Dynamic injunctions for tackling live sports piracy were crafted in the UK by the Premier League and first authorized by the High Court of England and Wales in 2017.

Football Association Premier League Ltd v British Telecommunications Plc & Ors compelled the UK’s major ISPs to block specific servers providing illicit match streams into the UK, with flexibility built-in by design.

In the years that followed, continuous fine-tuning set the legal standard for others to follow. Years of development work in conjunction with anti-piracy partner Friend MTS provided for sophisticated dynamic blocking of pirate IPTV services. That opened up new opportunities to support broadcasters and sports leagues developing their own live blocking programs overseas, with Canada a notable example .

Italy Preferred to Tread its Own Path

When Italy passed new law in 2023 in support of its now-infamous ‘Piracy Shield’ blocking system, the decision to go with a whole new anti-piracy platform was, at least on face value, somewhat baffling.

On one hand, the Premier League can be seen as a rival of top-tier Italian league Serie A; yet on the other, they share the same opponent in the fight against piracy. With anti-piracy coalitions also showing success right now, the theory made sense; after a year of blunders and controversy, little else did.

In an interview published Monday, Chris White, Chief Architect at Friend MTS, recalled last year’s football season as having a little more tension than usual.

Not If – When Disaster Strikes

“This summer the broadcast industry held its breath as news came out about overblocking by Italy’s new anti-piracy platform Piracy Shield, which is managed by AGCOM, the country’s communications regulator,” White said.

“Nobody wants to be responsible for blocking legitimate online services, damaging brands and impacting revenues.”

White was likely referring to the controversial blocking of Cloudflare and an unknown number of its customers’ websites, due to a Cloudflare IP address being wrongfully placed on the Piracy Shield system.

Despite that event ticking all three of the above boxes, there was no sign of public reflection on what could be learned from the experience. Instead, AGCOM declared war on Cloudflare and Serie A dragged the cloud provider into a lawsuit .

More Restraint, Increased Scrutiny

The above took place to a background of legal amendments to authorize more aggressive blocking and punishments for the tech industry for failing to engage in the blocking program. With rightsholders reportedly free to block with even less oversight than before, visible action to prevent history from repeating itself was notable only by its absence.

Moving forward, White said, the general threat of overblocking and its consequences should lead to a more considered approach.

“As the industry digests this risk, we expect to see more restraint and increased scrutiny about automated solutions and a shift towards blocking services with proven accuracy and industry-proven monitoring tech,” he explained.

“More importantly, we now need to make a concerted effort to counter the controversy by educating the industry about how effective blocking has been over the last seven years. We support many big name and lesser known broadcasters, streamers and sports leagues such as UEFA in effective blocking that is protecting the value of rights and revenues, and have done so for numerous years without issue.

“This is achieved through best-in-class monitoring and forensically accurate technologies to ensure that any targets won’t cause collateral damage on legitimate services.”

The Serie A and Friend MTS Partnership

If the quote above sounds a like a sales pitch, the timing is about right. In January 2022, Friend MTS confirmed a three-season deal with Serie A to combat piracy via its “field-leading global monitoring services” which provide “real-time identification of illegal streams of live Lega Serie A content…”

The three-year deal was actually a three-year extension, one that marked a decade-long Serie A partnership with Friend MTS. Whether that relationship will continue is unclear, but if Serie A already enjoys blocking accuracy thanks to Friend MTS, why did Cloudflare and then later Google both get blocked by Piracy Shield?

All we know is that AGCOM publicly blamed DAZN for both ‘blunders’ and on the Friend MTS website , DAZN isn’t mentioned as one of the company’s partners.

From: TF , for the latest news on copyright battles, piracy and more.

Less than a year has passed since Italy officially implemented the ‘ Piracy Shield ‘ system that aims to thwart live sports streaming piracy.

Since February the system has blocked access to thousands of IP-addresses and domain names associated with unauthorized broadcasts.

This massive blocking operation is seen as a major success by the authorities and many participating rightsholders. As time passed, however, its weaknesses also became painfully obvious.

In addition to effective blockades , there were multiple reports of overblocking, where the anti-piracy system blocked access to Google Drive , Cloudflare , and other legitimate sites and services. Meanwhile, calls for more transparency and accountability were growing.

