For students and researchers who can’t afford expensive textbooks and journal subscriptions, it can be a useful resource. At the same time, publishers have spent years trying to take it down, with takedown notices and blocking orders, while U.S. authorities indicted its alleged operators.

This tension is the subject of a paper published earlier this month in the journal New Review of Academic Librarianship, written by two librarians at Nigerian universities.

The peer-reviewed academic paper doesn’t pick a side and the lead author kindly shared a copy of their work with TorrentFreak. While the conclusions are not immediately newsworthy, there was one reference that stood out right away.

A TorrentFreak Article That Doesn’t Exist

In a section on enforcement against Z-Library, the authors write that major academic publishers, including Elsevier and Springer Nature, have taken similar legal action. The reference is a 2021 TorrentFreak article, as shown below.

The problem is that this particular legal action is new to us. The reference section lists the article as “Publishers continue crackdown on shadow libraries” and links to the TorrentFreak homepage. However, we have never published an article with that title.

We did report that Elsevier and Springer Nature obtained a UK blocking order against Sci-Hub, and that several Z-Library domains were temporarily suspended over copyright infringement claims. However, we’re not aware of this particular legal action against Z-Library.

Looking more closely, we see more claims that don’t seem to fit. The paper’s account of the Z-Library criminal case, for example, states that the U.S. Department of Justice “arrested individuals” in 2022.

The DOJ’s own press release says that the two alleged operators, whose indictment we covered at the time, were arrested in Argentina “at the request of the United States.” The title the paper gives for that press release doesn’t exist either.

Plausible but Inaccurate

These non-existent citations appear plausible, as they cite real publications and organizations in a fitting context. However, that doesn’t mean they are accurate. When we went over the full reference list, we noticed that this applies to more sources.

The paper cites a 2019 Harvard Journal of Law & Technology article by IP law professor Daniel Gervais, titled “The future of intellectual property in the shadow of shadow libraries.” The table of contents of the cited issue doesn’t include it, and the cited pages are taken up by two articles on other topics.

The same applies to a 2019 College & Research Libraries article attributed to Carol Tenopir and colleagues. The cited issue has no article by Tenopir. She did co-author a 2019 article on a similar topic, but it appeared in a different journal, under a different title.

Other references that couldn’t be located include a 2019 article credited to Björn Brembs and articles credited to authors named Smith, Piper, Okike and Aronson, as well as a Kaspersky report on “the hidden dangers of shadow libraries.”

In total, we had trouble finding at least ten of the 44 references in the paper, as well as others that didn’t necessarily back the stated claims.

100% AI?

The obvious question is where these mystery references came from. The paper’s acknowledgements may offer a hint in the right direction, as they mention that AI was used in the research and writing process.

“We confirm that Consensus AI was used in sifting through large volume of literature and extract relevant information,” the authors write. They add that ChatGPT was used to improve the language of parts of the paper.

AI chatbots are known to invent references, often with plausible titles credited to real experts in the field. This could explain the findings, although it doesn’t prove that AI wrote these references.

We also ran the paper’s abstract and conclusion through the AI detection tool Pangram. For both sections, the tool reported that “100% of the text is likely AI-generated.” These types of tools are not perfect and can produce false positives, but it would fit the picture.

It would be rather ironic if AI caused these errors. It would mean that a paper in a commercial, peer-reviewed journal, published by Taylor & Francis, relied on AI to write about Z-Library. Meanwhile, many rightsholders are suing AI companies for using shadow libraries to train AI models.

Interestingly, the paper explicitly warns that sites such as Z-Library hurt publishers’ revenue, which funds peer review and editing.

“The widespread use of Z-Library poses significant challenges to the sustainability of academic publishing. Publishers rely on subscription fees and paywalls to fund the peer review, editing, and distribution of scholarly works,” it reads, presumably generated by AI as well.

The paper doesn’t mention that peer reviewers generally aren’t paid for their work, an issue that was central to a recent lawsuit against major academic publishers, including Taylor & Francis.

Publisher Investigates

The lead author initially shared a copy of the paper with us, but didn’t answer our follow-up questions about the mysterious references. We also asked Gervais, Brembs and Tenopir whether they wrote the papers that are credited to them, but they didn’t respond either.

Publisher Taylor & Francis did reply and says that it’s looking into the matter.

“I can confirm that this has been referred to our Editorial and Publishing Ethics & Integrity teams, who will investigate the concerns you have raised,” a Taylor & Francis spokesperson informed TorrentFreak.

The publisher will not comment further while the investigation is ongoing. Whether the paper will be corrected or retracted has yet to be seen.

—

The paper “Z-Library and Full-Text Access: Democratizing Knowledge or Undermining Copyright Ethics?” is available here.

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

The Swiss non-profit foundation faced a request from beIN Sports for penalties of up to €580,000 a day, as Quad9 chose not to block pirate tennis streams.

