megaupload in 2012 hadn’t turned into a legal quagmire, Real-Debrid’s statement concerning new anti-piracy measures may have arrived somewhat sooner. Ostensibly legal file-hosting services don’t exist in a legal gray area, but when platforms are mindful of conduct that could strip away eligibility for safe harbor-style protection, allegations of infringing conduct can always be countered. Not always successfully,...
Google’s Piracy Purge: 3.5 Billion DMCA Takedown Notices in a Year
Fifteen years ago, Google processed 250,000 takedown notices in an entire year. Today, it only needs 36 minutes to reach the same number. Despite several attempts to make piracy less visible in its search engine, the problem isn’t going away. On the contrary, takedown notices continue to increase at a rapid pace. From 250k to 3.5bn Last February, we reported that Google had processed its 8 billionth DMCA takedown. A year later, the...
ProtonVPN: Site Blocking Is an Attack on Users’ Online Freedom
Copyright holders see pirate site blocking as an effective and proportional anti-piracy measure. Over the years, courts and lawmakers in dozens of countries have agreed, resulting in a patchwork of blocking regimes around the globe. Initially, these efforts focused on residential ISPs as the key intermediaries. While these companies were not blamed directly, they were the go-to parties to implement blocking. But as time went on, that...
Record Labels Target 20 ISPs in Pursuit of BitTorrent Pirates and Damages
The Recording Industry Association of Japan (RIAJ) has around 65 members including Sony, Universal, and Warner. For good reason it’s seen as the local equivalent of America’s RIAA. The global music industry is currently in good health and Japan is no exception. In a recent report, RIAJ Chairman and Sony Music Entertainment CEO Shunsuke Muramatsu said that 2024 marked the 11th consecutive year of growth in the domestic market. In...
DAZN Escrows €35m TV Rights Bill as Football Piracy Row Boils Over
Exclusive rightsholders and broadcasters have always complained about piracy and probably always will. Complaints are often directed towards a common target; a legitimate platform perceived as uniquely positioned to have a significant impact, for example. A dispute over piracy involving two rightsholders in France is on a different trajectory. Neither are uniquely positioned to do much about piracy beyond work underway already but, in...
Scammers Exploited Official EU Website for ‘Piracy’ Scams
In an effort to make online piracy less visible, search engines actively downrank and de-index pirate site domains. This works, in the sense that it makes it harder for prospective pirates to bump into these sites though searches. It also created new problems and exacerbated others in the process. Scams Galore Since the top positions in search results are relatively free of well-known and generally more trusted pirate sites, malicious...
