Following on the heels of the landmark Cox v. Sony ruling, the Supreme Court has vacated the contributory copyright infringement verdict against ISP Grande Communications, ordering the Fifth Circuit to reconsider its decision in light of the new precedent. The order is the latest setback for the record labels, whose campaign to hold ISPs liable for their subscribers' piracy continues to unravel.

In late 2022, several of the world’s largest music companies, including Warner Bros. and Sony Music prevailed in their lawsuit against Internet provider Grande Communications.

The record labels accused the Astound-owned ISP of not doing enough to stop pirating subscribers. Specifically, they alleged that the company failed to terminate repeat infringers.

The trial lasted more than two weeks and ended in a resounding victory for the labels. A Texas federal jury found Grande liable for willful contributory copyright infringement, and the ISP was ordered to pay $47 million in d...

Read entire story Yesterday at TorrentFreak

Major music publishers and the NMPA are asking a Texas federal court to throw out X's antitrust lawsuit, calling it a baseless attempt at retaliation. The music companies argue that X’s conspiracy theory rests on a single word in an email, while adding that their massive DMCA takedown campaign was not a sham but fully protected by the First Amendment.

Last week, X asked a federal court in Tennessee to dismiss a music piracy lawsuit, arguing that the Supreme Court’s ruling in Cox v. Sony, rendered the music companies’ contributory infringement theory futile.

The music publishers, meanwhile, were busy in a different court, asking a Texas judge to throw out X’s antitrust complaint against them with similar finality.

The motion to dismiss, filed in the Northern District of Texas, argues that X’s lawsuit doesn’t hold up and the music companies want all eight counts dismissed with prejudice.

A C...

Read entire story 4/6/2026 at TorrentFreak

Last week's Supreme Court decision in Cox Communications reshaped the piracy liability landscape, creating new urgency for site-blocking legislation in Congress. This could be addressed by Senator Thom Tillis and Representative Zoe Lofgren, who have been working on bicameral legislation that would require ISPs and DNS resolvers to block foreign pirate sites under court order, TorrentFreak has learned.

The Supreme Court’s decision to reverse the billion-dollar piracy liability verdict against Cox Communications is a major win for Internet service providers.

It confirms that they can’t be held liable for pirating activities of subscribers or customers unless they actively induce copyright infringement through specific acts, or if their service has no substantial non-infringing uses.

For rightsholders, however, the ruling represents a significant setback, as it makes it much harder to hold ISPs liable for pirating subscribers.

Or, as Justice Sotomayor note...

Read entire story 4/5/2026 at TorrentFreak

The Supreme Court’s recent reversal of the billion-dollar Cox Communications verdict also makes an appearance in the long-running legal battle between Yout.com and the RIAA. The streamripper's counsel argues that the ruling's treatment of noninfringing uses is relevant to its case against the RIAA. The music group disagrees, suggesting that it is not relevant.

YouTube downloaders and other nifty tools are seen as a major piracy threat by the music industry.

To curb this trend, music companies have taken legal action against various stream-ripping services. This includes Yout.com, which is operated by the American developer Johnathan Nader.

Nader is not easily defeated, however. In 2020 he took the RIAA to court in an attempt to have the site declared legal.

Appeal Pending

At the end of 2022, the district court handed a win to the RIAA and dismissed the matter at an early stage. Judge Stefan Underhill concluded that Yout had ...

Read entire story 4/3/2026 at TorrentFreak

Elon Musk’s X is moving for a total dismissal of the high-profile copyright lawsuit filed by major music publishers, claiming that the Supreme Court just pulled the rug out from under the labels’ case. Citing the recent Cox v. Sony decision, the social media platform argues that the "contributory infringement" theory used to keep the litigation alive is now legally defunct.

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 termination policy.

The National Music Publishers Association (NMPA), for example, claimed it had sent over 300,000 formal infringement notices, many of which didn’t lead to immediate removals.

“Twitter routinely ignores known repeat infringers and known infringements, refusing to take simple ...

