The frontline of online piracy liability keeps moving, and core internet infrastructure providers are increasingly finding themselves in the crosshairs.

In a significant ruling last week, the Paris Judicial Tribunal ordered Cloudflare to actively block access to pirate MotoGP streams, confirming that third-party intermediaries can be required to take responsibility.

The ruling follows a complaint from French entertainment powerhouse Société d’Edition de Canal Plus ( SECP ), which holds the rights to various sports broadcasts. In this case, the proceeding was filed to protect its interests in MotoGP events, which started a new season last month.

DNS Resolvers are Liable

The reasoning behind the blocking request is similar to a previous blocking order , which also targeted OpenDNS and Google DNS. It is grounded in Article L. 333-10 of the French Sports Code, which empowers rightsholders to seek court orders against any outfit that can help to stop ‘serious and repeated’ sports piracy.

This time, SECP’s demands are broader than DNS blocking alone. The rightsholder also requested blocking measures across Cloudflare’s other services, including its CDN and proxy services.

The legal paperwork cites 14 domain names, including motogpstream.me and livestreamhd247.live, but doesn’t stop there. SECP also pushed for dynamic blocking, asking Cloudflare to act against future infringing sites identified by French media regulator, ARCOM.

Cloudflare’s Failed Defense

Cloudflare put up a defense, arguing that unlike traditional ISPs, it isn’t the kind of intermediary that’s targeted by Article L. 333-10. The company said that its DNS, CDN, and reverse proxy services don’t “transmit” infringing content in the way envisioned by the law. Instead, they merely route traffic or cache content passively, so strict policing obligations are not appropriate.

Cloudflare also attacked the proportionality and effectiveness of the requested measures. For example, it said that DNS blocking would affect a “negligible” number of users and could be easily bypassed by VPNs or other DNS resolvers, rendering these restrictions futile.

Cloudflare also warned that due to technical challenges, it could be difficult to accurately geo-restrict blocking measures to France, introducing a new risk of global collateral damage.

Court Dismisses Pushback, Orders Blocking Measures

None of these defenses convinced the Paris court, which rejected all of Cloudflare’s arguments. For example, it disregarded the “passive” vs. “active” distinction, concluding that intermediaries such as Cloudflare play an integral role in accessing pirate streams. As a result, the company is required to block this content.

The potentially limited effect of the blocking order didn’t change the court’s view either. While Cloudflare’s blocking won’t put an end to piracy, it will have an impact, even if some people bypass the proposed blocking measures.

All in all, the Paris Court ordered Cloudflare to comply and block the listed pirate site domains within three days. The blockades should stay in place for the remainder of the 2025 MotoGP season, across all relevant services.

Future Pirate Site Domains are Covered

The order was issued last week and Cloudflare has already implemented it, with the court allowing Cloudflare to adopt its own technical measures. Visiting the blocked domain names from France will now result in an HTTP 451 error, indicating that they are now unavailable for legal reasons .

Interestingly, the blockades may not stop at the 14 domain names mentioned in the original complaint. The ‘dynamic’ order allows SECP to request additional blockades from Cloudflare, if future pirate sites are flagged by French media regulator, ARCOM. Refusal to comply could see Cloudflare incur a €5,000 daily fine per site.

“[Cloudflare is ordered to implement] all measures likely to prevent, until the date of the last race in the MotoGP season 2025, currently set for November 16, 2025, access to the sites identified above, as well as to sites not yet identified at the date of the present decision,” the order reads.

This latest French ruling is part of broader efforts by rightsholders to co-opt core internet infrastructure into their enforcement efforts. Mandatory blocking requirements, once largely confined to ISPs, are now gradually expanding to other intermediaries. The expansion is not just a French or European phenomenon; a proposed U.S. site blocking bill also envisions a key role for DNS resolvers.

—

A copy of the Paris Court order, issued on March 28, 2025, is available here (pdf)

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

When rightsholders feel that conditions are optimal, site-blocking measures are presented to countries as a proportionate, precise, and entirely reasonable response to rampant piracy.

Should there be a need for new legislation, care should be taken to provide room for rightsholders to maneuver, to ensure that adaptive pirates are placed under maximum continuous pressure.

Under intense pressure itself by an impatient United States demanding that piracy needed to be taken more seriously, Spain spent years doing just that. The success story includes over a decade of site-blocking that generated zero controversy.

Piracy blocking applications even appeared to decline in 2024 . A far cry from the days when a call-out on the USTR’s Priority Watch List seemed inevitable, but still light years adrift from the disaster playing out in Spain since February.

With Great Power Comes….Massive Blocking

In 2022 LaLiga and Telefonica, owner of broadcaster Movistar, found room for legal maneuver. Understandably frustrated that their premium live sports broadcasts were instantly pirated, the companies convinced a court that rapid, dynamic blocking would be a proportionate response to IPTV piracy.