Piracy Shield Expansion

The authorities haven’t been sitting still since the ‘Piracy Shield’ launch. In addition to technical tweaks and improvements, expanding its reach was of particular interest. In October, for example, an amendment was approved to compel VPNs and DNS services to comply with blocking orders too.

This expansion was unofficially confirmed at the Court of Milan which ruled that Cloudflare has to block Piracy Shield targets across all applicable services.

In the coming year, it’s expected that the ‘Piracy Shield’ legal framework (Law 93/23) will be further updated following a public consultation. AGCOM, the organization in charge of the blocking system, announced as much in its annual report last month.

“As known, in fact, Law No. 93/23 further expanded the scope of the Authority’s action by strengthening its functions for a more effective and timely countering of piracy actions online with reference to all events broadcast live on the network,” AGCOM wrote.

“To this end, the Authority will proceed, after public consultation, with the necessary amendments to the Regulations […] and with the technical activities of updating and implementing the live blocking platform (Piracy Shield) functionality to achieve the objectives set by the law.”

Piracy Shield for Movie Premieres?

AGCOM’s comments suggest that more sports and other live TV content may eventually receive ‘Piracy Shield’ protection. A public consultation is planned to discuss these and other potential expansions.

This is music to the ears of local anti-piracy group FAPAV, which represents major film organizations and companies, including Italian branches of Netflix, Universal, Warner Bros, and Walt Disney.

FAPAV President Bagnoli Rossi recently applauded AGCOM for the rollout of the ‘Piracy Shield’, describing it as a fundamental anti-piracy tool . At the same time, he expressed a wish to expand its scope even further, covering ‘non-live’ movies as well.

“We hope that the new public consultation will be opened as soon as possible, aimed at extending the timeliness of intervention to other audiovisual content provided for by law, including for example first-run films and non-sports live television broadcasts, a measure that the sector is waiting for,” Rossi says.

Slippery Slope?

Put differently, FAPAV would like to make the ‘Piracy Shield’ the defacto blocking standard for a wider variety of valuable copyrighted content.

This is not a trivial comment. It suggests that a 30-minute blocking window , which was written into law specifically to help protect rightsholders of live broadcasts, might be expanded to non-live content.

This is a controversial suggestion; ‘instant’ blockades are more susceptible to errors than measures ordered following a proper judicial review. While that may be acceptable collateral for live content, the stakes change when the same blocking technology is used more broadly.

While AGCOM hasn’t specifically mentioned the inclusion of non-live content, it’s clear that rightsholders will argue in favor of this during the upcoming consultation. That by itself, will be plenty of fuel for further discussion, controversy, and drama in 2025.

From: TF , for the latest news on copyright battles, piracy and more.

Offering pirate streaming services is a serious offense in the UK, where several people have received multi-year prison sentences.

Last Friday, another seller was added to this growing list. At York Crown Court, 41-year-old Sunny Kanda from Wheatley, Halifax, was sentenced to two years in prison for selling modified Fire Sticks that provided access to pirate IPTV streams.

The sentencing doesn’t come as a surprise, as Kanda pleaded guilty to three charges; violating the Copyright Designs and Patents Act 1988, the Proceeds of Crime Act 2002, and Fraud Act 2006.

£108,000 (Lost) Revenue

The ‘criminal’ proceeds from the Fire Stick operation were estimated at £108,000 over an 18-month period. The victims were legitimate streaming providers such as Sky, BT Sport, Disney+ and Netflix, who purportedly lost revenue as the result of the pirate sales.

The information provided above was shared in a press release issued by National Trading Standards and anti-piracy group FACT , who are both pleased with the outcome. They hope it will deter others from starting similar criminal operations.

“Today’s sentence is an important reminder to all those who buy and sell TV firesticks that crime does not pay – it breaches copyright law and we encourage people to report suspected cases to the Citizens Advice consumer service,” a Trading Standards spokesperson said on Friday.

The press release was picked up by several reputable news outlets including the BBC , which reported all the major talking points. They include an undercover FACT investigator joining a private, 3,900 member Facebook group where “KD Streams” was sold, to make a test purchase of a pirate Fire Stick.

The official communication is accurate, but it also leaves out many details that could put this criminal conviction in context.

