Latest Torrent News

In late 2022, several of the world’s largest music companies, including Warner Bros. and Sony Music, secured a key victory against Grande Communications.

A Texas federal jury found the Internet provider liable for willful contributory copyright infringement and ordered it to pay $46.8 million in damages, after Grande failed to disconnect pirating subscribers.

The verdict was a milestone in the recording industry’s campaign to hold ISPs responsible for their subscribers’ piracy. The ruling was later affirmed on appeal by the Fifth Circuit, which also vacated ...

Operation Offsides was the largest sports piracy crackdown ever carried out during a single event.

From the start of the FIFA World Cup through the final, U.S. authorities and their partners seized more than 1,000 domains, while close to 2,000 more were blocked across Latin America.

The Motion Picture Association, which coordinated the effort through its Alliance for Creativity and Entertainment (ACE), previously praised the operation as a massive success. However, in an op-ed published by RealClearMarkets yesterday, MPA’s leadership admits that domain seizures have the...

Site-blocking orders are a routine tool for rightsholders in India, where the Delhi High Court has issued dozens against pirate platforms over the past several years.

These orders gradually expanded from basic site blocking orders that targeted just ISPs, to dynamic and updating blocklists, which also require global domain registrars to take action.

A new order, obtained this week by HBO and associated studios, follows the familiar template. It targets 30 “rogue website” operations as defendants, covering more than 120 pirate site domains. In addition to Indian IS...

Earlier this year, the U.S. Trade Representative (USTR) classified Vietnam as “Priority Foreign Country,” because of its lacking anti-piracy enforcement.

That designation, applied for the first time in over a decade, triggered a Section 301 investigation, opening the door to potential trade sanctions.

As part of this process, stakeholders were requested to provide input on Vietnam’s alleged shortcomings. This includes the piracy challenges and concerns, which were highlighted as the primary concern.

One of the key submissions came from the Motion Picture Associati...

France has been at the forefront of the fight against online piracy for years.

More recently, it has been one of the pirate site blocking pioneers. In addition to demanding action from ISPs, their orders also targeted DNS resolvers and VPN providers.

While the expansion of the blocking measures is still contested, French lawmakers have already prepared the next one.

The French Parliament has handed ARCOM, the country’s audiovisual and digital regulator, the power to block pirate sports streams in real time without checking each targeted piracy source manually. T...

Similar to other social media platforms, creators on Facebook and Instagram have to battle a constant stream of copyright infringing material.

To facilitate this process, the company has rolled out several anti-piracy initiatives in recent years.

Both Facebook and Instagram use a “Rights Manager” tool, which is an automated system that runs copyright checks. After rightsholders upload reference files, the system detects infringing material and allows owners to take down or monetize this content.

Rights Manager has been working without much noise for close to a deca...

Last summer, adult content producers Strike 3 Holdings and Counterlife Media filed a copyright infringement lawsuit against Meta, alleging that the tech company downloaded thousands of their films via BitTorrent to train AI models.

After Meta’s motion to dismiss was denied last month by U.S. District Judge Eumi K. Lee, Strike 3 filed an amended complaint expanding its claims to 2,973 films, up from the original 2,396.

With that many works at stake, potential statutory damages could reach a massive $446 million.

This week, Meta filed its answer to the amended compl...

In a complaint filed at a Nashville federal court in 2023, Universal Music, Sony Music, EMI and others, accused X Corp of ‘breeding’ mass copyright infringement.

The social media company allegedly failed to respond adequately to takedown notices and lacked a proper repeat infringer policy. The National Music Publishers Association (NMPA) claimed it had sent over 300,000 formal infringement notices, many of which didn’t lead to immediate removals.

The battle escalated in January, when X Corp. filed a landmark antitrust complaint against the NMPA and a coalitio...

Canada’s approach to pirate site blocking has evolved quite a bit since the Federal Court issued the first ‘GoldTV’ order in 2019.

That original order targeted a specific service and a fixed set of domain names. If rightsholders wanted to add a domain to the blocklist, they had to go back to court.

Later orders against Soap2Day and, more recently, various stream-ripping sites, went a step further. Instead of targeting specific operations run by the same people, they allowed rightsholders to update the blocklist with alternative domains that would pop up, as...

At the height of the cyberlocker boom in the early 2010s, Uptobox was already an established name.

The platform remained online despite a fierce anti-piracy crackdown that led to the demise of Megaupload, Hotfile, and many other file-hosting services.

Uptobox eventually met its fate in September 2023, when a coalition of entertainment companies including Disney, Amazon, Apple, Netflix, Paramount, and Warner Bros. obtained a court order to seize its servers at various data centers.

Uptobox Crackdown

The Alliance for Creativity and Entertainment claimed responsibility for...