These blocking orders presented new problems. The crisis currently playing out in Spain shows how easily circumvented technical restrictions can be rendered almost useless. This, in turn, triggered a disproportionate response leading to substantial collateral damage.

When enhanced privacy features at Cloudflare undermined blocking , the power of a new court order issued last December allowed LaLiga to block Cloudfare itself and by default, many thousands of innocent Cloudflare customers.

Block and Awe

After a court rejected appeals by Cloudflare and hacker collective RootedCON in March, LaLiga now appears to be blocking whatever it needs to block to get the job done. And it’s a big job, as updates from sysadmin @jaumepons on X reveal.

300 of 12382 domains behind 1 IP address

According to @jaumepons , Cloudflare IP addresses are currently being blocked by LaLiga at the rate of 3,000 every week. For perspective, Italy’s Piracy Shield caused uproar when it blocked less than a handful.

Each IP address serves thousands of innocent Cloudflare customers and whichever pirate streaming service happens to be taking cover among them.

Despite having no links to pirate sites, the number of domains said to be affected by IP address-based blocking appears to be disproportionate to the stated aim. The claim that many newspapers have been caught up in the dragnet is concerning; the claim below is more disconcerting than anything else.

????

Unsolicited Press Release

While we’re generally averse to parroting press releases without broader context, a communication received late Wednesday piqued our interest and then proved unusually puzzling. The author is the Spanish non-profit DigitalES and at the time of writing the release doesn’t appear on the group’s website . Its intentions, however, are made clear right off the bat:

DigitalES, the Spanish Association for Digitalization and the employers’ association for the telecommunications, technology, and digital innovation sectors, is calling for the cooperation of all Internet intermediaries to ensure compliance with the court order requiring the blocking of resources linked to pirated audiovisual content.

—-snip—-

This court ruling is based on the material impossibility of implementing DNS-level blocking as a measure against online piracy. The main reason is that websites with illegal content and the intermediary companies that connect them to the internet employ various techniques (such as ECH or Relay) to change their IP addresses and circumvent these restrictions. Therefore, the most viable solution is considered to be either directly blocking the IP addresses associated with pirated content, or a combined strategy that includes blocking domains, URLs, and IP addresses .

Despite the agreement reached with most of these web traffic intermediaries to implement this solution, some services are not implementing the court order.

Whether the overblocking situation is linked to lacking implementation at some providers isn’t clear. In fact, the press release doesn’t mention overblocking at all; it notes the failed legal actions by Cloudflare and RootedCON but says nothing about the controversial events that triggered them.

Other Relevant Details

It may be a coincidence that Telefonica, Vodafone, MásOrange, and DIGI, are directly linked to the blocking action in Spain, while also being members of DigitalES. That no mention is made of these companies in the DigitalES press release might be an oversight, but with vested interests in how the current situation plays out, a few extra details of their involvement may prove informative.

The blocking injunction obtained last December was a joint effort by LaLiga and Telefónica Audiovisual Digital (TAD), which operates the Telefonica-owned subscription digital TV platform known as Movistar Plus+. In January it was reported that Telefonica had retained the domestic rights to broadcast LaLiga matches until the end of 2026/27 season, in a deal worth €1.29bn (US$1.43bn).

The injunction protects this investment by providing the legal basis for blocking measures at four named ISPs;

• MásOrange: Operator of brands including Orange, Yoigo, Jazztel, Masmovil, Simyo, Pepephone, Lebara, Lyca, Llamaya, and Euskaltel. An agreement between Orange and Telefonica-owned Movistar and DAZN secured broadcasting rights for LaLiga matches.
• Vodafone: LaLiga matches are available on Vodafone TV through a deal with DAZN
• DIGI: Romanian telco sells access to LaLiga matches via its DIGI TV platform in Spain
• Movistar: Telefonica-owned telco (LaLiga shown on Movistar+)

The process through which blocking injunctions are obtained is typically non-adversarial . Ultimately signed-off by a judge, ISPs are indeed compelled to implement piracy blocking measures, albeit under pre-arranged terms to which they all agreed.

The theory is straightforward. LaLiga/Telefonica monitor the internet for pirate streams and send their IP addresses to the ISPs. Once the ISPs add those IP addressees to their internal blacklists, their own customers watching those streams can no longer do so.

The companies believe that with enough disruption, pirates will decide to go legal. How well that’s going right is unclear. The massive overblocking of Cloudflare denies access to legitimate platforms for pirates and non-pirates alike.

A Surprise Intervention

According to RootedCON, Vodafone surprised by intervening in its case .