Rebrand & Resell

Those who think that the defendant was running an entire IPTV operation are wrong. In a Reddit post from 2020, Kanda showed an interest in rebranding an APK, which could then be used to resell subscriptions. That’s how many ‘hobbyist’ resellers first get involved.

Such rebranded apps can be used in conjunction with dedicated IPTV platform software such as OTTRUN, with the user bringing their own service from elsewhere. These subscriptions ‘credits’ are often bought by resellers in bulk from yet another provider, such as the IPTV Reseller Hub.

The prices below show that there’s plenty of room for profit, as plans are sold to customers at much higher prices.

Kanda, possibly with help from others, likely combined services like these to sell his modified Fire Sticks with a significant markup. These customers included a FACT investigator, which led to his arrest and conviction.

Small Cog in the Wheel

How many customers the operation had wasn’t made public. However, simple math shows that £108,000 results in an average of 600 customers who each paid £10 per month for the 18 months that were mentioned. At least one former user of the service claims to have paid £15 per month, which could theoretically reduce the average to 400.

There is no doubt that Kanda broke the law. However, it’s important to note that he’s far from a mastermind in the grander pirate IPTV business.

The man doesn’t come across as a typical ‘criminal’ either. Publicly available information suggests that he has been gainfully employed for years, has a steady relationship, and occasionally raised money for charity.

That said, by willingly operating as a pirate IPTV reseller, he faced all the risk, which resulted in a multi-year prison sentence.

While rightsholders are happy with the criminal conviction, the fact remains that the criminal masterminds who rake in millions a month from these schemes remain out there. Their business wasn’t impacted, and they will simply move on to the next ‘reseller’.

After which this sad cycle will repeat itself.

From: TF , for the latest news on copyright battles, piracy and more.

In January 2017, Alexa data indicated that The Pirate Bay was the most popular torrent site on the internet. In July that same year, the notorious torrent site entered the Alexa Top 100 with the 99th most popular domain on the internet.

TPB had been there before but following a disastrous period of downtime in 2014, many users simply went elsewhere. That had a significant effect on the site’s traffic and its coveted Top 100 ranking.

The extraordinary background to traffic data now being reported by SimilarWeb was likely affected by downtime too. However, seven years on from The Pirate Bay’s misfortune, the piracy landscape is more complex, enforcement has increased, yet the ecosystem somehow appears to recover more easily than before.

Very Big Numbers

As SimilarWeb’s data shows, HiAnime.to received 331.6 million visits in November 2024. For any site today that’s a very big number yet the data shows the site received fewer visits than the previous month. In October 2024, HiAnime received 364 million visits, 32 million more than November and a remarkable 62 million increase on September’s traffic.

Unprecedented….

With more than three times the traffic of legal competitor Crunchyroll, HiAnime is obviously a priority target for Japan’s anime producers; but if only it stopped there.

According to the data, HiAnime outranks GitHub in the United States overall, and both Peacock TV and Disney Plus in the United States’ ‘Streaming and Online TV’ category. Outranking Disney Plus globally can’t be ruled out.

As a caveat, we should mention that this data only includes website visits, not traffic that goes to the associated streaming apps.

[Illegal] Global player

Roughly 40% of the site’s visits are from users in the United States, four in ten aged between 18 and 24. Over 80% of the site’s social media traffic is reportedly fueled by YouTube, although the majority of overall visits (76%) are direct. How the site managed to pull in so much traffic is extraordinary in itself.

The Secret Sauce

The most significant enforcement action of 2024 saw anti-piracy coalition ACE take down FMovies and several closely linked additional sites, together accounting for over a billion visits each year. One of the sites taken offline was Aniwave.to, a relatively new site but one already enjoying a significant amount of traffic.

The secret sauce that enabled Aniwave to become so popular so quickly, isn’t exactly a secret. Aniwave wasn’t a new site, it was simply a rebranding of another anime giant called 9anime, which previously ‘shut down’ due to alleged legal issues.

So when 9anime/Aniwave was shut down by ACE/MPA so dramatically in Vietnam late August/early September, HiAnime was waiting in the wings to scoop up the traffic. Whether one cuts it this way or that, that traffic was effectively generated by itself.

