Manga Publishers Maintain Pressure Despite Pirate Countermeasures
After decades of work, supporting a stated mission to destroy online piracy, rightsholders today understand the enormous task ahead. A few prominent outliers aside, more pragmatic terms to describe ongoing anti-piracy work, may even be gaining traction. A staple of law enforcement agencies everywhere, ‘disruption’ is perhaps the most accurate term to describe successes in the context of an expansive, oversupplied, yet adaptive piracy...
PIPCU Uses UK IPO’s ‘Surplus Millions’ to Wage War on IPTV Pirates
The latest wave of the UK government’s Copyright Infringement Tracker study was expected a year ago. There’s still no indication when it will arrive, or even if it will arrive at all, a shame considering interest generated by previous reports. That said, the first three weeks of 2025 has seen the publication of other IP-focused reports, including the Intellectual Property Office’s (IPO) 2022/23 Report and Accounts and its Innovation...
Supreme Court: Bank Can Terminate Contract Over Lacking Anti-Piracy Measures
File-hosting platform 1fichier.com appeared around 2009 and since then has seen no shortage of copyright complaints. Most recently, it was highlighted by the U.S. Trade Representative as a notorious piracy market. The site’s response to takedown notices is seen as insufficient by rightsholders, the USTR concluded. These allegations are nothing new to 1Fichier and parent company Dstorage. However, where other services typically evade...
Tech Industry Urges EU to Halt Italy’s Overreaching Anti-Piracy Measures
Launched last year, Italy’s elaborate ‘Piracy Shield‘ blocking scheme was billed as the future of anti-piracy efforts. To effectively tackle live sports piracy, broad blocking powers aim to block piracy-related domain names and IP addresses within 30 minutes. While many pirate sources have indeed been blocked, Piracy Shield is not without controversy. There have been multiple reports of overblocking, where the anti-piracy system...
Telegram ‘Suspends RuTracker’s Channel’ For Copyright Infringement
The arrest of Telegram founder Pavel Durov by French authorities in August 2024 was unexpected, the basis perhaps even more so. The mere suggestion that social media operators in the United States could face arrest overseas, for the alleged misconduct of a minority of users among more than a billion, would not be well received. According to reports, France accused a subset of Telegram users of committing a range of very serious...
Reddit and Film Companies Clash in Appeals Court Over Sharing Users’ IP Addresses
Reddit has gone head-to-head with a group of filmmakers over the past two years, aiming to protect the privacy of its users. In three separate cases, the filmmakers subpoenaed Reddit for details of users who commented on various piracy related topics. The movie companies said they are not planning to go after these people in court but want to use their comments as evidence in ongoing piracy liability lawsuits against Frontier...
