While rightsholders in Belgium have been slightly less vocal in support of site-blocking measures than others around Europe, they now appear to be making up for lost time.

With rightsholders eager to block large swathes of pirate sites and local ISPs on record saying they want exactly the same thing , an application for a blocking injunction filed by DAZN’s Eleven Sports Network in March showed partners working together.

Eleven Sports Network / 12th Player BV

Filed at the Dutch-speaking Business Court in Brussels, the application saw DAZN’s Eleven Sports Network (ESN) and 12th Player BV, a joint venture between ESN and the Spanish company Mediapro Internacional, team up hoping to compel local ISPs to block around 90 pirate domains.

According to the claimants, the platforms are dedicated to streaming live football matches in violation of their rights. Visitors to these pirate services reside in Belgium and access matches illegally using local internet service providers.

In this matter, the main internet service providers in Belgium are the named defendants, but only for the purposes of establishing their role as intermediaries. The ISPs are supporters of site-blocking measures because they also stand to benefit: Telenet via its Play Sports service, Proximus via Proximus Pickx, and Voo via Voo Sports.

Rightsholders ‘Recommend’ ISPs Should Block the Sites

With claimants and defendants all aiming for the same thing, the language used in the decision handed down by the Brussels court is non-adversarial, to put it mildly.

The claimants asserted that the domains submitted for blocking “provide access to websites on which audiovisual content broadcast on the channels of Eleven Sports Network BV is communicated to the public” and that customers of Telenet NV, Proximus NV, Voo NV, and Orange Belgium NV, facilitate access to those domains.

To tackle this problem, the claimants “recommended” that in their roles as intermediaries, the ISPs should implement DNS measures to prevent access to the ‘pirate’ domains.

The claimants further suggested putting the DNS tampering to good use; customers attempting to access the domains should be redirected to a DAZN anti-piracy site (screenshot below) set up to advise visitors on the reasons for redirection.

All parties also agreed to bear their own costs.

Not Much for the Court to Do

With no evidence before the Court that the claims were inadmissible and no grounds being identified that they might be, the claims of the applicants were declared admissible. The ISPs disputed the applicants’ claims for the record but offered no argument in support. Instead, as part of the predetermined direction of the case, left judgment in the hands of the Court.

The Court determined that as providers of internet connectivity, the ISPs are intermediaries and, as such, are in a position to prevent their subscribers from accessing the pirate streaming sites. The ISPs were ordered to do just that.

The request by Eleven Sports for the ISPs to redirect subscribers to a block page provided by DAZN was rejected. However, the decision notes that the ISPs “are free to provide the public with such information about the blocked access that these parties deem appropriate.”

Given that the claimants and defendants worked together to present the blocking action to the Court, it’s possible that the ISPs will find it appropriate to redirect visitors to DAZN’s anti-piracy page after all. Describing it as a ‘block page’ seems insufficient, however.

The site, located at dazn-antipiracy.be where the image above is displayed, seems to have a lot going on behind the scenes considering its straightforward task. One might even conclude that the aim isn’t just to inform, but to track visitors longer term.

The domains to be blocked by the ISPs are listed below. Three domains (aliezstream.pro, cdnssd.ru, ustream.pro) appear to be duplicates.

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

A press release issued by Spain’s Ministry of the Interior on Friday initially sounds straightforward.

Based on a complaint filed by the Alliance for Creativity and Entertainment, in November 2022 an investigation was launched to identify those responsible for two websites that marketed a service that allegedly violated the rights of ACE members.

“The complex computer and banking investigation carried out, together with several police investigation techniques, allowed the specialists of the Central Cybercrime Unit to prove that the websites investigated were registered, controlled and operated from several companies directed by the main suspect, a citizen of Dutch origin,” the statement reads.

“This man allegedly led a business and criminal network, made up of citizens living mainly in Gran Canaria, which appeared to be a legitimate business structure with which he managed to earn more than 5,300,000 euros.”

International TV Channels, Movies, TV Series

The press release describes an “international criminal organization” operating a pirate IPTV network using “the latest technology and the most advanced technical devices” to capture satellite signals from various countries.

“They subsequently amplified them and decrypted the multimedia content they transported, content that they then distributed publicly and illegally. In total, more than 130 international television channels and thousands of movies and series that they made available to citizens around the world,” the Ministry continues.