Chameleons Eat Themselves, Grow Stronger

Compounding the incestuous relationship between these chameleon platforms are events dating back to summer 2023. Under pressure from ACE, the owner of a site called Zoro.to handed over the site’s domains to ACE/MPA. Shortly after, Zoro.to was suddenly “sold to new owners”, who immediately rebranded the world’s then-largest pirate site to Aniwatch .

When Aniwatch came under pressure from ACE in September 2023, the subsequent response was similarly reminiscent of Grand Theft Auto. On a five-star wanted level, the site pulled into a paint shop, received a complete respray, before reappearing as HiAnime; stars wiped clean and traffic intact.

A month after the big shutdown in Vietnam, with HiAnime pulling in extraordinary traffic, ACE was observed in hot pursuit once again .

How this will eventually play out seems almost inevitable; the big question is whether outranking Disney Plus globally comes before or after.

From: TF , for the latest news on copyright battles, piracy and more.

Japanese manga comics have always been popular on pirate sites, whereas other categories have seen their growth stall. In contrast, manga piracy continues to grow.

This unauthorized activity is a thorn in the side of publishers, who are increasingly fighting back against this piracy activity, wherever it takes place in the world.

Japan’s largest publisher Shueisha has taken a variety of legal actions, also in U.S. courts. The company obtained several DMCA subpoenas hoping to expose the operators of dozens of pirate sites such as Manganato.com , mangakoma01.net , truyenqqvn.com , and manga-zip.is , for example.

These cases are filed in the U.S. because the manga publisher requests information from third-party intermediaries such as Cloudflare, PayPal, Visa, and Google.

One Piece ‘Pirates’ on X

This week the manga mogul was back in court, requesting a DMCA subpoena from another American intermediary, Elon Musk’s social media platform X. The application targets the X accounts of ‘spoilerplus’ and ‘mangaraw’, which stand accused of repeatedly sharing ‘One Piece’ content without permission.

These are not random X accounts that incidentally shared pirated material. On the contrary, they are linked to well-known pirate sites that have been targeted by similar efforts before.

Spoilerplus and Mangaraw domain names were listed in a broad DMCA subpoena that targeted Cloudflare last year. Not much later, these domains also showed up in a separate request in a California federal court, where Google, Visa, and PayPal were asked to provide information on the alleged operators.

The latter information request is tied to legal developments in Japan, where Shueisha aims to bring the ‘anonymous’ operators to justice. The status of the Japanese process is unclear, as the manga publisher continues to seek information, including sources like X.

X DMCA Subpoena

The request for a DMCA subpoena, filed at a Californian court this week, specifically seeks information on twitter.com/spoilerplus and twitter.com/mangaraw_jp .

Shueisha previously sent a notice to X, asking it to remove both accounts. While X disabled all the highlighted posts that are tied to allegedly infringing material, the Mangaraw account is still online today, linking to the mangaraw01.net website.

Both accounts posted infringing ‘One Piece’ material according to Shueisha. According to a declaration from attorney Hiroyuki Nakajima, these posts were made by “anonymous internet users” without authorization from the rightsholders.

Japanese Lawsuit & Free Speech?

The DMCA subpoena request doesn’t mention a potential lawsuit in Japan. However, the manga publisher stresses that it needs all information tied to these accounts to protect its rights.

While ‘anonymous’ users have previously been shielded by free speech rights under the First Amendment, the rights of copyright holders should carry more weight here, the request argues.

Shueisha specifically cited jurisprudence from a U.S. court which previously held that “to the extent that anonymity is used to mask copyright infringement […] it is unprotected by the First Amendment.”

In this case, the account holders are suspected infringers at the center of potential copyright litigation. That sets it apart from previous instances where the anonymous speech of Redditors was protected because they were merely seen as potential ‘witnesses’.

Email, IP-addresses, Access logs & More

The request for a DMCA subpoena has yet to be approved by the court but, absent any protest from X, that’s just a formality.

Shueisha already shared a list of all the details they would like to receive about the two X accounts. This includes names, phone numbers, email addresses, payment details, IP-addresses, and detailed access logs.

Whether X has access to all this information has yet to be seen. And even if it has, it’s unclear how usable it is. Ostensibly, Shueisha’s previous attempts at Cloudflare, Google, PayPal, and Visa were not sufficient to identify all the culprits with certainty.

Update: There’s a separate DMCA request from Shogakukan looking for information on X user @WeET_COLLECTION ( pdf ).

