Earlier this year, a Hawaiian District Court blocked movie companies' efforts to unmask alleged BitTorrent pirates using a DMCA subpoena 'shortcut'. The filmmakers asked the court to reconsider its position but without success; the 'DMCA shortcut' will remain closed. The rightsholders will appeal the order but won't be able to use evidence previously obtained through settlements with pirating subscribers.
Tracking BitTorrent pirates isn’t all that hard since IP addresses are openly broadcasted. With help from Internet providers, these addresses can then be linked to account holders.
ISPs don’t hand over this data voluntarily; they typically require a subpoena or court order before taking action.
In the United States, subpoenas are typically obtained by filing a copyright complaint in federal court against a “John Doe” who’s known only by an IP address. Most of these cases are filed against a single person, which makes it a relatively expensive process.
DMCA Shortc...
Brazil's Ministry of Justice and Public Security has announced a second phase of Operation Anime, an initiative to disrupt piracy of Japanese anime and Korean webtoon content. This second wave follows the first which took place close to a year ago. In coordination with Japan-based anti-piracy group CODA and COA based in South Korea, authorities conducted 11 search and seizure warrants in five regions. No sites have been named but domains appeared to have been seized.
In February 2023, Brazil’s Ministry of Justice and Public Security revealed an extension to Operation 404, an ongoing anti-piracy operation to disrupt websites and apps involved in online piracy.
The purpose of 404-offshoot Operation Anime was to “suppress crimes committed against intellectual property” with a specific focus on piracy of Japanese cartoons, better known as anime. Several sites were shut down including goyabu.com and animeyabu.com.
Close to a year later, the Ministry of Justice has confirmed a new phase of Operation Anime with a new partner app...
BREIN CEO Tim Kuik has retired, shutting down an impressive career that pre-dates the world wide web. Kuik started working at a home video distributor in the 1980s and became director anti-piracy at the Motion Picture Association a decade later. He eventually reached his pinnacle at BREIN, the Dutch anti-piracy group where Kuik took the lead for a quarter century.
In the summer of 2009, hackers from all over the world gathered at an outdoor conference near Vierhouten in the Netherlands.
The event was mostly a meetup of like-minded geeks, but one person stood out a mile; Tim Kuik, director of anti-piracy group BREIN.
Kuik joined a panel discussion where he calmly explained why his organization helped rightsholders to shut down pirate sites. The group was winning its lawsuit against Mininova at the time and had just booked a victory against the founders of The Pirate Bay just a few weeks earlier.
As the panel was opening up for...
The Office of the United States Trade Representative has released its annual Special 301 Report, calling out countries that fall short on anti-piracy enforcement and other forms of intellectual property protection. Countries such as Argentina and China are listed as priority threats, while Vietnam is labeled a leading source of online piracy. The USTR urges the Asian country to tackle the problem and take criminal prosecutions seriously.
Each year the Office of the United States Trade Representative (USTR) publishes a new update of its Special 301 Report, highlighting countries that fail to live up to U.S copyright protection standards.
The annual overview is meant to urge foreign governments to improve policy and legislation in favor of U.S. copyright holders.
The process has shown itself to be an effective diplomatic tool and has helped to kick-start copyright reforms around the globe. Not all governments are equally susceptible to critique and Canada once described the process as flawed. Still, no country w...
Facepunch Studios has confirmed that years of Nintendo-related uploads are being deleted from Steam Workshop in response to takedown notices linked to Garry's Mod. What began as rumors of a Nintendo DMCA takedown campaign, suddenly shifted towards a 'fake notice' campaign, run from a suspicious domain. Frustrations then targeted Garry himself for "falling for a scam." "You didn't even look at the domain!" yelled one fan. Let's do that.
In a world where there’s always someone telling people what to do, Garry’s Mod is a breath of fresh air. Launched in 2006, the sandbox game has no goals; just hand over $9.99 to Steam, jump in, and do whatever you like.
