Five years ago, the World Health Organization formally declared the COVID-19 outbreak as a pandemic.

Follow-up measures taken by governments and organizations around the world directly affected the lives of billions of people.

Those who were lucky enough to keep their jobs started to work from home, if possible. The same applied to school-going youth, who saw their social lives cut off due to lockdowns and curfews.

The devastating health crisis is over today, but its impact can’t be understated. Aside from lingering health issues, the aftermath also extends to the online piracy niche, where the effects of COVID-19 were already visible in anecdotal piracy figures early on.

In early 2020, we reported that there was increased interest in the movie Contagion , a decade-old classic which depicts a worldwide virus outbreak. Mid-March, the first signs revealed an increased interest in pirate sites and services in severely affected regions.

Soon after the pandemic was official, additional research revealed that torrent traffic spiked in many countries when lockdown measures were put in place.

Academic Paper Documents a Diverse Piracy Pandemic

While we take our own journalistic research seriously, it doesn’t compare to proper academic research. This typically takes years to complete and paints a more detailed and complex picture of COVID-19’s effects on piracy.

A paper titled “Digital piracy in times of Covid‑19” was published in the most recent issue of the Journal of Cultural Economics . Authored by Julia Mazzei and colleagues, it presents the results of an extensive survey conducted in 2022.

The full dataset includes 25,939 respondents, 7,095 of which are minors, from 14 different countries including France, Germany, United Kingdom, United States, Australia, Indonesia, and Brazil. All respondents were asked about their media consumption habits during the pandemic.

Paired with demographic information, including whether respondents experienced income reductions or significant changes to online working or schooling, the responses allowed the researchers to obtain more insight into the link between the pandemic, legal consumption, and piracy.

New Pirates Emerged

The overall conclusion shows that the number of new pirates grew faster than usual during the pandemic, while existing pirates increased their illegal consumption volumes.

“[A]s much as 6–8% of the population started using illegal channels during the pandemic, as opposed to a maximum of 2.5% that would be expected as a result of demographic developments. In addition, many who had used illegal channels before increased their pirating activities,” the researchers note.

The paper identifies two main drivers of this effect: affordability and available time. With more spare time, especially for those who were home-bound, people were eager for entertainment, including content offered through pirate sites and services.

The affordability aspect of piracy applies to everyone, but was particularly important for those who lost income as a result of the pandemic, as they may not have the funds to take out additional subscriptions.

Complex Effects on Legal Consumption

While it’s clear that piracy increased overall, this doesn’t mean that legal consumption decreased across the board. In fact, the opposite effect can be found.

For example, film and TV piracy showed a positive association with legal consumption. One illegally accessed movie or series was linked to an increase of 0.5 in legally consumed items, suggesting a potential sampling or complementary effect overall.

The music industry was less lucky, however, as the researchers found substantial negative displacement. Consuming one music album through illegal channels was associated with a 0.7 reduction in the amount of music accessed legally.

For books, there was no statistically significant link between piracy and legal consumption, measured over the entire population. For games, there was a small negative effect, but this was only marginally significant.

Zooming In Reveals More Detail

To add to the complexity, these displacement effects can differ according to age group. Looking at film and TV piracy, piracy among minors was linked to greater legal consumption, while the effect was reversed for young adults (18-34).

For books, the roles were reversed; piracy was linked to less legal consumption for minors, while young adults showed a positive association.

Interestingly, piracy displacement effects might also cross categories in some rare instances. For minors, film and TV piracy increased legal viewing activity, but it was also correlated with less book consumption. In other words, the increase in film and TV consumption, was linked to less book reading.

All in all, the study indicates that the pandemic clearly resulted in new pirates and more piracy. However, at the same time, it suggests that piracy is not by definition linked to fewer sales, or less legal activity.

The researchers end the paper by noting that people should be cautious in interpreting the findings as causal effects. Nonetheless, they help to shed further light on the complex piracy phenomenon, as it will be interesting to see if the findings will hold up in future studies.

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A copy of the paper, published under a Creative Commons license (CC BY 4.0) is available here . Mazzei, J., Martinelli, A., Nuvolari, A. et al. Digital piracy in times of Covid-19. J Cult Econ (2025)

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

When the Alliance for Creativity and Entertainment launched in 2017, the globalization of online piracy had been apparent for some time.

In the relatively calm waters of a decade earlier, the Hollywood majors tackled pirate adversaries all around the world, often while pooling resources under the banner of the MPAA.