—

A copy of Shueisha’s DMCA subpoena request at the California federal court and the associated paperwork is available here ( 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 ).

From: TF , for the latest news on copyright battles, piracy and more.

More than two-and-a-half years ago, a group of Israel-based TV companies entered a new phase of their multi-year war against the country’s most popular and resilient pirate sites.

Companies including United King Film Distribution, Keshet Broadcasting, Hot Telecommunications Systems, and Reshet Media, requested a broad injunction at a federal court in the United States. The targets were three popular and highly-resilient pirate streaming sites; Israel-tv.com, Israel.tv, and Sdarot.tv, at the time Israel’s most-visited pirate site.

Blocking orders previously obtained in Israel had failed to put the platforms out of business. In the United States, the companies simply requested three of the most oppressive injunctions ever seen in a piracy case, and surprisingly the court obliged .

All ISPs…and any other ISPs providing services in the United States shall block access to the Website at any domain address known today…or to be used in the future by the Defendants…by any technological means available on the ISPs’ systems.

The injunctions also prevented CDN providers, DNS providers, domain companies, advertising services, financial institutions, and payment processors, from doing any business with the sites, ever. This unprecedented overreach provoked a significant reaction from Cloudflare and soon after the injunction was withdrawn .

TV Companies Try Their Hand at the High Court in London

While the Holy Grail of site-blocking injunctions ultimately proved elusive, other measures detailed in redacted or sealed court filings were eventually sanctioned in the United States. The nature of the measures is unknown but after being deployed for the last two-and-a-half years, most likely at great expense, the job still isn’t done.

In today’s shape-shifting world of self-resurrecting pirate sites, and clone sites that effectively mimic fallen originals, it’s difficult to say whether the various Sdarot-branded platforms online today are connected to the original or not. Israel TV, on the other hand, is an IPTV subscription platform with a style of business that’s more difficult to mimic, at least convincingly so.

The TV companies and the site are by now sworn enemies. The former doggedly refuses to give up and the latter bluntly refuses to give in. News of action at the High Court in London therefore suggests a new battleground is about to emerge.

Filed on December 24, 2024, the action sees United King Film Distribution, Keshet Broadcasting, Hot Telecommunications Systems, and Reshet Media, facing off against the UK’s largest internet service providers; British Telecommunications, EE, Plusnet, Sky UK, Talktalk, and Virgin Media Limited.

With no pirate sites mentioned at this stage but all other tell-tale signs present, this is unmistakably an application for a blocking injunction under Section 97A of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

An Interesting Coincidence

What the Israeli companies have in mind isn’t entirely clear beyond the basics, and details are unlikely to arrive in the public domain for quite some time. Yet coincidentally or not, during the last few weeks an unusual listing appeared on freelancing platform, Upwork, that may shine some light on current planning.

Placed by a small IT company reportedly doing business in New York, which to date has spent $196K on 261 hires (67 active), the listing requests very specific information of the type typically required as part of a S97 application.

Upwork Listing

The item listed as ‘Task #2’ also fits neatly into a hypothetical scenario of this exercise being connected to an application for a blocking injunction. The TV company applicants have already shown considerable determination in their pursuit of Moonpay.

On reading the text, whoever won the contract for the work seems to have been advised that a particular outcome is a necessity; i.e this report should include a more specific transfer to their processing domain called billnet domain and more importantly to show that billnet always transfers to moonpay.com

In the unlikely event that a Section 97A order under copyright law would also instruct the blocking of a payment provider, showing that all of an infringer’s business can be attributed to a single processor might be quite useful. The text at the end (emphasis ours) may or may not be a reference to that but if such an order was made under copyright law, it would be the first of its type, at least as far as we’re aware.

Significantly Easier Than the U.S.

For the last 14 years or so, rightsholders have obtained blocking injunctions against broadly the same ISPs, hoping to reduce the availability of pirated content in the UK. The major Hollywood studios, major record labels, and to a lesser extent publishers, are adamant that site-blocking works. Yet in most months, new blocks targeting hundreds of domains are urgently pushed through in response to the latest pirate countermeasures.

The ISPs’ familiarity with this process is a big plus for the Israeli companies. Unless there’s a glaring issue that needs to be addressed, it’s likely they’ll receive no opposition from the ISPs; after all, several are TV companies who also wish to restrict infringement.