With the benefit of hindsight, some fans may have taken that a little too literally. At the time of writing, Garry’s Mod workshop content uploaded by users over many years, is being systematically taken down in response to takedown notices filed by Nintendo.
“This is an ongoing process, as we have 20 years of uploads to go through. If y...
Late January, the U.S. Department of Commerce published a notice of proposed rulemaking for establishing new requirements for Infrastructure as a Service providers (IaaS) . The proposal boils down to a 'Know Your Customer' regime for companies operating cloud services, with the goal of countering the activities of "foreign malicious actors." Yet, despite an overseas focus, Americans won't be able to avoid the proposal's requirements, which covers CDNs, virtual private servers, proxies, and domain name resolution services, among others.
It’s long been the case that access to certain services, whether on or offline, will only be granted when customers prove their identity.
Often linked to financial products but in many cases basic money/goods transactions carried out online, handing over a name, address, date of birth and similar details, can increase confidence that a deal will more likely than not go according to plan. In some cases, especially when buying restricted products, proving identity can be a condition of sale.
Yet, for many years, companies operating in the online space have been happy to d...
Researchers from Delft University of Technology plan to amplify their BitTorrent client "Tribler" with decentralized AI-powered search. A new demo shows that generative AI models make it possible to search for content in novel ways, without restriction. The ultimate goal of the research project is to shift the Internet's power balance from governments and large corporations back to consumers.
Twenty-five years ago, peer-to-peer file-sharing took the Internet by storm.
The ability to search for and share content with complete strangers was nothing short of a revolution.
In the years that followed, media consumption swiftly moved online. This usually involved content shared without permission, but pirate pioneers ultimately paved the way for new business models.
The original ‘pirate’ ethos has long since gone. There are still plenty of unauthorized sites and services, but few today concern themselves with decentralization and similar technical ad...
In a joint press release on Monday, the Premier League and Alliance for Creativity and Entertainment revealed the first-ever online piracy conviction in Vietnam. The news came as a surprise, as did comment published in local media attributed to a government official. It may seem like a small step, but admitting that Vietnam has a manga piracy problem, one that causes "hundreds of millions of dollars in damage to copyright owners," is a big step forward.
The joint press release issued Monday by the Premier League and Alliance for Creativity and Entertainment (ACE) was unusual right from the start.
Published early on Monday, even the timing was a break from the norm, but the content was even more surprising. Following criminal referrals by the Premier League and ACE, an operator of BestBuyIPTV – a platform that has appeared on the USTR’s Notorious Markets report for the past five years – had been convicted at the People’s Court of Hanoi.
For a country where criminal referrals have traditionally disappeared ...
A new survey confirms that the high cost of online streaming services keeps piracy relevant. The findings suggest that one in three Americans have pirated a movie or TV series over the past year. Costs are a key motivator for these self-proclaimed pirates, with the number of legal subscription services and their price tags a key trigger.
For online media consumers, things have improved significantly over the years. More content is being made available on-demand than ever before.
Netflix set the tone a decade ago by offering movies and TV series online as a convenient alternative to piracy. This worked well, so well that more than a dozen other streaming services were launched, all with their own exclusive releases.
While this may sound positive, in some ways it made things worse for consumers. As it turns out, it’s quite costly to have more than a handful of subscriptions and fees may rise to the point ...
The Internet Archive is doubling down on its position that its digital lending library service operates under the bounds of fair use. Major publishers assert that digitizing books without appropriate licensing amounts to infringement but IA counters that the practice is in the public interest. It also fits copyright's ultimate purpose; to promote the broad public availability of literature and other arts.
The non-profit Internet Archive (IA) aims to preserve digital history for generations to come.
The organization literally archives key parts of the Internet, copying older versions of websites to preserve them for future generations. This information becomes more and more valuable as time passes by.
IA has plenty of other archive projects too. For example, it operates a library that offers a broad collection of digital media, including books, which patrons can borrow upon request.
Thousands of libraries have digital lending services but IA’s approach is different...