Less-connected rightsholders had little choice but to go it alone while shouldering 100% of the costs. For those who meet the ACE entry criteria today, access to a wealth of knowledge and vast experience that money simply can’t buy, comes as part of the package after paying the ACE members’ annual fee.

Today over 50 companies involved in movie and TV production, broadcasting and distribution, and more recently live sports, come together as members of ACE, a collective inseparable from the anti-piracy operations of the MPA.

In day to day business, several member companies are direct rivals in the same markets, many more find themselves among general competition to varying degrees. Yet all have something in common; a persistent piracy problem that in many key markets, only seems to be getting worse.

Fighting Back Globally

The need to eliminate existing priority targets and swiftly suppress emerging priority threats is universally understood. Somewhere in the middle, where the bulk of pirate sites and services exist, sits a vast pool of potential targets ready for triage.

Relatively few are named in a full-blown lawsuit, but it does happen and can prove very costly indeed. Only very rarely does ACE confirm a shutdown in connection with a settlement agreement but again, that definitely happens too. The precise financial implications for site operators is almost never revealed but a six figure demand seen by TF some years ago seems unlikely to have been unique.

Domain Seizures For Q1 2025

Regardless of any financial terms they may or may not contain, a settlement or agreement to cease-and-desist often sees ACE/MPA take control of domain names, to prevent their infringing use moving forward.

The details occasionally appear in ACE announcements but more often than not, domains are silently signed over to the MPA, with future visitors redirected to the ACE portal for a warning on the dangers of piracy. Pick an especially rare domain and the redirect may even lead to the MPA’s site.

Pirates can pick their poison (ACE left, MPA right)

The only mention of domain seizures thus far in 2025 appears in an announcement revealing the closure of Spanish file-hosting site Gamovideo. The pair of domains seized aren’t identified by name but we can confirm they are gamovideo.com and gamovideo.net.

Domains seized during the first quarter of 2025 (plus a few seized earlier this month), appear in the table below. There’s around 80 in total, but a few more may already be in the pipeline.

ACE/MPA – Pirate Domains Seized 2025 (Q1)

The seized domains reveal a familiar mix of movie and TV show streaming sites, live sports streaming sites, plus a small number of file-hosting and IPTV services. Nothing especially unusual, at least as far as we’re able to determine.

Some of these sites may reappear in the weeks or months ahead under existing or new branding. Others may happily throw in the towel and consider themselves lucky. Much seems to depend on the location of site operators and/or the level to which ACE has managed to strip away their anonymity.

Such matters are never discussed publicly but circumstantial evidence suggesting a lack of respect for agreements among a minority isn’t too difficult to find. Nor is it likely to be forgotten – ever.

MPA Has an Impressive Domain Collection

Finally, if success could be measured based on the volume of domain seizures alone, no other anti-piracy group in the world would come close to the haul amassed by ACE/MPA.

For the sole purpose of demonstrating the scale, the table below contains roughly 500 domains. Not all domains are instantly identifiable, so there’s a chance that a small number of non-pirate domains may have slipped through the net.

If that’s the case, refilling the gaps with pirate replacements won’t be an issue. The API used to obtain this list returned around 1,300 domains in response to a reverse WHOIS query for ‘ Motion Picture Association, Inc. ‘ of which we discarded around 200 for being general use domains not directly connected to piracy. Another API suggests the availability of considerably more; around 11,000, give or take.

Many domains need to be renewed at the end of year one, so the cost of holding them all long-term is likely to be significant.

Not for the MPA, of course, especially when compared to the billions of untapped business said to flood away each year due to the very thing the members of ACE are determined to reduce.

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

With millions of daily users, Reddit is undoubtedly one of the most visited sites on the Internet.

The community-oriented platform has “subreddits” dedicated to pretty much every topic one can think of, including several that are linked to online piracy and related issues.

As the platform continued to grow into the $17 billion company that it is today, rightsholders started to pay attention to these discussions. Eight years ago, Reddit was asked to remove ‘just’ 4,352 pieces of content, but that increased to well over a million a few years later.

Reddit Publishes Transparency Report

This week, Reddit published its latest transparency report which shows that this year-long upward trend has reversed recently. The company now receives fewer and fewer takedown requests.

The takedown surge peaked in 2023 with rightsholders asking the platform to remove more than 1.7 million pieces of content. The latest figures indicate that this number declined by roughly 50% last year to 879,645.

