For more than two years, a husband and wife in Vietnam allegedly ran a billion-visit-a-year operation serving Korean webtoons in unauthorized English translation. The network, believed to be Harimanga, Manhwaclan and Kunmanga, has gone dark, its servers seized and the pair hauled in for questioning by Korean and Vietnamese authorities.

Korea’s Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism rarely names the pirate sites it helps shut down, and its June 12 announcement was no exception.

It redacted the three high-profile target domains as “Hari***,” “Manhwa***” and “Kun***.”

These match the names of three well-known manhwa aggregators: Harimanga, Manhwaclan and Kunmanga, all of which started having access problems in late May, right when Vietnamese police seized their servers.

Initially it wasn’t clear why the sites suddenly went offline, but the authorities co...

Read entire story Yesterday at TorrentFreak

A Pennsylvania federal court has handed down a $9 million default judgment against the operator of pirate IPTV services 'Shrugs' and 'Zing'. Major Hollywood studios, Amazon, and Netflix sued the defendant last year, but he failed to appear in court despite being personally served. In addition to the millions in damages, rightsholders secured a sweeping injunction to seize the platform's domains and cut off its hosting services.

The Internet is littered with cheap IPTV services that offer access to a lot of content, for very little money.

These deals often seem too good to be true, and in most cases they are, at least for those who prefer to stay on the right side of the law.

The operators of these services often remain in the shadows, but anti-piracy groups are actively trying to pin them down. For example, members of the Alliance for Creativity and Entertainment (ACE) identified Mechanicsburg resident Brandon Weibley as the alleged operator of several commercial IPTV services offering pirated strea...

Read entire story 6/12/2026 at TorrentFreak

As the FIFA World Cup kicks off, tech-industry group CCIA Europe warns that piracy-blocking systems built to protect live sports are damaging the open internet. The group, which represents tech giants such as Amazon, Cloudflare, and Google, echoes a recent academic study, which found that Europe's anti-piracy efforts raise overblocking and enforcement concerns.

Today, the 2026 FIFA World Cup officially kicked off with the opener between Mexico and South Africa.

With a record number of 48 participating countries and 104 matches in well over a month, the high-profile tournament is the largest live broadcasting operation the sport has ever seen.

The FIFA World Cup is also the most valuable sports event, with roughly $4 billion in broadcasting rights on the line for a single tournament. Rightsholders do everything in their power to protect these exclusive broadcasts, in part through piracy blocking efforts.

While sports broadcast...

Read entire story 6/11/2026 at TorrentFreak

An electronics store in Queens that sold pirate IPTV boxes for years, despite receiving six cease-and-desist letters from DISH, has been found liable by a New York federal court. The reseller blamed his supplier in court, but that defense did not convince the judge. As a result, the small brick-and-mortar store was ordered to destroy all remaining pirate boxes, while facing millions in potential damages.

In December 2023, DISH Network filed a copyright infringement lawsuit in New York targeting the pirate IPTV service Glo TV, along with an alleged reseller known as Massive Wireless.

This reseller is a brick-and-mortar electronics store operated by Khaled Akhtar in Jackson Heights, Queens. According to DISH, this store was used to sell “Glo TV”/”Rays IPTV” pirate IPTV services.

This accusation was backed up with hard evidence, as DISH used a private investigator to buy a pirate IPTV box in the store. The owner of the small store purchased these boxes i...

Read entire story 6/11/2026 at TorrentFreak

The long-running piracy liability lawsuit between filmmakers and internet provider WOW! has ended with a quiet settlement. In late March, a Colorado federal court refused to resolve the ISP's safe harbor defense on summary judgment. Instead of going to trial, both sides walked away. The settlement follows the Supreme Court's Cox decision, which had reshaped secondary liability earlier this year.

In 2021, a group of film production companies including Millennium Media and Voltage Pictures sued internet provider WOW! at a federal court in Colorado, accusing it of turning a blind eye on piracy.

The stakes in this legal battle were incredibly high. After filing their original complaint, the plaintiffs recently expanded their claims to cover roughly 375 films, meaning potential statutory damages could be as high as $56 million.

WOW! previously tried to have the case dismissed, but a federal judge in Colorado rejected that attempt last year. After that, the case moved for...