Yesterday the Paris Court ruled on the matter and not in favor of Quad9. As a direct result, the foundation decided that it will no longer offer its services to users in France starting November 24.

€1,000 a Day

The court ordered Quad9 to implement the May blocking order, which since expanded to 58 domain names, or face a penalty of €1,000 a day, which is a fraction of beIN’s demands.

beIN had asked for €10,000 per day for every domain that remained accessible through Quad9. The court set the penalty at €1,000 per day in total instead. This runs until the blocking measures end on November 14, which Quad9 calculates adds up to €24,000, not counting its own legal costs.

Quad9 told us that it understands it is now subject to the penalty, as it won’t block the domains before the order ends.

In its ruling, the court points to Quad9’s own statements. According to the court, Quad9 has to make reasonable efforts to block the domain names, but it decided to take no action at all, for reasons it previously explained.

That’s a different outcome than earlier this month, when the Paris court refused beIN’s penalty requests against Cloudflare and several VPN providers. These companies had blocked at least some of the domains, which the court considered a reasonable effort.

Canal+ also lost a similar penalty request against Cloudflare in September. Quad9, however, hasn’t blocked a single domain, as it also confirmed in a statement submitted to the court.

Leaving France

For Quad9, the case was never just about money. The foundation sees recursive DNS resolution as a neutral service and doesn’t want to tamper with it.

“We categorically refuse to alter or lie to you about the DNS responses you receive in a way that opposes your expectations,” Quad9 writes in a statement.

The Swiss foundation also says that it can’t accurately block for French users only. Its free service requires no sign-up and it says that there is no reliable way to tell which users are in France.

Blocking the domains for all users would also satisfy the court, Quad9 confirms. However, the DNS resolver refuses to apply a French court order to Internet users worldwide.

How Quad9 will stop serving French users hasn’t been decided yet. The foundation told us that it’s still evaluating its options, which it believes are all imperfect.

Blocking wouldn’t help much either, Quad9 argues, as there are plenty of workarounds. People who want to access the pirate sites can simply switch to one of the thousands of other open DNS resolvers.

“This is like holding a piece of newspaper in front of a stadium full of people to block the view of a concert,” the foundation says.

More Blocking Cases

The decision to leave isn’t just about this beIN case. Quad9 notes that roughly 20 other blocking cases are pending in France and the foundation expects many of them to ultimately lead to more blocking pressure and potential fines.

“Quad9 cannot survive the accumulation of penalties yet to be assessed in 20 other pending cases, nor those of future cases similar to the one brought by beIN,” it notes.

Quad9 isn’t the first public DNS resolver to make this move. In 2024, OpenDNS suspended its service in France in response to a Canal+ blocking order.

For Quad9, it’s also a matter of principle. The foundation fears that blocking demands which seem reasonable today will turn into a flood of new ones.

“Once the tools of censorship are built, they are rarely used sparingly or justly,” Quad9 writes.

An appeal is pending and Quad9 says it will continue to fight court-ordered DNS blocking. For now, French users have until November 24 to switch to another DNS resolver.

—

A copy of the Paris Judicial Court’s ruling (RG 26/11882) is available here (pdf).

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

The American Copyright Protection Act (ACPA) would allow courts to order ISPs, DNS resolvers, and VPNs to block foreign pirate sites.

The competing DEFEND IP Act, introduced days later by Rep. Zoe Lofgren and Sen. Thom Tillis, does the opposite. It explicitly excludes services that only offer VPNs.

The VPN industry has a voice in U.S. blocking debates through the Internet Infrastructure Coalition (i2Coalition). In addition to representing companies such as Amazon, Cloudflare, and Google, the group runs a VPN Trust Initiative, with ExpressVPN, NordVPN, and Surfshark as founding members.

The coalition has been relatively quiet in recent site blocking discussions, but today, on Global Encryption Day, i2Coalition published a report titled “VPNs at Risk.”

Like last year’s DNS at Risk report, it warns against turning neutral infrastructure into a copyright enforcement tool.

From Pirate Sites to VPNs

Copyright enforcement is one of the reasons governments consider regulating VPNs, the report notes. VPNs can be used to bypass blocking measures and may make it harder for rightsholders to identify infringers or enforce geographic licensing restrictions.

France has been one of the prime examples of this type of regulation, i2Coalition notes. In May 2025, a Paris court ordered NordVPN, CyberGhost, Surfshark, ExpressVPN, and Proton VPN to block 203 pirate sports streaming domains at the request of Canal+.

More orders followed later.

“These cases, brought by rightsholders before French courts, illustrate how obligations imposed at one layer of the Internet can migrate to another when users find alternative technical paths around court-ordered restrictions,” the report notes.

That raises a broader question.