This is a significant drop by itself. However, it’s even more pronounced if we look at the number of requests Reddit took action on. This decreased to 550,554 items last year, compared to 1.2 million removals a year earlier.

The lower actionability rate is mostly driven by the second half of last year, where less than half of all items flagged by rightsholders were removed. This is mostly caused by duplicate reports.

The chart below ^(*) shows that Reddit also declined to take action in response to tens of thousands of reports because it didn’t find any infringement. Meanwhile, 5,573 reports failed to identify specific content and 1,721 items were suspected to be fraudulently reported.

Fair ‘AI’ Use

Reddit also declined to remove content because it deemed these to be “fair use”. The absolute number for these is very low, 360 items in the final half of last year, but the reasons provided are all the more intriguing.

For example, Reddit declined to take action in response to a notice from a major sports rightsholder because the identified clip wasn’t a full broadcast, but an AI-generated parody.

“The rightsholder for a major televised sporting event submitted a copyright takedown notice seeking the removal of a video from Reddit, and identified their copyrighted work as a full broadcast,” Reddit notes.

“The video posted to Reddit used AI to significantly transform and parody a short clip taken from the original broadcast. We declined to remove this content because we believe it makes fair use of the broadcast.”

The example provided by Reddit is unique and rare, but it indicates that the company pays attention to individual notices, including potential defenses against copyright infringement claims.

Repeat Infringers

Moving on, Reddit reports that in the second half of 2024, it banned 1,813 users for repeat copyright infringements. In addition, 181 subreddits were banned permanently for the same reason.

The number of user bans is significantly higher than the first half of the year, and for the subreddits this effect is reversed.

Looking further back, these copyright-related bans are down significantly from their 2022 peak, similar to the removals. Reddit previously banned 5,853 users in 2022, while 3,215 subreddits were taken offline that year.

It will be interesting to see if these copyright action downtrends continue in the years to come. That is certainly not a given, as is exemplified by Google’s recent copyright takedown resurgence .

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Note: ^(*) This breakdown doesn’t appear to include all reported items from noticed that were classified as invalid. We report them as they appeared in the report.

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

A trio of DMCA subpoena applications filed in the United States this week aim to extract any information held by three well-known internet companies, on potentially dozens of pirate site operators using their services.

The vast majority of the requests appear in a single DMCA subpoena targeting Cloudflare. Of the 52 main domains in that application, six also appear in another application directed at Tonic Corporation’s .to registry.

While .to domains are preferred by some operators due to the limited information requested by the registry when acquiring them, ACE/MPA file requests similar to the one below several times each year.

Six Domains Face Double Scrutiny

The final subpoena contains a single request for Zenlayer to offer up the personal details of whoever is behind the app MAGIS TV v7.1.2, which appears to serve movies direct from the company’s servers.

Stability vs. Mobility

In the DMCA subpoena above targeting Tonic, 1337x.to is easily recognized as the main domain of one of the most popular torrent sites online today, having been in use for well over a decade. The domain predates the launch of Google’s transparency report a decade ago, but since then has been targeted by at least 6.59 million URL takedown notices sent to Google alone.

For comparison, other domains mentioned in the subpoenas, including netmovies.to (2022) and 1hd.to (2023), have attracted relatively few takedown notices. Further examples, including Binged.to and Freek.to, only raised their heads above the parapet in the last quarter of 2024, and have barely received any at all.

Freek.to

That leaves freeky.to which appears to have attracted just four takedown notices – ever. As the data in the table below shows, traffic growth at some of these sites has been remarkable in the absence of significant pushback.

The data above begins in January but for Freek.to, December 2024 was an even more productive month; over 24 million visits according to SimilarWeb data, with less than 5% of its overall traffic attributed to organic search.

Time to Burn

With ACE/MPA now clearly on the case, future tactics should be interesting to watch. That being said, ACE has seen this same pattern of activity several times before. Sooner or later, the domains above will likely cease to exist, or at least, won’t present the problems they once did after their return to storage.

At that point, all eyes will be on the new rising stars of pirate streaming, having apparently appeared out of thin air but just in time to seamlessly scoop up a massive windfall of traffic.

The Rest of the Rest

Other domains listed in the DMCA subpoena include hydrahd.me, a domain that received 87.1m visits in January, 82.1m in February, and ‘just’ 54.7m in March. The domain hydrahd.cc also ‘lost’ significant traffic, falling from 2.57m in January to less than 1 million in March. Hydrahd.com started the year with 500K visits but by March had just 125K left.