The service, which isn’t named by the Ministry, reportedly had more than 14,000 subscribers who paid between 10 and 19 euros per month, resulting in “damage to the rights of the authors, producers and distributors of these artistic works.”

Service Dismantled, Eight People Arrested

The Ministry of the Interior says that eight people, described as the main members of the network “who held or had held positions of responsibility” have now been arrested.

They were targeted in raids on addresses in Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, Madrid, Oviedo, and Málaga. Two home searches, executed simultaneously, led to the seizure of a vehicle and two computers. Bank accounts containing 80,000 euros were frozen.

“Likewise, the servers of the online platforms investigated were seized and blocked. Sixteen web pages controlled by this criminal organization were also blocked, so that when their users currently try to access them, their access is prevented. It redirects them to a National Police website where a message is displayed informing them that this page has been intercepted,” the government ministry concludes.

Service Targeted Was TVMucho, Recently Rebranded as Teeveeing

Supplied by the Ministry of the Interior, the video above is much like many others depicting raids against pirate IPTV services. In this case we can confirm the target was the service formerly known as TVMucho and more recently known as Teeveeing.

Launched around 2015 and originally incorporated in London as TVMucho Ltd early 2016, the company ran for 18 months before shutting down. Company data in Spain reveals that TVMucho Sociedad Limitada began trading just under nine years ago and was registered to an address in Las Palmas.

Unless there was a lot more going on than its public image suggested, TVMucho didn’t seem to exist for the purpose of usurping traditional pay TV providers or the likes of Netflix.

The premise was simple; expats away from home with zero access to the free-to-air channels they had come to rely on, could subscribe to TVMucho and the service would pipe those channels to them over the internet for viewing in Spain.

At least as far as we’re aware, the channels on offer from TVMucho were the channels expats would receive simply by switching on a TV at home. While a TV license would be required to view them in the UK, for example, none required a subscription or payment over and above that.

Beyond a handful of free minutes as a promotion, TVMucho did cost money to view but with no official alternative, the service proved popular.

Citing ‘Insurmountable Challenges’ TVMucho Shuts Down

In a message that appeared on its homepage in October 2023, TVMucho spoke of “unsurmountable challenges” presented by a company in the U.S. and advised its customers the company had ceased trading with immediate effect.

Since the authorities have refrained from revealing the identity of the main suspect, we won’t be naming him here either. However, the paragraph that references the “often misunderstood” business model is something the Dutch owner of TVMucho has spoken about for years.

We will revisit his position on legality at a later time once the charges against him have been made clear; what we can confirm is that while he believed that the law protected his business, major rightsholders have repeatedly argued quite the opposite.

TVMucho is Dead, long Live TeeVeeing?

The sudden demise of TVMucho was matched by the equally sudden appearance of an almost identical platform called TeeVeeing.

All former subscribers of TVMucho needed to do was agree to new terms and conditions and according to reports, normal service was resumed.

The marketing material pretty much confirmed that everything would remain the same, including access to the same free-to-air content from back home (but unavailable in Spain), all laid out nicely in a glossy EPG.

For reasons that still aren’t clear, the TeeVeeing app is still available on Apple’s App Store and still free to download from Google Play . That doesn’t seem to dovetail particularly well with the emphasis being placed on “dismantled” services and blocked websites in Spain.

Yet, the Alliance for Creativity and Entertainment confirms that this action is indeed about TVMucho and TeeVeeing and the “125 channels, including major networks like BBC, ITV, Sky, and RTL” offered by the service(s).

The report avoids mentioning that the channels are all free-to-air but notes that due to the work of the Spanish National Police, “the access to infringed content and 15 related domains were blocked.”

Dismantled, or Just Dismantled a Bit?

When putting together this report on Friday, we had zero problems accessing the TVMucho website. We had zero problems accessing the website of TeeVeeing too, which in view of the statements about its dismantling is a bit of an issue. Through our Spanish contacts we asked if the websites were accessible in Spain and whether by pure luck or otherwise, neither were blocked.

While that’s not a particularly big deal for TVMucho’s website, the same can’t be said about that of TeeVeeing; quite obviously it’s still online and as the screenshot sent to us independently confirms, a live event that was taking place in the UK on Friday afternoon was being shown live, in browser, no complications.