Read entire story 4/2/2026 at TorrentFreak

The Paris Court of Appeal has confirmed that third-party DNS providers can be legally compelled to block access to domain names to stop piracy. The DNS providers countered that such measures are technically burdensome and easily bypassed. However, the court ruled that the intermediaries must act nonetheless and pick up the bill themselves. This is a clear win for Canal+, which pioneered the blocking expansion.

Traditional site-blocking measures that require local ISPs to block subscriber access to pirate sites have been commonplace in France for years.

By blocking pirate domains through ISP DNS resolvers, subscriber access is effectively cut off. However, the measures were only partially effective, as many users simply switched to third-party DNS resolvers to get around them.

In 2024, an order from the Paris Judicial Court, requested by football and rugby rightsholder Canal+, aimed to patch that loophole. The order required Cloudflare, Google, and Cisco to actively block access to ...

Read entire story 4/1/2026 at TorrentFreak

A new breed of hypervisor-based bypasses can 'crack' Denuvo-protected games on the day of release, marking a fundamental shift in the piracy landscape. Denuvo parent company Irdeto informs TorrentFreak that it is working on a countermeasure while warning that the new cracks are a security concern. Popular repacker FitGirl initially flagged security concerns as well, but embraced the new cracks as they improved.

For as long as protected computer games have existed, people have tried to break or bypass these digital locks with patches, loaders, and keygens.

With gaming as a multi-billion-dollar industry today, protecting games is more important than ever. Especially during the early release window when most sales are generated.

In the past decade, Denuvo has been the prime anti-piracy solution. The Irdeto-owned protection software managed to delay pirate releases seriously. Despite being a nuisance to many legitimate customers, gaming companies were pleased to pay for this first line ...

Read entire story 3/31/2026 at TorrentFreak

In an effort to gather material for its LLM training, Meta used BitTorrent to download pirated books from Anna’s Archive and other shadow libraries. According to several authors, Meta facilitated the infringement of others by "seeding" these torrents. This week, the court granted the authors permission to add these claims to their complaint, despite openly scolding their counsel for "lame excuses" and "Meta bashing."

Over the past two years, rightsholders of all kinds have filed lawsuits against companies that develop AI models.

Most of these cases allege that AI developers used copyrighted works to train LLMs without first obtaining authorization.

Meta is among a long list of companies now being sued for this allegedly infringing activity. This includes a class action lawsuit filed by authors including Richard Kadrey, Sarah Silverman, and Christopher Golden, which accused Meta of using libraries of pirated books as training material.

Court Dismisses AI Training Claims

Last summer, ...

Read entire story 3/30/2026 at TorrentFreak

Every week we take a close look at the most pirated movies on torrent sites. What are pirates downloading? 'Hoppers' tops the chart, followed by 'Crime 101.' 'Peaky Blinders: The Immortal Man' completes the top three.

The data for our weekly download chart is estimated by TorrentFreak, and is for informational and educational reference only.

Downloading content without permission is copyright infringement. These torrent download statistics are only meant to provide further insight into piracy trends. All data are gathered from public resources.

This week we have three newcomers on the list. “Hoppers” is the most shared title.

The most torrented movies for the week ending on March 30 are: Movie Rank Rank last week Movie name IMDb Rating / Trailer Most downloaded movi...

Read entire story 3/30/2026 at TorrentFreak

In an era of instant streaming and expendable pirate sites, The Pirate Bay is somewhat of a relic. The site has weathered more than two decades of legal pressure, and while traffic is a fraction of its peak, it remains online. Even more remarkable, several torrents from March 2004 remain active today, outlasting the very servers they were originally hosted on.

The Pirate Bay was once the leading pirate site, with a hubris matching its millions of monthly visitors.

After the verdict that sent its founders to prison, the site slowly started to decay. The option to comment or register as a new user eventually broke down, and aside from promoting a fishy token, public outreach ground to a halt.

Despite this downward spiral, the site continues to live up to its official tagline: the galaxy’s most resilient torrent site. Where TorrentSpy, Mininova, isoHunt, Torrentz, KickassTorrents, ExtraTorrent, RARBG and TorrentGalaxy all fell, ...

Read entire story 3/29/2026 at TorrentFreak