Fortunately, hydrahd.ac performed significantly better; zero visits in January and February led to a healthy 21.3m in March. The reasons for the site returning an intermittent Error 451 (Unavailable for Legal Reasons) this week are currently unknown.

The rest of the domains can be found with additional data in the table below. How many will choose to self-destruct and/or hand themselves in for seamless recycling will probably become apparent in due course, at least among those with the strength, patience, and spare time to keep up.

Copies of the DMCA subpoena applications are available here ( 1 , 2 , 3 ,pdf)

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

Anna’s Archive is a meta-search engine for shadow libraries that allows users to find pirated books and other related resources.

In late 2023, the search engine Anna’s Archive expanded its offering by making data from OCLC’s proprietary WorldCat database available online.

Anna’s Archive scraped several terabytes of data over the course of a year and published roughly 700 million unique records online, for free.

These records contain no copyrighted books or articles. However, they can help to create a to-do list of all missing shadow library content on the web, with the ultimate goal of making as much content publicly available as possible.

OCLC Sued Anna’s Archive

This ‘metadata’ heist was a massive breakthrough in the quest to archive as much published content as possible online. However, OCLC responded with a lawsuit filed at an Ohio federal court, accusing the site and its operators of hacking and demanding damages.

The non-profit says that it spent more than a million dollars responding to Anna’s Archive’s alleged hacking efforts. Even then, it couldn’t prevent the data from being released through a torrent.

Following the alleged hacking efforts, OCLC attempted to identify the perpetrators. The investigation led them to Seattle resident Maria Dolores A. Matienzo, the sole named defendant in the case.

The complaint mentioned that Matienzo describes herself as an “archivist” and uses the handle “anarchivist” on social media and Github. The defendant was allegedly employed as a software engineer at an AI startup and previously worked as a catalog librarian at a direct competitor of OCLC.

Maria A. Denies Involvement

Responding to the allegations in court, Matienzo denied any involvement with Anna’s Archive.

“I am not affiliated in any way with Anna’s Archive and had no involvement in the alleged hacking and/or scraping of data from WorldCat.org that was allegedly orchestrated and carried out by Anna’s Archive,” Matienzo wrote.

In a motion to dismiss , Matienzo’s attorney wrote that there is no “shred of evidence” that links the defendant to the search engine, let alone any of the alleged hacking or scraping efforts.

As the case progressed, no other defendants were identified. OCLC moved for a default judgment against the ‘unnamed’ operators, while Matienzo’s motion to dismiss was pending. Last month, however, an Ohio federal judge slammed on the brakes .

In a detailed order, Judge Watson expressed uncertainty about the legality of large-scale data scraping under state law.

Citing this uncertainty, the judge denied OCLC’s request for default judgment against Anna’s Archive and denied Matienzo’s motion to dismiss without prejudice, pending clarification from the Supreme Court of Ohio, to which several core legal questions were referred.

Key Defendant Dropped From Lawsuit

Disappointed by the decision, OCLC asked the court to reconsider its position. It also requested the only named defendant to be dropped from the case, to focus on obtaining a final judgment against Anna’s Archive, which could help to get the associated domain names blocked.

The Ohio federal court initially denied the request over procedural issues, after which OCLC and Matienzo filed a joint motion this week, asking the court to drop the defendant from the case.

“At this juncture of the proceedings, OCLC and Matienzo have reached an agreement that Matienzo be dropped from this action. As a result, OCLC no longer seeks relief from Matienzo in this action,” the joint motion reads.

This request has yet to be approved by the court but with agreement from both sides, that’s likely just a formality. And because the defendant will be dropped ‘with prejudice’, similar claims can’t be refiled against her at a later stage.

From the public filings, it appears that OCLC has no idea who the real operators of Anna’s Archive are. There sure are plenty of archivists named Anna , but ideally, they need something more than association by name.

Instant update: The motion to dismiss Matienzo from the case was granted .

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A copy of the joint motion to drop defendant Maria Matienzo from the lawsuit, filed on Tuesday, is available here (pdf)

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

Without assurances that hosts, domain registries, registrars, DNS providers, and consumer ISPs would not be immediately held liable for internet users’ activities, investing in the growth of the early internet may have proven less attractive.