Which 16 websites the Spanish government is referring to as blocked is unclear. The same seems to hold true for the dismantled services that, as least as far as we can tell, doesn’t include the main one. Other questions can be addressed in due course, including the claim that the suspects captured satellite broadcasts.

It’s possible they did just that, but there’s also information to suggest that content was more easily obtained from at least one other IPTV service.

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

The invention of the MP3 format in 1993 didn’t make any mainstream news headlines. In hindsight, however, it was a pivotal moment that would revolutionize music consumption, and more.

Invented by the German engineer Karlheinz Brandenburg and colleagues at the Fraunhofer Society, the coding format made it possible to reduce the size of music files without any significant loss of audible sound quality.

Due to the size reductions, these digital files could be stored on flash-memory devices. This led to the invention of dedicated MP3 players capable of playing music ripped from CDs. Many considered this a more compact and shock-resistant alternative to the Discman .

At the time, music industry insiders were already fantasizing about the ‘celestial jukebox’; a tool or service that would make it possible to play any track on demand. The MP3 helped to bring this concept a step closer too, as Napster would soon prove.

Napster: June 1, 1999

At the end of the nineties, technology and the Internet were a playground for young engineers and ‘hackers’. Some of them regularly gathered in the w00w00 IRC chatroom on the EFnet network. This tech-think-tank had many notable members, including WhatsApp founder Jan Koum and Shawn Fanning , who logged on with the nickname Napster.

In 1998, 17-year-old Fanning shared an idea with the group. ‘Napster’ wanted to create a network of computers that could share files with each other. More specifically, a central music database that everyone in the world could access.

This idea never left the mind of the young developer. Fanning stopped going to school and flanked by his friend Sean Parker , devoted the following months to making his vision a reality. That moment came on June 1, 1999 , when the first public release of Napster was released online. Soon after, the software went viral.

Napster was quickly embraced by millions of users, who saw the software as something magical. It was a gateway for musical exploration, one that dwarfed even the largest record stores in town. And all for free. It sounds mundane today, but some equated it to pure technological sorcery.

For many top players in the music industry, Napster’s sorcery was pure witchcraft. At the time, manufacturing CDs with high profit margins felt like printing money and Napster’s appearance threatened to ruin the party.

Music Industry Shocked

According to the RIAA’s former CEO, Hilary Rosen, a few months after Napster’s release, the music industry shifted into full panic mode. In February 2000, all major label executives discussed the threat during an RIAA board meeting at the Four Seasons Hotel in Los Angeles.

“I will never forget this day. All of the heads of the labels, literally the titans of the music business, were in that room. I had somebody wheel in a PC and put some speakers up and I started doing a name that tune,” Rosen later recalled .

The major music bosses started to name tracks, including some that weren’t even released yet, and time and again Napster would come up with results. Needless to say, the board was terrified.

Within a year, the RIAA sued Napster Inc. and soon after artists including Metallica and Dr. Dre followed. These high profile cases only raised the popularity of Napster and MP3 players began to sell like hotcakes.

Peak Napster

At the start of 2001, Napster’s user base reached a peak of more than 26.4 million worldwide. Yet, despite huge growth and backing from investors, the small file-sharing empire couldn’t overcome the legal challenges.

The RIAA lawsuit resulted in an injunction from the Ninth Circuit Court, which ordered the network to shut down. This happened during July 2001, little more than two years after Napster launched. By September that year, the case had been settled for millions of dollars.

While the Napster craze was over, file-sharing had mesmerized the masses and the genie was out of the bottle. Grokster, KaZaa, Morpheus, LimeWire, and many others popped up and provided sharing alternatives, for as long as they lasted. Meanwhile, BitTorrent was also knocking on the door.

Ripple Effect

Today, 25 years later, music piracy certainly hasn’t disappeared, but it has changed. When Napster came out, there simply weren’t any legal options to buy digital music online; let alone one that offered ‘unlimited access’.

Napster paved the way for Apple’s iTunes store, to serve the demand that was clearly there. The boom in digital download sales never came close to mimicking the ‘all you can play’ experience and was soon marginalized.

The current music industry generates the bulk of its revenues from online streaming subscriptions, while CDs have been downgraded to rare artifacts. This music streaming landscape was largely pioneered by a Napster ‘fan’ from Sweden , Daniel Ek.