If recent history is any barometer, the ISPs may not even attend court. In that respect, they’ll probably have something in common with Israel TV.

From: TF , for the latest news on copyright battles, piracy and more.

Ever since the existence of online piracy first hit the mainstream, the phenomenon has been described using words such as massive or vast.

Setting the bar so high means that as far as basic descriptions go, the last quarter-century has always had a huge piracy problem. Only when focusing on a relatively small aspect of the piracy market and then pausing to look up, does the true scale come into focus.

When Italy officially launched its Piracy Shield platform on February 1, 2024, the stated aim was to eliminate IPTV piracy on home turf. Almost literally, it transpires, since the majority of all blocking in 2024 has been carried out by broadcasters such as DAZN and Sky, to protect top-tier football league Serie A.

Controversies litter the past eleven months. Cloudflare and Google were both wrongfully targeted as enthusiasm to prevent piracy took precedence over the interests of internet users, and previously promised transparency gave way to almost complete unaccountability. What can or will be done to prevent further overblocking in 2025 remains to be seen but, thankfully, we can offer a little more transparency right now.

Piracy Shield: The State of Blocking 2024

Telecoms regulator AGCOM has just released its 2024 annual report ( pdf ) and at 200-pages long it’s a hefty read. In respect of Piracy Shield it offers little enlightenment. The report states that from February 1 to May 26, 2024, rightsholders requested and obtained 13 precautionary measures in respect of the illicit transmission of live sports.

In the same period, 18,879 fully qualified domain names (FQDN) and 4,006 IP addresses were blocked by Piracy Shield.

Data provided to TorrentFreak by an anonymous source is more comprehensive. The data claims to include all IP addresses blocked by the system until just a few days ago, more than 6,900 in total.

The number of fully qualified domain names, meaning domain names and all subdomains where they exist, is significantly larger, almost 17,500.

Piracy Shield: IP Addresses Blocked (reported locations per ipinfo.io )

Using geo-location tools provided by ipinfo.io, it’s immediately apparent that servers located in Europe itself account for the majority of IP addresses blocked by Piracy Shield. How many of these locations indicate an originating source of pirated streams is beyond the scope of this article, but it’s clear that it’s relatively uncommon for distant IP addresses to service Italy directly.

Reasons for that include a preference for local datacenters based on performance, onward distribution of streams for use by local suppliers, and in theory a reduced risk of IP addresses ending up on Italy’s blocklist and others elsewhere in Europe. Success in that respect seems patchy.

Europe and Other Regions Closer to Home

Moving more closely towards Italy reveals that IP addresses have been blocked in almost all countries in Europe, with notable absentees Denmark, Slovakia, Slovenia, and Greece.

With some of their name labels almost completely obscured by location markers, Italy’s northern neighbors appear to be among those causing the country the biggest headaches.

Piracy Shield: Closer to Home

The focus box shows that 196 IP addresses have been blocked in Italy itself. This is interesting for a number of reasons. In general, most countries limit their blocking to overseas services/locations because in theory, blocking is a last resort, useful when pirate services are beyond the jurisdiction of national police and the courts. With virtually no restrictions on which IP addresses are placed on Italy’s blacklist, nothing is a surprise.

The Badlands of Western Europe

While 196 IP addresses is normally quite a lot, for Piracy Shield that isn’t a particularly large number. When compared to other European countries with coastlines on the North Sea, it fades into insignificance.

Piracy Shield: Northern Neighbors

Considering that the Netherlands, Germany, and France all have established domestic site-blocking programs, it’s notable that these countries appear to be among the major exporters of pirate streams. That being said, the Netherlands appearing at the top of the list isn’t a surprise. In general online piracy terms, not much has changed in 20 years, except for the method used to deliver the content.

At the heart of Europe, Germany in second place isn’t a major shock either. However, given attitudes to copyright elsewhere in the EU, other locations might be a more logical, if not less practical choice, with the same applying to France. Romania’s position seems about right; the country has always had great internet, is known to be favored by some suppliers, with rightsholders still complaining about enforcement options in the background.

Given the volume of entities in the list and the shifting nature of domain names, more time is needed to process those, so we’ll return to this topic very soon.