According to the report, the issue is not just which intermediaries can be ordered to block, but whether these measures actually reduce piracy, and what side effects they have for lawful users.

The French legal battle isn’t over either.

The report describes the decisions as “currently pending appeal,” but it doesn’t mention the latest twists. On September 30, the Paris Court of Appeal put an appeal by NordVPN, Proton, and CyberGhost against a similar order, obtained by football league LFP, on hold. It will first wait for a ruling from France’s Supreme Court, the Cour de cassation, in related DNS blocking cases.

A week later, the Paris court refused beIN’s request for daily penalties against VPN providers and Cloudflare, which had not fully blocked the targeted sites.

i2Coalition is aware of these developments but will keep the report text as is.

“We’re following those proceedings, including the pending Cour de cassation outcome. We’re keeping the text for this release, but those developments will inform future updates. They don’t change our broader concern about the implications of extending blocking obligations to VPN providers,” Executive Director Christian Dawson tells us.

Target the Right Layer

The report doesn’t ask for a VPN exemption from any and all regulation. Instead, it urges lawmakers to be precise, and to take measures where they make the most sense.

“Policymakers should consider where meaningful knowledge and control actually reside and whether an obligation can be directed toward the relevant conduct or service before moving deeper into general-purpose Internet infrastructure. The further an intervention moves from the activity being regulated, the greater the need to consider its effects on unrelated users and services,” the report reads.

Targeting the right layer is particularly important when it comes to VPNs. Consumer VPN services and corporate networks rely on many of the same underlying technologies, including protocols such as OpenVPN and WireGuard.

The report notes that Russia’s reported blocking of these VPN protocols shows how hard it is to tell the different uses apart at the network level.

When it comes to liability, i2Coalition points to the U.S. Supreme Court’s Cox ruling from earlier this year. This ruling confirmed that continuing to provide an Internet service, while knowing that some customers may misuse it, isn’t enough on its own to establish contributory copyright infringement.

The group sees the principles from this ruling as relevant to VPNs as well, but it doesn’t claim the matter is settled.

“If providers face liability merely because general-purpose services can be misused, they may have strong incentives to terminate users, restrict access, or intervene preemptively even when they have limited knowledge of the underlying conduct. Obligations should therefore reflect what an intermediary can reasonably know, control, and address,” the report warns.

“We see those principles as relevant to the debate around VPNs, but we aren’t suggesting that the ruling automatically determines the outcome of every VPN case. That would depend on the facts and legal issues presented,” Dawson notes.

VPN providers are not completely without responsibilities. According to the report, they can strengthen trust through independent audits and cooperation with legitimate legal processes. Voluntary programs, such as the VPN Trust Initiative’s own Trust Seal, can complement these efforts.

Lawmakers, in turn, should involve VPN providers and other technical experts from the start when they want to tackle a problem.

Silent on U.S. Bills

The report doesn’t apply these recommendations to the pending site blocking bills, as neither ACPA nor DEFEND IP is mentioned.

That’s notable, as ACPA would allow courts to name VPN providers with 100,000 or more monthly U.S. users or subscribers in a blocking order. That’s a position VPN companies would rather not be in.

TorrentFreak asked i2Coalition why the report doesn’t mention the two bills. Dawson says that the group is following both proposals, but that this particular report focuses on other developments.

“For this edition, we’ve focused on the developments covered in the report rather than trying to capture every pending legislative proposal. We expect to revisit US legislation in a future update as the debate develops,” Dawson says.

For now, both bills remain pending. Issa retires at the end of the year and Tillis’s term ends in January, so both bills would have to move ahead before the current session closes.

—

A copy of i2Coalition’s “VPNs at Risk” report is available here (pdf).

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

These logs would presumably reveal how Meta’s torrent clients were set up, including any changes to their upload settings.

The order is one of many discovery battles in the lawsuits over Meta’s use of shadow libraries. In the class action filed by authors including Richard Kadrey and Sarah Silverman, the court already ruled that training AI models on the books was fair use. That left the BitTorrent claims as the last live part of that case.

The server logs could reveal what happened on Meta’s machines. However, publisher Entrepreneur Media also wants to know who approved the torrenting activity.

‘Technical’ Decisions

Entrepreneur Media, which publishes Entrepreneur magazine, filed one of the related lawsuits where it accuses Meta of contributing to piracy by uploading (seeding) works to third parties, similar to the authors’ contributory infringement claim.

To find out more, the publisher asked Meta to identify everyone who “made, authorized, or approved” the decisions to obtain the shadow library datasets, and to do so via BitTorrent.

Meta’s answers named several people who are believed to have been involved in data-related decisions. However, Meta said it couldn’t identify anyone who “formally” made or approved decisions to acquire or use books for its first two Llama models. Those decisions were often the result of team consensus, Meta argued.

When it came to the torrenting itself, Meta pointed to the employees who ran the downloads, describing their choices as technical decisions.