Like many others, Ek was fascinated by the ‘all you can play’ experience offered by file-sharing software, and that planted the seeds for the music streaming startup Spotify, where he still serves as CEO today. In fact, Spotify itself used file-sharing technology under the hood to ensure swift playback.

Spotify is just one of the many examples of the Napster ripple effect, which reaches far beyond technology. The entire music industry has changed, for better and worse, depending on one’s perspective. And the ripples that started 25 years ago will still be felt in the decades to come.

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

Little over a decade ago, Google expanded its transparency report with a new section dedicated to DMCA takedown requests .

For the first time, this allowed outsiders to see which URLs were being targeted by copyright holders and in what quantity.

In the years that followed, we meticulously covered a steady increase in takedown notices. From just a few thousand reported links per week, soon it was hundreds of thousands, eventually crossing the 7 million mark around 2015.

The graph below shows the takedown boom during these years. At the time, we covered these record-breaking numbers, which peaked at roughly 20 million links reported weekly.

The exponential growth curve eventually flattened out and around 2017 the takedown volume began to decline . The decrease was in part due to various anti-piracy algorithms making pirated content less visible in search results.

Takedown Resurgence

While Google’s demotion measures are still in place, pirates haven’t disappeared. On the contrary, they actively try to bypass the search engine’s countermeasures. As a result, after a few years of declining volumes, DMCA notices shot up once again .

The resurgence produced record-breaking numbers. As reported earlier this year, it only took little over six months for Google to add a billion takedowns . That’s 36 million pirate URLs flagged per week, on average, but more was yet to come.

While browsing though Google’s transparency report this week, we noticed one reporting outfit quickly climbing the ranks. Dutch piracy reporter Link-Busters works with major book publishers and is now the top sender of Google takedown notices this year. The company is flagging URLs at a rate we’ve never seen before.

To set the stage; last year, MG Premium broke new records by being the first reporters to submit over 14 million links per week. That’s peanuts compared to Link-Busters’ latest efforts.

Last year, Link-Busters reported hundreds of thousands of links per week, increasing to around 14 million during the first months of the year. More recently, however, reporting rates have skyrocketed.

56 Million Per Week

In April, the anti-piracy group flagged a record-breaking 56 million links in a single week. That’s an average of more than 5,000 URLs per second. If it could maintain this rate, this single company would report 2.5 billion URLs in a year.

The chart above shows Link-Busters’ weekly takedown volume , which already seems to have dropped a bit. Still, the company may be on track to be the first to report a billion pirate URLs to Google.

And there’s another interesting statistic. Since February, Google processed around 750 million reported links, nearly half of which were reported by Link-Busters.

For the Books

As mentioned earlier, Link-Busters mainly works with major book publishers. Most of its takedowns are sent on behalf of Penguin Random House, HarperCollins Publishers, Hachette, John Wiley & Sons, and Princeton University Press.

This ‘book’ crackdown is also relatively new. Previously, music, movie, and adult rightsholders occupied the top takedown spots.

Not surprisingly, Link-Busters mainly targets the domain names of popular shadow libraries. Their top 10 includes several domains connected to Anna’s Archive and Z-Library, as show below.

Whether Link-Busters can keep up this takedown rate has yet to be seen. We’ve asked the company to comment on the recent volume surge and how it expects things to evolve going forward, but we haven’t heard back.

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

Z-Library is one of the largest shadow libraries on the Internet, hosting millions of books and 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.

According to the latest available information, these two defendants are still fighting their extradition . Meanwhile, the Z-Library service has continued to operate as if nothing ever happened, serving books to millions of people all over the world.

FBI Seizes More Domains

The feds are not standing idly by and have seized hundreds of domain names belonging to the site. The first wave of seizures took place in November 2022, shortly before the criminal case was made public. Another round followed in the spring, and a third wave came last November.

With these seizures, the FBI aims to frustrate Z-Library’s operations. Thus far, however, the library has always returned. U.S. law enforcement isn’t giving up though and, a few hours ago, it quietly carried out a new round of domain seizures.

These new seizures cover z-library.se and z-library.sx, two of the three main domain names recently promoted by the site. The third, singlelogin.re, remains unaffected at the time of writing.