In the meantime, the top 10 countries blocked by Piracy Shield worldwide in 2024 (IP addresses only)

Piracy Shield: Top 10 Blocked Countries 2024 (by IP address only)

From: TF , for the latest news on copyright battles, piracy and more.

In 2017, a new global anti-piracy coalition formed under the umbrella of the Motion Picture Association (MPA).

The Alliance for Entertainment and Creativity ( ACE ) bundled the powers and pockets of dozens of entertainment companies, and were joined by many more in the years that followed.

While skeptics may have dismissed the launch of yet another anti-piracy group, ACE was and is a grand success. The group has industry members and law enforcement contacts all over the globe, allowing it to pool intelligence and take action more effectively than ever before.

2024: A Transformative Year

The past year has been eventful for ACE on many fronts. The Alliance waved goodbye to its main boss, Jan Van Voorn, who left to work on a new IP-protection startup, IP-House. While his expertise will be missed, several key hires aim to fill the gap.

In June, Larissa Knapp was announced as the alliance’s new Global Chief of Content Protection. Knapp brings a wealth of experience from her 27 years at the FBI . As one of the highest-ranking officials, she managed over 2,000 personnel.

Other hires announced this year also bring much to the table, including former Assistant U.S. Attorney Marissa Bostick, who also served as Deputy Director for the Amazon’s Counterfeit Crimes Unit. As the MPA’s new Head of Global Litigation, Bostick will also oversee international litigation related to ACE activity.

Bryan Willett, a former FBI agent, is another key addition to the team. He will serve as the MPA’s VP Content Protection Enforcement for the Americas region, where he will develop and oversee ACE’s internet enforcement strategy, aiming to further curb online piracy.

2024: Landmark Shutdowns

While expanding the team is crucial for the future of ACE, the Alliance’s core objective of shutting down piracy operations remains unchanged. And 2024 saw no shortage of accomplishments on that front.

Looking back, the shutdown of the Fmovies piracy ring , together with Vietnamese authorities, stands out. This impacted many popular pirate brands, including Aniwave, Soap2dayx2, Zoroxtv, Fboxz, Animesuge, Cinezone, and many others.

These sites, which were wiped out overnight, collectively received billions of visits per year. The Vietnamese authorities are prosecuting the alleged mastermind of the Fmovies operation, which may bring more details to the forefront in the coming year.

There were many other key shutdowns in the past year too. In January, ACE shut down a football piracy streaming operation, in May IPTV sellers had their domains seized , Animeflix was pushed offline in July , and in September Egypt’s largest pirate site ‘Laroza’ was toppled .

Toward the end of the year, popular anime site Animefenix shut down ‘voluntarily’ citing legal pressure. The same happened to Braflix a few weeks earlier. Neither site mentioned ACE in their farewell messages but since both domains now redirect to ACE’s “Watch Legally” page, it’s not hard to guess where the pressure came from.

The above is just a selection of ACE’s actions. In total, several hundreds of domains were either seized or shut down by the group over the past twelve months. And there are no signs that enforcement activity will slow down anytime soon.

2025: Fresh & Familiar Targets

Just before Christmas, MPA and ACE went back to court, with Larissa Knapp requesting several DMCA subpoenas at a California federal court. Through the subpoenas, ACE wants Cloudflare and the .to domain registry (Tonic) to share information related to numerous domain names.

“This would include the individuals’ names, physical addresses, IP addresses, telephone numbers, e-mail addresses, payment information, account updates and account history,” Knapp writes.

These targets are all related to pirate streaming sites, services, or apps, some with dozens of millions of monthly visits. Anime site Anitaku is the most prominent target, with more than 158 million visits in November. Other sites like Gimy, Aniworld, and Faselhds also attract significant traffic.

The subpoenas target a total of 39 pirate streaming domains. ACE and the MPA hope that, through their requests for information, they can learn more about the identities and whereabouts of the operators.

This is not the first time that some of these sites have been targeted by ACE. An older Anitaku domain was listed in a subpoena a few months ago. While new uploads to the site were stalled recently , it remains online.

These subpoenas are standard practice by now. In several cases, site operators try to avoid being identified by using false information. However, history has also shown that these efforts can pay off.

In any case, the list of fresh targets shows what MPA and ACE’s priorities are. It’s clear that they are pushing full steam ahead with their enforcement efforts in the new year.