Of course, not being held immediately liable is a far cry from not being held liable at all. After years of relatively plain sailing, multiple ISPs in the United States are currently embroiled in multi-multi million dollar lawsuits for not policing infringing users. In Europe, countries including Italy and France have introduced legislation to ensure that if online services facilitate or assist piracy in any way, they can be compelled by law to help tackle it.

DNS Under Pressure

Given their critical role online, and the fact that not a single byte of infringing content has ever touched their services, some believed that DNS providers would be among the last services to be put under pressure.

After Sony sued Quad9 and wider discussions opened up soon after, in 2023 Canal+ used French law to target DNS providers . Last year, Google, Cloudflare, and Cisco were ordered to prevent their services from translating domain names into IP addresses used by dozens of sports piracy sites.

While all three companies objected, it’s understood that Cloudflare and Google eventually complied with the order. Cisco’s compliance was also achieved, albeit by its unexpected decision to suspend access to its DNS service for the whole of France and the overseas territories listed in the order.

So Long France, Goodbye Belgium

Another court order obtained by DAZN at the end of March followed a similar pattern.

Handed down by a court in Belgium, it compels the same three DNS providers to cease returning IP addresses when internet users provide the domain names of around 100 pirate sports streaming sites.

At last count those sites were linked to over 130 domain names which in its role as a search engine operator, Google was also ordered to deindex from search results.

During the evening of April 5, Belgian media reported that a major blocking campaign was underway to protect content licensed by DAZN and 12th Player, most likely football matches from Belgium’s Pro League. DAZN described the action as the “the first of its kind” and a “real step forward” in the fight against content piracy. Google and Cloudflare’s participation was not confirmed, but it seems likely that Cisco was not involved all.

In a very short statement posted to the Cisco community forum, employee tom1 announced that effective April 11, 2025, OpenDNS will no longer be accessible to users in Belgium due to a court order. The nature of the order isn’t clarified, but it almost certainly refers to the order obtained by DAZN.

Cisco’s suspension of OpenDNS in Belgium mirrors its response to a similar court order in France. Both statements were delivered without fanfare which may suggest that the company prefers not to be seen as taking a stand. In reality, Cisco’s reasons are currently unknown and that has provoked some interesting comments from users on the Cisco community forum.

Possible Motivation to Exit

Whether the rightsholders requested it, or the Judge simply thought it was appropriate, is still unclear, but the blocking order has a sting in its tail for non-compliance. Believed to be targeted at Cloudflare, Google, and Cisco – but not Belgian ISPs also required to comply with its terms – the order warns of penalties of €100,000 for each day of non-compliance. A user on Cisco’s forum felt that compliance shouldn’t be a problem.

“The court is very specific what needs to be blocked (130 pirate sports streaming domains and five illegal IPTV platforms). Blocking DNS requests based on domain categorization is at the core of the service of OpenDNS. There is nothing stating that OpenDNS should stop its services in Belgium,” Wiggum wrote .

“So why isn’t OpenDNS complying to this ruling? Instead, by pulling out of [Belgium], the Internet becomes less safe for those making use of it.”

While these are valid points, without the order being made available to the public, the definition of “non-compliance” is an unknown factor with potential to tip the scales. €100,000 per day is an awful lot of money for failing to deal with alleged copyright infringement over which the company has zero visibility.

Compliance is an Ongoing Commitment

The second and most critical factor is the assumption that blocking 130 domains is the end of Cisco’s obligations. The blocking order is dynamic, meaning that DAZN can and will add additional domains to the block list whenever that’s required. On the basis that blocking new domains quickly is the main goal of dynamic blocking, it’s at least possible that Cisco preferred an exit rather than a ruinous penalty hanging over its head.

Speculation, of course, but with no such penalties directed at the pirate sites themselves, it’s not difficult to see why being held liable may not sit well with intermediaries distant from any potential infringement.

For those who until recently were simply going about their daily business, blindly directing overwhelmingly legal internet traffic, perhaps the mandatory police uniform didn’t fit or sit well.

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

With an estimated 240 million visits during the first three months of the year, Nhentai is one of the most trafficked websites online today.

The site serves adult-oriented anime and manga, also known as hentai. These spicy Japanese comics are popular worldwide but not everyone is happy with Nhentai or its massive audience. Some rightsholders consider the site a deviant pirate operation.

California-based rightsholder PCR Distributing, which operates under brands including J18 and JAST USA, initiated action against nHentai last summer, describing the site as a significant threat to its business.