The seizure banner above suggests that in addition to the U.S. authorities, Austria’s Criminal Intelligence Service played a role too. The same applies to Austria’s Cybercrime Competence Center , C4, but since the banner hasn’t been updated since the last round, this information could be dated.

Email Hit

The full list of seized domains is much longer and includes names such as zlibrary-redirect.se, zlibrary-africa.se, and zlibrary-china.se. More may follow in the near future as the enforcement action might be ongoing.

Z-Library has yet to officially comment on the enforcement action. Communication though the regular ‘support’ email will be hard, however, as the site’s email domain z-lib.se is also part of the new seizure round.

At the time of writing, Z-Library’s Telegram channel remains online, with nearly 450,000 subscribers waiting in anticipation for an update.

No Surprise

The new seizures shouldn’t come as a surprise to the Z-Library team, considering the three earlier attempts. Previously, the site simply diverted users to new domains and ones that are still operational, including the .onion domain for the Tor network.

Whether U.S. authorities have made progress on locating the whereabouts of the remaining Z-Library team is unknown. For now, however, it doesn’t appear that any of the site’s server infrastructure has been taken down.

While all this plays out, the criminal prosecution in the U.S. shows little progress. The extradition process in Argentina hasn’t been finalized yet, it seems. In addition, a federal court in New York has yet to rule on a motion to dismiss filed by the Z-Library defendants last year.

Update May 31: Z-Library just sent out this message.

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

Reddit has gone head-to-head with a group of filmmakers over the past year, 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 were not planning to go after these people in court but wanted to use their comments as evidence in ongoing piracy liability lawsuits against Internet providers.

Reddit viewed the requests as intrusive. The company objected to the initial attempt , arguing that handing over the requested information would violate its users’ right to anonymous speech. Reddit later responded similarly to a second and third subpoena request.

The movie companies took these cases to a federal court, asking it to compel Reddit to comply. The court refused to do so, three times already .

Filmmakers Request ‘De Novo’ Review

The film companies were not happy with the denials and refused to give up. When U.S. Magistrate Judge Thomas Hixson denied their most recent attempt in February, relating to the case against ISP Frontier Communications, they moved for a ‘ de novo ’ review at a California federal court.

In their motion, the rightsholders cited jurisprudence suggesting that an IP address is not necessarily ‘unmasking’ personally identifying information. They argued that the magistrate judge ignored key arguments and arrived at the wrong conclusion.

The companies stressed that the commenters could prove crucial in their battle against ISP Frontier. Among other things, the court’s suggestion that there might be other ways to obtain similar evidence was premature, they said.

Reddit’s Objections

As expected, Reddit objected to the request for a ‘de novo’ review. The company argued that, as the court repeatedly found, the filmmakers have other non-intrusive options to gather evidence against Frontier, including seeking evidence from the ISP and its subscribers directly.

Reddit further noted that the filmmakers’ argument that IP-addresses do not “identify” users is misguided at best.

“Reddit does not require its users to give their real name or addresses, and so the only identifying information Reddit may maintain on its users is their IP address, which is precisely why the Movants here seek the users’ IP addresses. If IP addresses were not identifying, Movants would not be seeking them.”

At worst, the argument is disingenuous, Reddit wrote. The movie companies previously used a Redditor’s IP address to obtain the name and address of a subscriber, requesting their torrenting history and more.

“[A]fter Reddit provided Movants with IP address data for a single Reddit user last year, the Movants immediately identified that IP address by subpoenaing T-Mobile, and they have been harassing that user with motions practice ever since,” Reddit countered.

Court Denies ‘De Novo’ Review

After reviewing these and other arguments, this week the court sided with Reddit. In a single sentence, without further detail, U.S. District Court Judge James Donato denied the request for ‘de novo’ review.

“The motion for de novo determination of the motion to enforce the subpoena is denied, and the magistrate judge’s order is affirmed, for the reasons stated on the record,” Judge Donato writes.

Paired with the earlier rejections and denials, it’s clear that courts are hesitant to allow discovery of Redditors’ private information in connection with these non-party lawsuits.

The filmmakers have proven to be persistent and can appeal this outcome, or file yet another case. However, recent developments seem to have lowered the need to take further action related to the Frontier case.

Filmmakers Have an Alternative Now

The movie companies previously stressed that the Redditors could prove to be of key importance, since they had difficulty obtaining the required evidence from Frontier subscribers directly. However, that may have changed.

