Court Expands Google and Cloudflare DNS Blocking to Combat Piracy
In May, the Paris Judicial Court ordered Google, Cloudflare, and Cisco to block access to several pirate websites by poisoning their DNS. The order, issued under Article L.333-10 of the French Sports Code, compelled the tech giants to prevent users from accessing unauthorized streams of Champions League and Premier League matches. Applicant Canal+ argued that the alternative DNS resolvers allowed people to bypass the “regular”...
‘Piracy’ Scam Exploited Movie Fans For 20 Years, Suddenly Cited as Major Threat
As the RIAA sued thousands of students for music piracy, Hollywood knew that faster internet connections would soon make movies a similarly easy target. For downloaders in the early 2000s, faster connections couldn’t come soon enough. In the meantime, ads promising faster downloads began appearing everywhere. Some offered magical ‘internet booster’ software that in reality did little or nothing to improve speeds. Others linked to...
AGCOM Piracy Shield Critic Receives Ominous Warning, Comes Out Fighting
In the 1978 movie Midnight Express, there’s a scene where prisoners walk slowly around a wheel in a dark, stone room. Performed instinctively in a clockwise direction, the ritual brings calm and unity to an otherwise nightmarish existence. When the protagonist suddenly displays free will in an anti-clockwise direction, defiance of the unspoken rule causes confusion and then descends into chaos. At AGCOM headquarters in Italy,...
Real-Debrid Implements Extreme Anti-Piracy Filters to Appease Film Companies
Real-Debrid is nifty tool that provides access to premium and unrestricted downloads from a variety of file hosting and torrent websites. The popular download service operates as a middleman to access file-hosting platforms, for example, and also uses cached content to stream content from torrent sites instantly. These features appear to be quite appealing to pirates. This hasn’t gone unnoticed by Real-Debrid, which has an active DMCA...
Feds Shut Down Pirate Sports Streaming Service 247TVStream, Indict Operators
In recent years, rightsholders of major sports events have repeatedly complained that piracy of live sports is getting out of hand. Increasingly, lawmakers and law enforcement were asked to help out. This week, these calls were heard. 247TVStream Shutdown and Indictment The Department of Justice for the Eastern District of New York announced that it had effectively shut down a major pirate IPTV streaming operation, 247TVStream. The...
Z-Library Helps Students to Overcome Academic Poverty, Study Finds
Z-Library is one of the largest shadow libraries on the Internet, hosting millions of books and academic articles that can be downloaded for free. The site defied all odds over the past two years. It continued to operate despite a full-fledged criminal prosecution by the United States, which resulted in the arrest of two alleged operators in Argentina. These two Russian defendants are wanted by the United States and earlier this year...