PCR initially requested a DMCA subpoena asking Cloudflare to unmask the people behind the site, claiming that they failed to process takedown notices. These subpoena requests are typically straightforward, but not in this case, as Nhentai decided to intervene in court.

Nhentai Sued by Publisher for Widespread Piracy

Facing opposition, PCR swiftly dropped the subpoena request and filed a full complaint against the site’s operators in a California federal court instead. According to the publisher, Nhentai shares copyrighted material without obtaining permission.

“[Nhentai] hosts a vast collection of hentai works, including commercially produced content, much of which, based on information and belief, is shared without proper authorization from the owners,” the complaint alleged.

Nhentai’s initial opposition, in which it countered that it had been granted permission to share content, already indicated that the site had no plans to leave these allegations uncontested. And indeed, Nhentai responded to the lawsuit and actively fought back.

Nhentai Seeks Dismissal and Anonymity

In January, Nhentai asked the court to dismiss the lawsuit in its entirety. The anonymous operators said there were several grounds for the court to end the lawsuit prematurely, including insufficient copyright registrations.

In addition, Nhentai requested a protective order to proceed in the case anonymously, at least in the early stages. Keeping personal details out of public filings, but available to the opposing attorneys, would shield them from potential retribution.

“The specific harm and prejudice to Nhentai.net is that the Plaintiff in this matter has shown particular animus toward Nhentai.net and even its counsel and taken public action accordingly,” Nhentai’s attorney wrote.

“In truth, this case has nothing to do with copyright infringement, but rather appears to be a money grab and an attempt to take over the entire domain www.nhentai.net based on knowingly meritless claims,” the defense added.

Nhentai Operators Ordered to Unveil Themselves

Nhentai’s operators asked the court to keep their personal details private, at least until the motion to dismiss had been decided. In February, however, U.S. Magistrate Judge Joel Richlin decided otherwise.

The defendants failed to provide sufficient evidence that they would be harmed by being named, the Magistrate Judge concluded. The order further noted that there’s a public interest in knowing who the operators of this popular site are.

“The focus of this case is a publicly available website alleged to receive around 79.38 million monthly visitors from the United States and around the world. Thus, the Court easily concludes that the public has a strong interest in knowing the identity of the corporate entity that operates this website and is appearing in federal court,” Judge Richlin wrote.

Nhentai objected to the ruling, but after the matter was referred to California District Court Judge Cynthia Valenzuela, the Judge arrived at the same conclusion.

“Overall, Defendant has made no showing that it is entitled to keep its identity hidden from the parties to the action, this Court, or the public, let alone a showing that the Magistrate Judge Order was clearly erroneous or contrary to law,” Judge Valenzuela wrote in her decision last week.

Dismissal Denied, Case Continues

In addition to denying the protective order, Judge Valenzuela also denied Nhentai’s motion to dismiss the copyright infringement claims.

Judge Valenzuela notes that PCR sufficiently pled that it owns valid copyrights that are being infringed by the defendant. While there may be potential shortcomings in the pleading, they don’t warrant a dismissal at this stage.

This means that the case will now move forward with all copyright infringement claims intact.

Jason Tucker, president of anti-piracy outfit Battleship Stance , which helps PCR and other companies with their legal strategies, is pleased with the outcome. He says it confirms that the defendants in these cases can’t remain anonymous.

“These rulings send a clear message: you don’t get to profit from other people’s work and stay hidden in the process. I’m glad the Court recognized that this case is about holding people accountable when they build businesses off someone else’s content.”

“That’s one of the few ways we can protect creative work and the people who make it. We’re still in the early stages, but it’s a meaningful step forward,” Tucker adds.

Both the motion to dismiss and the motion for a protective order were decided on the April 8th. The court ordered Nhentai to file a status report, disclosing the names of all defendants within three business days. A week has now passed, and as of today, no defendants appear to have been publicly named in court filings.

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A copy of Judge Cynthia Valenzuela’s order denying the motion to dismiss and the motion to strike is available here (pdf) . The order denying the motion for a protective order can be found here (pdf)

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

As debate heats up in the United States over proposed site-blocking legislation, opinions of what that might mean in practice are already beginning to emerge.

Introduced by Rep. Zoe Lofgren late January , the Foreign Anti-Digital Piracy Act (FADPA) attempts to distill well over a decade of site blocking experience amassed by U.S. rightsholders overseas, into a package carefully curated for use on home soil.