Frontier previously redacted the personal details of its subscribers, when filmmakers asked for information in their piracy liability lawsuit. Earlier this month, however, the U.S. Bankruptcy Court for the Southern District of New York ordered the ISP to share these subscriber details in full .

The court concluded that, with proper safeguards , the interests of copyright holders weigh stronger than the privacy interests of Frontier subscribers.

These Frontier subscribers are materially different from the Redditors, as their alleged piracy activities, monitored via their IP addresses, are at the heart of the liability lawsuit against the ISP.

The unredacted information of Frontier subscribers should help the movie and music companies link the IP addresses to Frontier subscribers, which is required to establish the direct infringement claim and hold Frontier liable.

As for the safeguards, the court stressed that the filmmakers can’t harass the subscribers. It further stressed that their personal information can only be used for the Frontier lawsuit, adding that the highly confidential information should be destroyed 30 days after the proceedings conclude.

Whether the filmmakers will get the evidence they’re looking for remainsto be seen. That said, the ‘anonymous speech’ of the piracy-commenting Redditors remains well protected.

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

In a lawsuit filed at a U.S. district court early January 2022, video game giant Activision targeted German company EngineOwning UG, plus a number of individuals associated with the cheat-making and distribution business.

With a flood of similar cases, some filed by competitor Bungie, providing a template, Activision’s complaint alleged, among other things, that the defendants trafficked in circumvention devices, in violation of the DMCA’s anti-circumvention provision.

Warring Parties Come Out Fighting

For more than a year, the EngineOwning defendants played to their strengths, characterizing Activision as a fifty billion dollar corporate bully targeting a handful of under-resourced, overseas defendants, with little means of fighting back. Yet fight back they did.

After retaining counsel in the United States, defendants including Valentin Rick, Alex Kleeman, Bennet Huch, Leon Frisch, Leon Schlender, Leonard Bugla, Marc-Alexander Richts, Pascal Claβen, and Remo Löffler, filed a motion to dismiss. Activision’s amended complaint had added new claims under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, and two further counts of racketeering (RICO). In general, however, none of the defendants relished the idea of visiting the U.S.

A month later, two of the defendants broke ranks and settled with Activision. Court records indicate that one settled for $2m and the other for around half that, but money wasn’t the only thing on Activision’s mind. As always, information can also prove helpful.

Defendants’ Odds of a Win Take a Nose Dive

Activision’s response to the motion to dismiss was aggressive, to put it mildly. Armed with what appeared to be freshly-obtained records of EngineOwning’s internal communications, the court heard how the defendants “routinely trade detailed instructions on how best to illegally launder” their shared profits, while engaging in “fraudulent tax-dodging schemes.”

Also laid bare were allegations of lavish overseas spending, including weeks spent in the presidential suite of a Zurich hotel, and alleged pondering over whether to pay a defense lawyer or spend 10K on cocaine instead.

With the lawsuit expanding to more than 25 defendants, communication between the EngineOwning defendants and their U.S. attorneys ground to a halt; they subsequently received permission from the court to withdraw from the case. In July 2023, four of the defendants indicated they would defend themselves moving forward, but that was the last the case heard of them.

Activision Moves For Default Judgment

In an order dated Wednesday granting Activision’s motion for default judgment, District Judge Michael W. Fitzgerald recalled the facts of the case as alleged by Activision. Defendant Valentin Rick is described as the founder of EO (EngineOwning) and the “mastermind behind the venture.”

Together with Rick, co-creator/co-founder Leon Frisch is responsible for developing, marketing, distributing, and selling the cheats. The bulk of the rest form EO’s core team, with the remainder described as having site moderation, tech support, and reselling responsibilities.

‘$14.5m in Damages Sounds Reasonable’

Satisfied that Activision has indeed suffered lost profits and goodwill at the hands of the defendants, Judge Fitzgerald notes that all Activision claims pass muster.

“The Court therefore concludes that Plaintiff sufficiently alleges claims for violation of the DMCA, violation of the CFAA, violation of RICO, and intentional interference with contract,” his order reads.

“Here, Plaintiff seeks a total of $14,465,600 in statutory damages. Ordinarily, such a large sum of money at stake would weigh in favor of Defendants. But the Court has ‘wide discretion in determining the amount of statutory damages to be awarded.’ Here, the Court deems the amount of requested damages reasonable, given that Plaintiff alleges that Defendants have acted willfully.”

