The Piracy Pandemic: COVID-19 Led to a Surge of New Pirates
Five years ago, the World Health Organization formally declared the COVID-19 outbreak as a pandemic. Follow-up measures taken by governments and organizations around the world directly affected the lives of billions of people. Those who were lucky enough to keep their jobs started to work from home, if possible. The same applied to school-going youth, who saw their social lives cut off due to lockdowns and curfews. The devastating...
ACE & MPA Quietly Seized Dozens of Pirate Domains in Q1 2025
When the Alliance for Creativity and Entertainment launched in 2017, the globalization of online piracy had been apparent for some time. In the relatively calm waters of a decade earlier, the Hollywood majors tackled pirate adversaries all around the world, often while pooling resources under the banner of the MPAA. Less-connected rightsholders had little choice but to go it alone while shouldering 100% of the costs. For those who...
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...
