Italy's Piracy Shield IPTV blocking system is back in the news today after yet another completely avoidable blocking blunder. On Monday night, yet another CDN IP address was added to the blocklist rendering innocent sites unavailable. Italian tech news site DDaY, a long-standing critic of Piracy Shield's indiscriminate blocking, was among those affected.

After a series of completely avoidable incidents that have seen countless innocent sites blocked by Italy’s Piracy Shield blocking system, at this point is it appropriate to keep calling them ‘blunders’?

Continuing to do so might suggest acceptance that incompetence is always to blame. In reality, recent legal amendments addressed the issue of overblocking by dramatically weakening what little protection innocent sites had against becoming collateral damage.

In practical terms, rightsholders can now knowingly block innocent sites in many circumstances, with ...

Read entire story Today at TorrentFreak

Trouble continues for the popular torrent site TorrentGalaxy. After several technical issues last week, the site has become unreachable. At the same time, the related 'TGxGoodies' uploader accounts at other torrent sites have been inactive for days. TorrentGalaxy switched owners earlier this year, but it's unclear what's behind the recent problems.

Founded in 2018, TorrentGalaxy has grown to become a leading player in the torrent ecosystem.

The site was launched by former members of ExtraTorrent, a popular torrent site that had just shut down at the time. The founders aimed to provide a home for ExtraTorrent ‘refugees’ but, over time, it transformed into much more than that.

TorrentGalaxy Downtime

In recent months, TorrentGalaxy has faced considerable downtime. The original team sold the site to new operators, which offered an explanation for the earlier ‘maintenance‘ issues. However, the site co...

Read entire story Yesterday at TorrentFreak

Music streaming app Musi claims Apple removed its app from the App Store after "backroom conversations" with key music industry players. The app developer alleges this was an "unfair" and "tainted" removal process designed to put it out of business. Musi is seeking a preliminary injunction to reinstate its app while the legal battle plays out.

In October, Musi filed a lawsuit against Apple after the company removed the music streaming app from the App Store.

Filed at a California federal court, the Musi complaint states that the takedown was unjustified and accuses Apple of breach of contract, among other things.

Wasting no time, Musi requested a preliminary injunction to compel Apple to reinstate the music app. While existing users still have access to the software, it’s no longer available for new users to download which directly impacts revenue. If this continues, Musi will eventually be put out of business...

Read entire story Yesterday at TorrentFreak

Indie videgame portal Itch.io is effectively offine today after a brand protection company reported the platform for "fraud/phishing" for what was a problem easily solved using a DMCA notice. According to Google's transparency databases, the same company has repeatedly attempted to use the DMCA to solve alleged trademark infringement but had its complaints rejected.

The DMCA takedown procedure may not be perfect but, for those intending to use it, there’s an unambiguous step-by-step process that’s been in place for a quarter of a century.

Needless to say, entities that deviate from the established rules can make life difficult for themselves as well as the intended recipients of takedown notices. That includes entities that attempt to use DMCA takedown notices to enforce trademark disputes, or prefer to avoid the DMCA altogether by portraying copyright complaints as something more serious.

Itch.io Taken Offline By Bogus Complaint...

Read entire story 12/9/2024 at TorrentFreak

Cloudflare is actively disabling access to some pirate site URLs on its network, informing visitors that the requested pages are unavailable for legal reasons. While these types of 'HTTP 451' error messages are relatively rare, they are nothing more than Cloudflare complying with its legal obligations under the DMCA.

Cloudflare, a global internet infrastructure company, offers various services to millions of users, including connectivity and privacy tools.

While primarily a conduit for internet traffic, Cloudflare occasionally hosts content permanently on its servers.

The company’s approach to copyright complaints differs based on the role it plays. If Cloudflare merely passes traffic along (for a website using their CDN), they forward DMCA takedown notices to the actual hosting provider, which is often hidden from public view.

When Cloudflare actually hosts reported content...