One of the most controversial points in the development of the case has been Vodafone’s intervention: before the judge made a decision, it appeared to reject RootedCON’s presence in the legal process. The operator maintained, now with the support of the judge, that the only ones entitled to challenge the ruling were the operators that were sued at the time by LaLiga and Telefónica.

However, they themselves have not filed their own request for annulment. “What Vodafone is effectively saying is that operators are happy to be forced to block.”

And as distributors of LaLiga content, purchased at considerable expense, that makes complete sense. As internet service providers knowingly blocking legitimate resources and their own non-pirating customers? Not so much.

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

More than a decade ago, Mojang Studios announced that it was working on a Minecraft movie together with Warner Bros.

The film had been scheduled for a 2022 release, but was delayed due to the COVID-19 pandemic among other factors.

Today, ‘ A Minecraft Movie ‘ will finally see its American box office premiere. While it’s too early to say whether it will be a blockbuster hit, the film already has the dubious honor of being linked to an extremely rare event; the leak of an unfinished copy of the movie which is now circulating on pirate sites.

It’s not uncommon for popular films to leak online during their theatrical windows. Pirated copies often appear as ‘cam’ or ‘telesync’ releases; both are recorded directly from cinema screens, with the latter’s direct audio the main difference. The Minecraft film is already available online in these formats, seemingly originating from countries where the film has already premiered, as the Ukrainian and French dubs suggest.

‘Workprint’ leak

Circulating alongside these typical pirate releases is a much more unusual leak; an unfinished workprint copy of the movie with its CGI at least partially missing. The copy has an English audio track and is clearly associated with a source with direct links to the movie production chain.

The differences between the unfinished and finished copies are obvious, as the examples below show.

While Minecraft is not known for its real-life imagery, the final product – as shown in other leaked releases – is definitely more polished.

For anyone seriously interested in enjoying movies, these low-quality pirated copies are unwatchable. And that’s on top of the usual legal concerns associated with pirating movies.

Warner Bros. Takedowns

Poor quality or not, Warner Bros. will do whatever it can to limit the spread of these early leaks. The movie studio has sent out several DMCA takedown requests already, including the one below received by Google yesterday.

The notice above contains various links to sites that posted copies of the leaked film, including cammed versions and the workprint. This list of links is just the tip of the iceberg, as the film is circulating across hundreds of websites now.

The unfinished leak isn’t expected to keep many people away from movie theaters, but it does raise another concern. How was it possible for a workprint to leak and then offered to the public for download? Could it even happen again?

The Wolverine Workprint

These are questions that have to be answered and given what’s at stake, the FBI may be involved already. The same happened when a workprint copy of X-Men Origins: Wolverine leaked in 2009.

The FBI eventually identified Gilberto Sanchez, a glass installer and musician from The Bronx, as a suspect. Sanchez had uploaded the film to Megaupload and pleaded guilty, resulting in a 12-month prison sentence.

Sanchez has always denied being the source of the workprint leak, however, insisting that he purchased a bootleg DVD of the workprint for $5 on the street in New York. The post-production studio from where the workprint copy leaked was never named.

Whether this time will be different is unknown, but the Wolverine case shows that those further down the ‘leak’ chain are far from safe when the stakes are high.

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

After a decade of focusing efforts overseas, the push for website blocking has landed back on American shores.

The fierce backlash against SOPA effectively shelved domestic site blocking initiatives in the U.S., but that hesitation appears to have evaporated.

With Representative Zoe Lofgren’s introduction of the Foreign Anti-Digital Piracy Act ( FADPA ) in February, the controversial mechanism of court-ordered blocking against foreign ‘pirate’ sites is no longer just a foreign issue; on The Hill it’s a hot topic once again.

Should the proposal become law, FADPA would enable rightsholders to restrict access to verified pirate sites, run by foreign operators. Site blocking orders would apply to both Internet providers and public DNS resolvers.

Lofgren’s bill received broad support from rightsholders and other lawmakers are showing interest as well. According to reports, U.S. Rep. Darrell Issa is working on a second site blocking bill , which could increase political momentum.

EFF: Site Blocking is a Terrible Idea

When U.S. site blocking legislation was first introduced fourteen years ago, these measures were still a novelty. Since then, however, dozens of countries have implemented formal blocking procedures, some more strict than others.

That doesn’t mean that site blocking lacks opposition. In the United States, the Electronic Frontier Foundation ( EFF ) says it will fight back against the renewed push in favor of blocking, decrying the proposals as a “terrible idea”.

“These new proposals would let rights holders get federal court orders forcing ISPs and DNS providers to block entire websites based on accusations of infringing copyright. Lawmakers claim they’re targeting “pirate” sites—but what they’re really doing is building an internet kill switch,” EFF’s Joe Mullin writes.