Finding that the defendants’ failure to appear is unlikely to be due to “excusable neglect”, the Judge granted a permanent injunction, which includes the transfer of the engineowning.to domain to Activision.

For violations of the DMCA’s anti-circumvention provision (17 U.S.C. § 1203(c)(3)(A)), Activision sought the minimum statutory damages of $200 per violation multiplied by the estimated number of downloads of the cheating software in the United States (72,328).

Activision asked for the defendants to be held jointly and severally liable for damages totaling $14,465,600 plus $292,912 in attorneys fees; in the context, the Judge found the request reasonable.

In the meantime, it’s business as usual at EngineOwning, but for how long is unknown.

Having disengaged from the lawsuit last year, it seems unlikely that a new spirit of cooperation will suddenly become a feature of events moving forward.

Given the history, if there are rules to be followed, finding a way around them to gain an unfair advantage might be the most logical outcome.

Activision’s Motion for Entry of Default and the Court’s Default Judgment are available here and here (pdf)

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

In today’s throwaway society, there can be a tendency to undervalue. Expensive smartphones are carelessly dropped and replaced, while an intermittent fault is seen as an excuse to buy better TV, rather than as a signal to check the batteries first.

Yet, things that have true worth, due to their history and other intangible qualities, are not so easily replaced. Last December, when the city of Seoul, South Korea, got out of bed to nationwide news reports of graffiti being sprayed on the walls of the ancient Gyeongbokgung Palace, it wasn’t difficult to see why people were so upset.

Built in 1395, Still Incredible

Gyeongbokgung dates back to the Joseon dynasty, making it very nearly 630 years old. It’s had a lot of restoration work done over the years, including a rebuild in 1867 after being destroyed 270 years earlier. But as the news report shows, culture and history aren’t valued by everyone.

Images in the media revealed that the graffiti was sprayed in several locations, together almost 150 feet long. The image below shared online represents just a small part of the damage, which sadly increased after a copycat struck the next night.

The characters in red reportedly say ‘free movie’ and elsewhere the name of an artist and their album was reportedly daubed. Under the blurred-out blue text in the middle, lay something more valuable: a probable motive.

Suspects

The damage was caused over two days, a Saturday and Sunday night. One suspect handed himself into the police on Monday, a then 17-year-old who said he’d been paid 100,000 won – less than $75.00 – to deface the palace.

While initially citing difficulties in the investigation due to the suspects’ use of Telegram, which is both encrypted and based overseas, several people were already talking to the police.

The 17-year-old and his 16-year-old girlfriend were both detained in December; the latter was present when the damage was taking place on December 16, 2023, but played no active role, reports suggest. A man in his 20s admitted that he caused damage the next evening in what appears to have been a copycat incident.

The teenagers said that they were offered 3 million won, almost $2,200, to spray the web address of an illegal streaming site on the palace. They identified the instigator by his online nickname, ‘Team Leader Lee.’

Man Was Arrested, Escaped, and Arrested Again

On May 25th (some reports cite May 22nd), ‘Team Leader Lee’ – now identified as Mr Kang, the alleged operator of an unnamed illegal streaming site – was arrested and taken to court. From there he was taken to the Cyber Investigation Unit at the Seoul Metropolitan Police Agency.

He arrived there around 13:50 and for reasons that aren’t being made clear, somehow managed to escape. Police reportedly deployed all of their resources and by 15:40, 30+ year-old Kang was back in custody.

Police say they have evidence to show that Kang offered the money in exchange for promoting his website in graffiti on the sides of the palace. Kang’s also suspected of posting illegal pornography on the site, including the worst kind, according to a police report.

In total, damage caused by the suspects has led to 150,000,000 won ($109,500) in restoration costs, The Korea Times reports. Korea’s Cultural Heritage Administration (CHA) says the pair responsible will face a civil lawsuit for damages.

The man in his 20s is currently on trial in a criminal case. Prosecutors are pushing for three years in prison, an indication of how seriously the offense is being taken.

Kang has a warrant out for his arrest and faces a number of charges and potentially many years in prison. Should he be convicted, one of the most valuable commodities of all may prove elusive; it waits for no one and can never be restored, not for any amount of money.

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