Read entire story 12/9/2024 at TorrentFreak

Greece is buzzing with news of a historic, landmark decision by a local court, to imprison a person for five months for subscribing to a pirate IPTV service. The news warrants an informed conversation about creators' rights and how the judicial system has sharpened its response to piracy. However, until evidence is produced to the contrary, the story should be stamped "propaganda" and noted for an offense of its own: a distraction from genuine progress in the fight against piracy.

After investing huge resources into tackling pirate IPTV platforms as significant as the one reportedly taken down last week, a little stagecraft should be as expected when authorities and rightsholders declare victory.

Information suggests that the blackout impacted supply across Europe and beyond, so a small amount of window-dressing on the number of users affected and profits generated don’t really have a misleading impact. There’s no denying the importance of the operation either; a lot of information was shared by the authorities and while difficult to confirm, in ge...

Read entire story 12/8/2024 at TorrentFreak

In a bid to identify individuals allegedly involved in creating and distributing cheats for the video game Destiny 2, Bungie has subpoenaed the U.S.-based cryptocurrency exchange Kraken. The subpoena seeks to identify the owner of a Bitcoin wallet, who is believed to be a European resident. This individual, however, is contesting the subpoena, claiming it violates EU privacy laws and other regulations.

Over the past several years, Destiny 2 creator Bungie has pursued legal action against several cheat sellers and cheat makers.

This has resulted in a number judgments and settlements in Bungie’s favor, but the gaming company isn’t done just yet.

Furthering its efforts to protect the integrity of its games, last year Bungie filed a second lawsuit against numerous individuals allegedly involved in cheat maker and distributor operation Ring-1.

Filed at a Washington federal court, the complaint named numerous defendants with others listed as John Does. While ...

Read entire story 12/7/2024 at TorrentFreak

The ACE anti-piracy coalition sidelined dozens of sports streaming sites this week with action against dozens of domain names including Crackstream and various Streameast clones. The official Streameast was targeted by the U.S. Government earlier this year, but the copycat takedowns are just as important, as these sites drew more traffic than the original.

In August, Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) seized several domain names linked to Streameast, a popular live sports piracy site with millions of users.

The seizures were carried out by the book but did not achieve the desired effect, as Streameast remains available through alternative domains.

According to the site’s operators, they won’t stop until sports streaming is more affordable to the public. That message appeals to pirates, but also to opportunistic pirate site operators, who’ve successfully cloned the Streameast brand.

When users search for &#...

Read entire story 12/6/2024 at TorrentFreak

Hidden pirate features within seemingly harmless apps, known as "stealth apps," are slipping past Apple's App Store security, offering users access to pirated movies and TV shows. Taiwan's Criminal Police Bureau recently busted three individuals promoting unlock instructions for these apps to roughly 400,000 users. Surprisingly, this tech-savvy scheme was orchestrated by a group whose combined age totals 215 years.

Apple’s position on obviously infringing movie and TV show streaming apps is that they’re not allowed on the App Store, period.

Hoping to reach a massive but restricted audience, so-called ‘stealth piracy’ apps employ trickery to circumvent Apple’s vetting process.

Over the past couple of years, stealth apps have made the headlines on a number of occasions and even attracted the attention of an Expert Group at the EU Intellectual Property Office Observatory. In general terms, these apps disguise themselves as a game or some other benign tool then...

Read entire story 12/5/2024 at TorrentFreak

Japan's Cultural Affairs Agency is looking towards AI to strengthen the country's battle against rampant online piracy. The pilot program proposed by the agency would see culturally significant manga and anime content protected by automated image and text recognition systems, with less reliance placed on resource-intensive human intervention.

With the arms race between pirate sites and rightsholders showing no obvious signs of cooling down, the online piracy landscape is becoming increasingly complex.

The existing toolbox of legal measures, such as action against domain names, site-blocking, search engine penalties, even whole-site deindexing, has led to the emergence of a new breed of shape-shifting, measure-evading, pirate sites.

Seemingly able to rebrand almost at will, it’s not uncommon for sites to reappear with new names and a new coat of paint, without any significant damage to existing traffic. Meanw...

Read entire story 12/4/2024 at TorrentFreak