The EFF sees the site blocking proposals as a threat to the free and open internet. This critique is grounded in the risk that legitimate sites could find themselves blocked as collateral damage if they share IP-addresses or hosting with pirate sites.

These concerns are not hypothetical. Recent events have shown that site blocking measures still affect legitimate sites, such as when Google Drive and Cloudflare-linked sites were taken offline in response to Italian blocking demands.

Site Blocking Doesn’t Work

According to EFF, site blocking is both “dangerously blunt” and “trivially easy to evade”. People can use VPN services to evade blocking measures, for example, or switch to alternative DNS resolvers that are not subject to blocking restrictions.

The group doesn’t see site blocking as an effective tool to curb piracy, but as a broader effort to institute a censorship regime.

“Site-blocking legislation is an attempt to build a new American censorship system by letting private actors get dangerous infrastructure-level control over internet access,” Mullin warns .

At this stage, little is known about the technical implementation of the proposed site blocking efforts. Rightsholders know that it’s not going to solve their piracy problem, but they argue that it’s better than doing nothing.

Reviving the U.S. Site Blocking Protests

Pushback against the site blocking proposals was expected, but it will be difficult to equal the massive opposition against SOPA in 2012, which turned into a global Internet protest .

EFF is committed nonetheless and Mullin gladly reminds lawmakers of this ghost of the past .

“The question is whether lawmakers remember what happened the last time they tried to mess with the foundations of the open web. If they don’t, they’re going to find out the hard way. Again,” he says.

“Site-blocking laws are dangerous, unnecessary, and ineffective. Lawmakers need to hear—loud and clear—that Americans don’t support government-mandated internet censorship. Not for copyright enforcement. Not for anything.”

Similar to thirteen years ago, EFF has set up a dedicated page inviting members of the public to reach out to their representative in Congress, to share any concerns they may have.

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

Released in 2013, The Pirate Bay documentary TPB-AFK offers insight into a pivotal moment in Internet history.

Created by Simon Klose, the film follows three Pirate Bay founders during their trial in Sweden. True to the nature of the site, it was made widely available online for free.

People could still buy copies or support the film directly, but those who didn’t want to spend a dime could grab a copy though torrent sites, including The Pirate Bay, or stream it on YouTube. The Creative Commons ( CC BY-NC-SA ) license even allowed fans to share their own copies with others.

“You don’t need permission to copy and share my film. But you can’t make money off it,” Klose explained at the time. “By using a Creative Commons license, I am making it legal for the audience to copy and share the film.”

2013: Copies Taken Down by Hollywood

Soon after the premiere, hundreds of copies of the documentary started to surface online, resulting in millions of views. While this was good news for the director, it also caused controversy.

In the months following the release, several Hollywood studios including HBO, Paramount, Fox and Lionsgate, sent DMCA notices to Google, asking the search giant to remove links to the documentary. In most cases the requests were honored.

It wasn’t clear whether the takedowns were sent in error, or if it was a targeted attack on the Pirate Bay documentary. Whatever the case, the unwarranted censorship outraged the director.

After the erroneous takedowns were highlighted in the news, Google eventually reached out offering to set the record straight by reinstating the removed links. But not before teaching a valuable lesson about copyright power dynamics.

“To me, it’s a depressive lesson that Google rather acts as a private proxy for dinosaur copyright enforcement than helping indie filmmakers experiment with sustainable distribution models,” Klose said in 2013.

Takedowns Remove TPB-AFK copies from YouTube

With this backstory in mind, it came as a surprise to learn that copies of the TPB-AFK documentary were removed from YouTube recently. This includes the official release posted on the TPBAFK YouTube channel that was embedded across hundreds of websites.

“This video is no longer available due to a copyright claim by Nonami Docs,” YouTube’s message reads.

Nonami Docs isn’t some Hollywood adversary with a Pirate Bay grudge. On the contrary, it’s linked to Simon Klose, who used it to remove copies of his own documentary from YouTube. That also includes uploads by third-parties.

Peter, who runs the anarchi.st YouTube channel, is one of the people who was hit by a takedown notice. The channel shares films relating to class struggle without running advertisements on them, in line with TPB-AFK’s Creative Commons license, but was removed nonetheless.

“You can imagine my surprise when my channel got a copyright strike because Simon Klose wanted the film removed from YouTube. It is difficult to imagine a more ironic copyright action,” Peter tells us.

The channel owner confirmed that the notice did indeed come from the TPB-AFK director but opted not to file a counter notice as he could do without the added stress. Nonetheless, he was puzzled by the takedown. And he’s not the only one.