Site-Blocking Debate Returns to Polarization

Should it become law, FAPDA would allow rightsholders to obtain site blocking orders targeted at verified pirate sites, run by foreign or assumed foreign operators. The proposals as they stand today envision blocking orders that would apply to both ISPs and DNS resolvers, the latter an already controversial trend that has only recently shown momentum in Europe.

As proponents have made clear many times over the past 15 years or so, to remain effective site-blocking must continuously adapt. That necessarily means that the FADPA proposals on the table today are the starting point for U.S. site-blocking. For those advocating in favor of FADPA, especially as a highly predictable framework with guardrails for safety, the inherent need to adapt and expand presents challenges for longer-term assurances.

No Wild Predictions Required, Europe Holds the Answers

Unlike the SOPA debate in 2012, where wild predictions one way or another had no clear historical basis, today there is a deep well of information to draw from, much of it the result of U.S. rightsholders’ implementation of site-blocking in Europe. As such, events there should be considered informative.

Established four years ago , Germany operates an administrative site blocking regime which requires no direct legal oversight. A partnership between rightsholders and local ISPs saw the launch of the “Clearing Body for Copyright on the Internet” (CUII) which is now responsible for handing down blocking instructions against sites that structurally infringe copyright.

Recommendations for blocking are published on the CUII website, along with redacted reports explaining investigators’ findings. The image below shows all recommendations for blocking since the program began.

This level of transparency is already a step up from broadly equivalent schemes seen elsewhere in Europe. However, in common with many of its counterparts elsewhere, the domains subsequently nominated by rightsholders and then blocked by ISPs are on a confidential list to which the public has no access. Or at least, that was the original plan.

Confidential Block List Exposed By ISP

A Netzpolitik report published last week revealed that Germany’s secret site-blocking list had been publicly available for at least 10 months via the URL rpz01do.versatel-west.de. Accidentally made available by ISP 1&1 Versatel, the URL let visitors see every domain blocked by local ISPs, enabling them to see how the list changed over time following numerous updates.

While the CUII website lists 24 platforms for blocking, at last count the exposed list contained well over ten times more domains/subdomains, over 300 in total. For perspective, Germany’s site-blocking program is very modest when compared to schemes in the UK, France, Italy, and Spain, for example, where thousands of sites are blocked with information on domains mostly restricted.

Last year we reported on the work of Damian, a then-17-year-old in Germany who lifted the veil of secrecy on the scale of domain blocking via the site cuiiliste.de .

“CUII is a private organization that blocks websites that it believes violate copyright law – without any court orders. In addition, their approach seems very non-transparent in my opinion,” Damian said.

Damian and others working on the project used various DNS-based techniques to establish which domains were blocked in Germany. However, he informs Netzpolitik that access to the ‘leaked’ master list helped to confirm that all blocked domains were present on the cuiliste.de site, something that can longer be guaranteed.

That’s because, predictably, as soon as 1&1 Versatel discovered its accidental transparency, measures were swiftly taken to ensure the list was hidden away as originally intended.

Site-Blocking = Censorship?

A pro-FADPA article published late last week by the Information Technology & Innovation Foundation put forward reasons ‘Why the US Should Block Piracy’. One of a series of articles with a similar theme over the last few years, the piece describes site-blocking as “a no-brainer” and U.S. policy as having “international precedent.”

The crux of the piece dismisses concerns that FADPA could be used as a tool for censorship, and rejects the notion that the “one sided process” through which orders are obtained are “fundamentally flawed.” These are entrenched positions that have closed very little over the last 12+ years and will undoubtedly continue to rage as the months unfold.

“[W]hen policymakers propose reasonable, legally sound tools to stop [piracy], critics respond with hyperbole, misdirection, and scare tactics,” the piece adds, a claim that has been utilized by both sides, if any at all.

No Censorship Where There’s Transparency

Claims of censorship often depend on the context and the FADPA proposals in the U.S. will need to address those claims at some point, whether justified or not. However, while censorship and transparency have some similarities, the latter may deserve more attention.

Proposals in the U.S. suggest a system not dissimilar to those operating in Europe, with and without involvement of the courts. An initial blocking order against a platform will be made available to the public, but since those orders are likely to be flexible (‘dynamic’ in site-blocking parlance), permission will be granted to block additional resources without returning to court.

Following the clear pattern on display in Europe, whatever rightsholders and ISPs agree to block privately, will be blocked, and if there is no transparency requirement, none will be forthcoming.