…

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A full list of all targeted domains is available below. Some of the associated paperwork can be found here ( 1 , 2 , 3 ).

– vidsrc.to
– aniworld.to
– animeworld.so
– 1tamilblasters.dad
– streamblasters.pm
– chinaq.tv
– dramasq.tw
– dramasq.com
– politicslovers.com
– linkkf.net
– bearbit.co
– tugaflix.best
– cb01.forsale
– altadefinizione01.living
– altadefinizione.democrat
– katmoviehd.fi
– lordhd.mov
– kukaj.me
– faselhds.care
– xalaflix.eu
– gimy.ai
– anitaku.bz
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– onstream.so
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– castledownload.com

From: TF , for the latest news on copyright battles, piracy and more.

Online piracy is a constant headache for copyright holders; one that’s particularly hard to beat.

Because those who run pirate sites often ignore takedown requests, copyright holders began targeting search engines and other online platforms that inadvertently help users to find pirated content.

Typically, copyright holders outsource this work to third-party companies that scan the web for links to pirated material. These companies then contact search engines, like Google, to request their removal.

Google has become a primary target for these requests, having recently processed its 10 billionth URL removal request.

Link-Busters: The Takedown Champion of 2024

These removal requests are not new. The process has been going on for well over a decade, fueled by reports from thousands of rightsholders. This year, however, one company stood out far beyond the rest in a way we’ve never witnessed before.

A few days ago, Link-Busters flagged its two billionth pirate URL to Google.

This comes less than half a year after it reached the one billion milestone, and currently it’s sending takedowns for more than 250 million URLs per month.

At this rate, it is no surprise that Link-Busters is the most prolific takedown sender at Google. In fact, it’s good for well over half of all takedown requests the search engine received since this summer. That’s something we’ve never seen before.

Publishers Fight Piracy

Link-Busters’ record-breaking numbers reveal that its notices are almost exclusively sent on behalf of publishing companies. The rise of shadow libraries, combined with the threat of AI scraping, has made these companies very active on the anti-piracy front.

Websites such as Z-Library and Anna’s Archive allow the public to download free books. These books can also be used for AI training. To prevent this, publishers try to make these sites unfindable in search results.

Looking at Link-Busters’ most-targeted domains, we see three Anna’s Archive domains on top, followed by a series of localized Z-Library domains. These six domains are already good for over 340 million reported URLs.

The table also shows the top rightsholders working with the anti-piracy company. These are all publishing companies, with Penguin Random House and HarperCollins clearly standing out, with a billion takedowns combined. Other popular request senders include Taylor & Francis, Simon and Schuster, and Hachette.

‘Better Than All The Rest’

It’s clear that Link-Busters is more ‘active’ than most competing takedown outfits, but this conclusion deserves some nuance. For one, many of the reported domains are mirrors, which show the same pirated books and articles duplicated across different URLs.

Additionally, shadow libraries generally have a larger amount of content indexed than pirate sites specializing in video content. That’s simply because there are more titles available.

However, various online testimonials suggest that publishing companies are quite satisfied with Link-Busters’ service.

“Benchmarked against the competition, Link-Busters were better at finding infringements, responded faster and did not suffer from ‘false positives’,” Penguin Random House notes.

Taylor & Francis, meanwhile, notices that Link-Busters helped to process “at least 400% more removals than previous years.”

Shadow Libraries Expand

It’s clear that Link-Busters is making an impact and that many publishers are content. While the billions of takedowns prevented some people from ending up at pirate sites, it didn’t stop them from operating.

Despite pressure from a U.S. criminal prosecution, Z-Library remains online. The site has just announced that it will close the book on a rather successful year. With over 36 million user profiles and 250 million daily reading recommendations, it continues to serve a massive audience.

Interestingly, the site continues to grow its presence off the web as well. Z-Library closes the year with 876,477 users of its desktop application, which more than doubled in a year.

Anna’s Archive, meanwhile, continued to grow as well. After ending last year with 25 million indexed books and 99 million academic papers, it now has access to more than 36 million books and over 106 million papers.

All in all, it’s safe to say that Link-Busters has a lot more link busting to do in the new year. At the current rate, it will send a few billion DMCA takedown requests to Google in 2025.

From: TF , for the latest news on copyright battles, piracy and more.