Klose Sees YouTube as a Radicalizing Platform

Creative Commons licenses are typically considered irrevocable, which makes the takedown all the more questionable. However, it turns out that Klose hasn’t had a change of heart when it comes to copyright, his actions are targeted at YouTube specifically.

The director informs us that he did indeed remove the film from YouTube. This is not a copyright issue. He simply doesn’t want TPB-AFK to be present on Google’s streaming platform any longer.

“I’ve taken it off YouTube, because I think YouTube has become a radicalizing platform full of hate, and I don’t want my film there anymore. It’s still available on torrent sites,” Klose says.

The director didn’t add any further background but pointed us to his latest film, “ Hacking Hate “, which discusses in detail how social media platforms and YouTube are used as a tool to proliferate extreme content while profiting from it.

While it’s clear that Klose has changed his mind about YouTube rather than copyright, one can question whether copyright takedowns are the right way to enforce this. Especially when people are technically allowed to share the film.

The removals could be a good strategy to put a spotlight on the “Hacking Hate” documentary, but since Klose never sought public attention for the removals, his actions seem more intrinsically motivated.

It’s not clear how many instances of the documentary were removed from YouTube, but many copies of TPB-AFK are still available on the platform at the time of writing. Whether the uploaders of these copies filed counter-notices or were simply not targeted is unclear.

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

As the most prolific copyright litigant in the United States, adult entertainment company Strike 3 Holdings has filed over 15,000 lawsuits in federal courts.

These lawsuits target people whose Internet connections were allegedly used to download and share copyright-infringing content via BitTorrent.

Many of these cases result in confidential settlements or are quietly dismissed and never heard of again. A tiny percentage proceed to a full contest in court, while the remaining cases are simply ignored by defendants.

From a legal standpoint, failing to respond to a lawsuit, regardless of the validity of the claims, is the worst option. Not putting up a defense allows the claiming party to move for a default judgment where the court, because it only hears one side of the case, may find it easier to agree with the claiming party.

Strike 3 Strikes Gold

Strike 3 has obtained dozens, if not hundreds of default judgments and this week appears to have struck gold in a Georgia federal court. In three separate cases, U.S. District Judge Steven Grimberg awarded default judgments in favor of the adult entertainment company.

These uncontested cases are fairly straightforward. After filing complaints against John Does initially identified only by their IP-addresses, Strike 3 obtained subpoenas to obtain associated subscriber data from their ISPs.

These named defendants, who allegedly shared dozens of pirated films each via BitTorrent, were then served and asked to appear in court. The defendants in all cases failed to make an appearance, after which Strike 3 requested default judgments based on the following details.

– Defendant A. Salomon shared 130 copyrighted works without permission
– Defendant H. Alexander shared 115 copyrighted works without permission
– Defendant K. Forbes shared 35 copyrighted works without permission

Under U.S. Copyright Law, statutory damages for willful copyright infringement can reach $150,000 per infringed work. That could’ve resulted in almost $20 million in damages for defendant Salomon and more than $5 million for Forbes. However, Strike 3 opted for a more “reasonable” request.

Strike 3’s motion for default judgment requested damages of $750 per work, the statutory minimum for non-willful infringement.

“Defendant infringed 130 of Plaintiff’s Works, which therefore equates to $97,500. Thus, the recovery sought has been reduced to the absolute minimum and is reasonable,” the company argued.

Court Issues Default Judgments

After reviewing the paperwork and Strike 3’s self-proclaimed ‘reasonable’ damages requests, Judge Steven Grimberg granted all three default judgments this week.

The three judgments are part of a consolidated docket and use a nearly identical template. The only differences are the personal details, the number of infringed works, and the related damages amount. For Salomon, this results in $97,500 of owed damages, while Alexander and Forbes must pay $86,250 and $26,250 respectively.

In addition to the damages, Judge Grimberg also issued a permanent injunction, ordering the defendants to stop pirating Strike 3’s works and destroy all copies still in their possession.

These types of lawsuits are so common by now that they rarely make headlines anymore. However, this week’s substantial judgments show that they can have real consequences.

Strike 3 filed nearly 4,000 complaints last year, so these three cases represent a tiny fraction. Given the potential reward, however, it’s understandable that the company continues down this path.

For anyone involved in one of these cases, innocent or not, the defaults serve as a reminder that legal paperwork should not be ignored. And if defendants are innocent, history has shown that it can be worth putting up a serious defense.

—

Copies of the three default judgments issues by U.S. District Judge Steven Grimberg are available here ( 1 , 2 , 3 ).

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

Lawsuits filed to address infringement can also play a key role as part of a wider deterrent messaging campaign. In the online arena inhabited by millions of pirates, dual-purpose lawsuits are especially common.