Read entire story 6/9/2026 at TorrentFreak

In what's partly an effort to push back against domain seizures and blocking efforts, Z-Library has upgraded its mirror infrastructure. Users of the shadow library can now create custom-branded, login-only mirrors of the site, creating a network of stealthy, white-label pirate sites. Running a mirror site comes with costs and legal risk, but Z-Library offers to share a 20% cut of its donations as compensation.

Z-Library is one of the largest shadow libraries on the Internet, hosting millions of books and academic articles that can be downloaded for free.

The site has defied all odds over the past years. It continued to operate despite a full-fledged criminal prosecution by the United States, which resulted in the arrest of two alleged operators in Argentina.

These two Russian defendants remain wanted by the United States. According to the most recent information we have, the defendants escaped house arrest in 2024, while awaiting their extradition, and vanished into thin air.

...

Read entire story 6/8/2026 at TorrentFreak

YouTube's Content ID system processed a record 2.5 billion copyright claims in 2025, a 14% increase compared to a year before. While disputes remain rare, uploaders who challenged claims come out as the winner more often than not. Despite the increase in claims, the number of Content ID eligible rightsholders dropped.

To protect rightsholders, YouTube regularly removes, disables, or demonetizes videos that contain allegedly infringing content.

For years, little was known about the scope of these copyright actions, but that changed in late 2021 when the streaming platform published its first-ever copyright transparency report.

This report and the subsequent updates have shown that roughly 99% of all copyright claims on YouTube are handled through the Content ID system. Since most claims are automated, without any human intervention, access to this powerful removal tool is restricted to a fe...

Read entire story 6/6/2026 at TorrentFreak

A month after designating Vietnam as a "Priority Foreign Country" over its failure to deter online piracy, the U.S. Trade Representative has formally opened a trade investigation, opening the door to potential sanctions. Rightsholders are invited to submit comments, and the MPA, which pursued action against Fmovies, Sflix, 2embed, and other Vietnamese pirate operations, is expected to weigh in.

Last month, the U.S. Trade Representative (USTR) issued its annual Special 301 Report, signaling which countries can make improvements on the IP enforcement front.

In the most recent report, the USTR applied the “Priority Foreign Country” status for the first time in thirteen years, calling out Vietnam for persistent failures to deter online piracy and counterfeiting.

In recent years Vietnamese authorities reportedly helped to shut down several pirate sites, including the massive Fmovies network, which served billions of visitors. However, the criminal prosecution...

Read entire story 6/5/2026 at TorrentFreak

A seven-month Europol operation, coordinated by Bulgaria with support form Europol, has dismantled nine criminal networks running pirate streaming services. The operation, dubbed KRATOS 2, resulted in 29 arrests and the removal of more than 27,000 URLs. While the press release includes many data points, the announcement does not mention the name of a single targeted platform that was taken offline.

The Internet is full of cheap IPTV services that offer access to premium sports, films, and television content for a fraction of what legal services charge.

This has turned into a multi-million dollar business for several similar networks, which are typically more professional and organized than the ‘hobby’ pirate projects that emerged two decades ago.

The professionality of these services is matched by the severeness of the law enforcement response. The modern-day piracy networks, which are not easily threatened by a cease and desist notice, are now often target...

Read entire story 6/4/2026 at TorrentFreak

Google has processed billions of DMCA takedown requests during the first months of the year. Reporting agency Link-Busters remains the top sender. While its dominance remains, the company appears to have hit a takedown ceiling of roughly 70 million URLs per week. Google won't confirm whether there's a limit on the notices it processes and says that trusted parties "can submit the quantity they need."

Link-Busters is the preferred anti-piracy partner for many of the world’s largest book publishers, including Penguin Random House and HarperCollins.

The Dutch company is also the most active DMCA sender at Google by a wide margin, flagging billions of ‘pirate’ URLs in the search engine, mostly from shadow libraries.

6.5 Billion and Plateauing

Google recently updated its search transparency report, showing that Link-Busters now accounts for more than 6.5 billion delisting requests. This is more than a third of the nearly 18 billion requests Google received in ...

Read entire story 6/2/2026 at TorrentFreak