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

Tech companies are racing to build the most powerful Artificial Intelligence (AI) but how these systems are trained is now mired in controversy.

Many major tech firms allegedly used huge amounts of copyrighted material to train their AI, without obtaining permission from rightsholders. This has triggered a series of copyright infringement lawsuits.

Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, is one of the companies being sued. Well-known book authors, including Richard Kadrey, Sarah Silverman, and Christopher Golden, previously filed a class-action lawsuit against the company.

This lawsuit has a clear piracy angle, as Meta used BitTorrent to download archives of pirated books to use as training material for its Llama models.

Notably, the authors argued that, in addition to downloading pirated books from Anna’s Archive, Z-Library and other sources, Meta uploaded pirated books to third parties in the process.

Last month, both parties filed motions for summary judgment. Meta’s motion relied heavily on a fair use defense. Meanwhile, the authors argued that the downloading of millions of books cannot be classified as fair use, since the source of the books is clearly copyright-infringing.

Law Professors Back Both Sides

Given the high stakes, the motions for summary judgment attracted interest from various third parties. Through amicus brief filings, these groups are asking the court to consider their perspectives. Previously, several law professors backed Meta, for example, arguing that training AI using ‘pirated’ content might be fair use .

Not all law professors agree with this conclusion, however, as highlighted in a new amicus brief from another group of law professors. This “friend of the court” brief, submitted last Friday, clearly backs the authors.

These law professors, who don’t address the BitTorrent-specific allegations, believe that using copyrighted books to train AI is not fair use.

“Meta’s claim that its unauthorized copying of plaintiffs’ works to train its large language models is fair use is a breathtaking request for greater legal privileges than courts have ever granted human authors. It should be rejected,” they write.

Using copyrighted works without permission might be considered ‘fair use’ if the use creates a new and transformative product. However, the law professors don’t believe that’s the case here.

Instead, they see the AI end product as a commercial tool that has a similar purpose to the books it is trained on; namely, to educate people.

“The use of copyrighted works to train generative models is not ‘transformative,’ because using works for that purpose is not relevantly different from using them to educate human authors, which is a principal original purpose of all of plaintiffs’ works,” the professors state.

“That training use is also not ‘transformative’ because its purpose is to enable the creation of works that compete with the copied works in the same markets – a purpose that, when pursued by a for-profit company like Meta, also makes the use undeniably ‘commercial’.”

In their 19-page brief, the professors dispute Meta’s fair use defense by analyzing several relevant factors. They ultimately conclude that these factors weigh “conclusively” against a finding of fair use.

Publishers Highlight Brazen Widespread Piracy

The book authors also receive support from other third parties, including The International Association of Scientific, Technical and Medical Publishers ( STM ), which also submitted an amicus curiae brief last Friday.

The publishers’ brief highlights the shadow libraries that Meta allegedly used to source some of its training materials. These include Z-Library, Library Genesis and Anna’s Archive, which have all been subject to legal problems of their own; such as the criminal prosecution of two alleged Z-Library operators.

“The illegal websites that Meta used to purloin a trove of copyrighted works have been the repeated subject of enforcement,” the publishers’ brief reads.

“Collectively, they have been found by multiple courts to be illegal and against the public interest; investigated by the FBI and the U.S. Department of Justice, including for potential espionage; had their domains shut down; and had their operators arrested.”

Meta previously argued that its alleged use of copyrighted books as training inputs could be seen as fair use, regardless of the source of the data. However, STM sees this differently. They say that the “use of stolen content matters.”

The brief urges the court to consider these pirate sources, not only regarding the direct copyright infringement claim, but also when determining fair use for the AI training.

“Meta knowingly copied and distributed a shocking amount of infringing material from the world’s most notorious infringing websites to serve its commercial ends. Meta’s brazen acts of infringement, unprecedented in the annals of copyright law, must be considered in the context of fair use and should weigh heavily against it,” the publishers conclude.

The publishers’ position doesn’t come as a surprise, as they are directly impacted by the legal debate over AI training data. However, the fact that law professors can have vastly different opinions on the fair use analysis, shows that this isn’t an easy matter to resolve in court.

And given the stakes at play, these and other AI-related fair-use questions could very well end up at the Supreme Court in a few years.

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A copy of the Amicus Curiae brief from the Law Professors is available here (pdf) , and the brief from the International Association of Scientific, Technical and Medical Publishers can be found here (pdf)

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