Even for Nintendo, suing every infringer isn’t just impractical. Negative exposure in the media has direct implications for image and branding. Additional risk of polluting or even displacing otherwise positive articles, could jeopardize what amounts to free advertising worth millions of dollars.

A deterrent message delivered on the back of the right case, however, could reach its target audience using the same means, with relatively few downsides. If the company had something similar in mind, a Nintendo lawsuit filed in November seems an almost perfect fit.

Targeting Jesse Keighin, aka EveryGameGuru, the lawsuit poses little risk to Nintendo’s image. It compresses many types of infringing and unlicensed activity into a single case, one so overwhelming in scope that resistance is likely to prove futile. Yet this complaint seems to offer more than just an easy win; on the deterrent front, it may offer something for everyone.

A Message For Gamers Everywhere?

Whether by pure coincidence or meticulous design, each type of offending alleged in the complaint relates to fairly common individual acts that, in isolation, millions of gamers will be familiar with already. The defendant’s potential downfall could send a message to pirates and emulator gamers everywhere: relatively minor individual acts can have serious consequences.

Live-streaming footage of games before their official release is a zero-tolerance issue for Nintendo, for example. Streaming is described in the complaint as the unauthorized public performance and reproduction of Nintendo’s copyrighted works. Live-streaming footage of any Nintendo game, regardless of date of release, using an illegal Switch emulator, is described as a violation of the company’s rights for exactly the same reason.

For those who enjoy sending links to friends or internet strangers, for the purposes of signposting locations where illegal emulators and/or ROMS can be downloaded, Nintendo alleges acts of inducement and contributory infringement. Sharing tiny files such as those carrying encryption keys, amounts to trafficking in circumvention devices under the DMCA.

As alleged, Keighin’s conduct was obviously much more serious than that of the average Joe. However, since relatively few gamers will be interested enough to soak up the details, any deterrent message – should Nintendo intend to send one – could end up especially broad.

That Keighin was a prolific streamer on YouTube, Discord, Twitch, TikTok, Trovo, Kick, Vaughn, Dlive, Picarto, Nimo, Facebook, and Loco, ensures social media reach with serious potential, although maybe not for a while.

Transforming a Dire Legal Position Into Something Worse

In an email dated November 8, notifying Keighin that a complaint had been filed at a court in Colorado, Nintendo expressed concern over evidence preservation, noting that things may have already gone off track.

“We have observed that, since filing of Nintendo’s litigation, you have begun deleting content you posted online, including content referenced in the Complaint. I write to remind you of your duty to preserve such evidence. Upon commencement of a litigation, litigants have a duty to preserve evidence relevant to the case,” the email reads.

“Please immediately confirm whether you have maintained copies of everything you have already deleted and that you will comply with your preservation obligations.”

Having received no such confirmation, a subsequent Nintendo email informed Keighin that efforts to serve him in person had failed multiple times already.

“We have been attempting to serve you with the summons and complaint (attached) for the above-captioned matter for multiple days, but after attempting several addresses, we have been unable to serve you personally. We believe you may be evading service. Indeed, we are aware that you have stated publicly that you are aware of this lawsuit,” the email reads.

Nintendo Not Thrilled By the Chase

In case the gamer preferred to waive formal service of the summons and complaint, Nintendo provided the necessary paperwork and offered to take care of everything upon receipt of a signature. Worth a shot, perhaps, but unlikely to succeed in light of Keighin’s response posted to X.

Court records reveal a number of failed attempts to serve the defendant at various addresses. One of those addresses appeared in five DMCA counternotices sent by Keighin, to reinstate content taken down by Nintendo DMCA notices.

An email sent to Nintendo on October 24, in connection with the suspension of an account for copyright infringement, suggested that further channel suspensions wouldn’t be effective.

According to Nintendo, it’s possible that preparations to avoid being served involved outside assistance. At various addresses, process servers found family members but no physical trace of the defendant.

To support its claim, Nintendo provided a screenshot of a Facebook post; it limited who could respond, but not who could view.

Fueling the Fire

Other evidence to show that Keighin knew about the lawsuit appears in a screenshot of a brief encounter with a 9news journalist hoping for a story. A Facebook post that used profanity to declare zero interest in the case, allegedly addressed a colleague at law firm Jenner & Block LLP using the word “BITCH”.

A friend’s post on X, suggesting that Keighin should fight the “legendary” lawsuit in court dressed as Mario, carried less weight than Keighin’s own posts three days later. They reveal a plan to “piss Nintendo off” by causing the company to waste “a ton of money” on legal fees, before ensuring that “Nintendo gets nothing” after waving “Bowser’s Bankruptcy Magic Wand.”

In his posts on social media, Keighin says that “he’s making sure there’s no precedence [sic] set here” and at minimum expects to “go down in video game history.”

The Nintendo lawsuit filed against Yuzu last year concluded with a win for the gaming company, minus any attempt to have the case settled on the merits, let alone set some type of precedent. Going down in video game history could go either way.

As the person who gifted Nintendo more than they ever imagined, in what is likely to be an uncontested default judgment, history may quickly forget. That Nintendo will emerge without even a scratch, having easily maintained the usually tricky moral high ground, is indeed one for the history books. Maybe even worthy of a memorable quote.

“Should have done more research on me,” Keighin warned Nintendo’s legal team.

“You might run a corporation. I run the streets.”

The complaint and subsequent filings are available here

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

Development of AI continues to progress at a rapid pace. This includes work on large language models (LLMs), which are typically trained on broad datasets of texts.

These technologies promise unparalleled progress which could benefit society as a whole. Yet despite widely recognized potential, areas of significant concern remain.

That many LLMs were trained on datasets containing copyrighted content is now widely known. This has led to numerous complaints and high-profile lawsuits, with companies like OpenAI , Google, Meta , Microsoft, and NVIDIA facing allegations of copyright infringement.

The courts will ultimately decide whether rightsholders have legitimate copyright claims, or whether technology companies can indeed rely on a ‘fair use’ defense. It will likely take many years before a final decision is reached so until then, rightsholders are doing all they can to prevent future infringements.

Books3

The Books3 dataset, used to train many popular LLMs, initially attracted significant attention. The dataset was compiled by AI researcher Shawn Presser in 2020, using the library of ‘pirate’ site Bibliotik.

Books3 was widely shared online and incorporated into other databases, including ‘The Pile,’ an AI training dataset compiled by EleutherAI. This practice remained largely unchallenged for years, but when AI entered the mainstream, copyright complaints surged.

Due to pressure from rightsholders and anti-piracy groups, Books3 was removed from numerous online platforms over copyright concerns. Danish anti-piracy group Rights Alliance spearheaded several of these takedown actions, while describing AI-themed infringement as a major problem.

“We have a big task ahead of us in detecting and taking down illegal training datasets like Books3, but also in dealing with AI that has already been trained on illegal content and is now spreading on the internet,” Rights Alliance Director Maria Fredenslund said previously.

BREIN vs. GEITje LLM

In the ensuing months, takedown efforts persisted. Notably, these efforts expanded beyond datasets containing complete books, targeting the models trained on this data as well.

Dutch anti-piracy group BREIN has been active on this front and announced that, as a result, one of the largest Dutch LLMs ‘ GEITje-7B ‘ was taken offline as a result of their efforts.

This LLM was trained on ‘Gigacorpus’ a dataset of books and texts previously targeted by BREIN, including a vast collection of Dutch texts and books, some of which contained copyrighted material sourced from the shadow library LibGen

“We see a worldwide trend that creators of AI models have little or no respect for copyright,” BREIN writes.

“Apparently, the thinking is that all the attention, time and money put into copyrighted works by creators and media companies are less important than the AI models,” the group adds .

In their defense, the LLM creator cited copyright exceptions for text and data mining for scientific purposes. However, BREIN argued that the European AI Act mandates the use of lawfully acquired content as inputs for AI models.

This disagreement wasn’t tested in court. The LLM developers lack the funds to litigate the matter so took the decision to take GEITje offline voluntarily.

Voluntary Shutdown

Machine learning engineer Edwin Rijgersberg developed the GEITje LLM as a hobby. While the 7-billion parameter model became quite popular, he is not in a position to mount a legal challenge.

Rijgersberg previously consulted copyright experts who informed him that the issue isn’t as black and white as portrayed by some rightsholders. That said, a legal battle would be expensive.

“I cannot afford to engage in a lengthy and costly legal battle to resolve these issues. After all, GEITje was a non-commercial, scientific hobby project. For this reason, I am complying with BREIN’s request,” Rijgersberg notes .

While BREIN stresses the importance of protecting copyrights, GEITje’s developer still has hope for an open-source Dutch-language AI landscape

“In my view, the future of European AI still lies in open-source AI. Only when AI is free to use, can be studied by everyone, and is freely available to modify and share for any purpose. can we truly speak of sovereign AI.”

While GEITje won’t make a comeback, Rijgersberg highlights that there are now many other Dutch LLMs available to the public. These models are trained on various datasets, which may or may not include copyrighted material.

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

Last week, the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office ( USPTO ) organized an anti-piracy symposium where several experts discussed recent achievements, new challenges, and potential solutions.

Held at the USPTO headquarters in Alexandria, Virginia, the meeting brought together public and private sector players to discuss various copyright and piracy-related topics.

For example, trial attorney Vasantha Rao, who works as the Department of Justice Computer Crime and Intellectual Property Section, discussed the Gears Reloaded case, the Z-Library takedown , plus international domain seizure actions including Operation Offsides .

Michael Christin, another trial attorney at the DoJ, went into great detail on the Jetflix case, discussing various challenges his team faced while litigating the case.

This was an openly accessible symposium, so discussion and commentary was limited to information already in the public record. That said, when discussing future anti-piracy solutions, more novel perspectives were brought up.

Piracy is ‘Maturing’

In a session on the latest trends in piracy and piracy prevention, Piracy Monitor founder Steven Hawley explained that piracy as an industry has evolved. There are many professional ‘pirate’ actors offering various services, both to consumers and aspiring site operators.

“I would say first off, the piracy in the universe has really matured, it’s metastasized, it’s a multichannel, multilevel industry, multinational phenomenon,” Hawley said.

“Market entry for a pirate is easy. If you wanted to become a pirate tomorrow, you could go online and find organizations that provide Piracy as a Service, they’ll give you content, they’ll give you a distribution platform, they’ll design your user interface, quite sophisticated.”

Marissa Bostick, Head of Global Litigation at the Motion Picture Association (MPA) , also sees a combination of increased professionalism and brazenness. Interestingly, this is paired with a shift from free to paid piracy services, with Bostick mentioning ‘ Magis TV ‘ as one of the examples.

“Users are paying to get access to the pirated content, whether it’s IPTV, premium cyber locker accounts, illegal password services, set-top boxes, there are various forms of this. It means the pirates are actually getting direct streams of income,” Bostick said.

The fact that some pirate services don’t even try to lie low anymore is evident in examples of brazen behavior. They openly advertise themselves through billboards and register for trademarks, as Magis TV recently did .

“Piracy is really sometimes coming out of the shadows. So what we’re seeing, and we see this in Latin America, for example, billboards for piracy sites. They’re paying influencers to go on social media and promote them. They’re registering for trademarks. This is not something that’s happening on some dark web,” Bostick added.

The American ‘Site Blocking’ Dream

The speakers went into great detail on these and other challenges. This ultimately led to the question of what can be done in response. Aside from litigation, including criminal prosecutions, pirate site blocking was frequently mentioned as a solution.

MPA’s Marissa Bostick said that they have been working on this for many years and that it’s been one of the most effective anti-piracy remedies.

There are now site blocking solutions in more than 50 countries around the world, including Australia France, Germany, the UK, Canada, Australia, Brazil, and South Korea.

The United States is notably absent from this list, but that may change. Bostick said that, with bipartisan and bicameral support, site blocking legislation may eventually move forward in the United States.

The call for site blocking was supported by many other speakers, including Lui Simpson of the Association of American Publishers , who stressed that the U.S. “is lagging far behind” compared to other countries, partly because the initial SOPA site blocking proposal failed in 2012.

“We’re hopeful that this time around we’ll make progress. As you know, we tried this maybe 13 years ago. The hope now is that the misinformation will not be so much of a hindrance here to actually getting a remedy in place.”

“It is long overdue. I think we’re one of the few, let’s just say more developed countries that unfortunately does not have this remedy,” Simpson added.

Attenzione!

U.S. site blocking discussions are not new and, in a meeting dedicated to anti-piracy solutions, there was little pushback. That said, it is clear that if site blocking comes to America, it should be done right.

This means that potential errors and overblocking should be ruled out, for as far as that’s possible. This is particularly important now that the Italian “ Piracy Shield ” site blocking scheme is cause for continued controversy.

That hasn’t gone unnoticed by the panelists at the symposium. Steven Hawley, for example, mentioned the “Piracy Shield” has had its challenges, especially because much of the process is automated without detailed verification.

“It sounds like a great system, but it needs fine-tuning. I guess this is a message to anyone who’s developing platforms like this, watch out for false positives,” Hawley said.

Lui Simpson also stressed that the U.S. should learn from site blocking schemes in other jurisdictions. However, she was not referring to overblocking, but to the tendency of blocked sites to launch alternative domains almost instantly.

If the U.S. proposes a site blocking solution, it should be dynamic, so that new domains can be added swiftly.

Bostick acknowledged this and stressed that the MPA has more than a decade of experience with site blocking measures around the globe. So, they can use everything they learned thus far to come up with a balanced and effective solution.

“We have over ten years of experience at this point with site blocking in various countries, different parts of the world, and how it can work seamlessly and effectively. So we need to use all that and use that experience to move forward,” Bostick stressed.

All in all, the USPTO’s anti-piracy symposium offered an intriguing peek into the learnings and priorities of various key players in the public and private sector. It also revealed that despite previous successes, there are still many challenges ahead.

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