Meta added that the acquisition of data from Anna’s Archive went through an internal legal review in early 2024, which involved its in-house lawyers.

In other words, the company didn’t name anyone higher up who approved the use of BitTorrent.

“On that construction no one at Meta decided to torrent anything, yet Meta torrented shadow libraries repeatedly from 2022-2024,” Entrepreneur Media countered.

‘Legally Not Okay’

The question becomes more concrete when it comes to seeding. One of the engineers who torrented LibGen data previously testified that the issue of seeding was raised and discussed internally, and that steps were taken to limit it.

An internal Meta logbook, which one employee reviewed before starting a download from Anna’s Archive, mentions a decision not to use torrents.

“Decided to go with direct file uploads without using torrents for the following reasons: Using torrents would entail seeding the file such as sharing content outside. This would be legally not okay,” the logbook reads, as quoted in Entrepreneur Media’s filing.

Meta does not deny that it used BitTorrent to download LibGen’s Scimag collection and data from Anna’s Archive. However, it says it isn’t aware of anyone who “made, authorized, or approved” a decision to upload or distribute the data. Meta’s lawyers also added that measures were implemented to avoid seeding.

How much data Meta shared with others is not clear either. Last year, Meta’s own expert estimated that uploads from its AWS servers didn’t exceed roughly 30% of the data downloaded during torrent downloads between April and July 2024.

Everyone in the Group

Yesterday, Judge Hixson ruled on the dispute. Two weeks earlier, Meta informed the court that it had no additional information to provide on the torrenting decision.

This didn’t convince the judge. He noted that the interrogatory isn’t limited to formal decisions, and that Meta’s answers were mostly about using the data, not obtaining or downloading it.

Meta’s argument that decisions were often collaborative doesn’t change that. The interrogatory asks about all decisionmakers, so if a decision was made by a team, everyone involved has to be named.

Meta must also identify the people who took part in the discussion that preceded the 2023 LibGen torrent download. In addition, it has to name the people who approved going ahead with BitTorrent, and whoever greenlit the April 2024 download from Anna’s Archive.

Notably, the order also covers everyone who decided “whether or how to seed, or to mitigate seeding,” when Meta downloaded LibGen’s Scimag collection and Anna’s Archive through BitTorrent.

For Entrepreneur Media, these names are important. The publisher says the answers “bear on” willfulness, as well as on its contributory copyright infringement and distribution claims.

This dispute largely revolved around naming the people involved. Whether Meta’s torrenting was fair use, and whether it actually distributed pirated books to others, has yet to be decided.

—

A copy of Magistrate Judge Hixson’s order is available here (pdf). The joint letter briefs filed by Entrepreneur Media and Meta can be found here (pdf) and here (pdf). Meta’s second supplemental interrogatory responses are available here (pdf).

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

The request is part of the DMCA anti-circumvention lawsuit that the Irdeto-owned company filed in September. That complaint identified the cracker only by a Discord user ID, a Reddit account and seven Steam profiles.

Denuvo wanted to subpoena Discord, Valve and Reddit, and its request wasn’t limited to just names and email addresses. The proposed subpoenas also requested payment details, login logs and post/comment histories, which turned out to be a step too far for the court.

‘Voluminous Data’

On October 8, Judge Haywood S. Gilliam Jr. ordered Denuvo to explain why it needs “the voluminous data contained in its requests for production” to identify and serve the defendant.

“Plaintiff’s requests for production go well beyond what is needed for the limited purpose of identifying the defendant and could pose substantial privacy concerns,” Judge Gilliam wrote.

The proposed subpoena to Valve was the broadest with 35 requests for the seven Steam profiles. These covered payment methods and transaction histories, IP addresses with timestamps, device identifiers, and any linked accounts.

Discord was asked to list the account’s server memberships and role assignments. Reddit, meanwhile, was asked for the posts and comments by ‘voices38’, as well as the account’s subreddit memberships.

From 46 Requests to Nine

The judge gave Denuvo the option to revise the subpoenas, using a narrow subpoena model from another case, or justify each data request in detail.

Denuvo chose the revise option. A few days ago, it filed new subpoenas that ask the platforms for targeted information.

Each request now covers documents relating to the identity or contact information of the account holder. That includes names, identification documents, email addresses, IP addresses, phone numbers, and business or residential addresses. Instead of the 46 original requests, there are now nine.

The new requests no longer list payment data, transaction histories, login logs, comments or posts. They do ask for IP addresses and phone numbers, which go beyond the model subpoena the judge pointed to. Denuvo argues that the platforms collect little information at sign up, and that what they collect is self reported.

The IP addresses may therefore be the only reliable path to the defendant, Denuvo writes. It also wants any name or identification document these companies have on file.

“Denuvo has only a pseudonym,” the company notes.

The crypto platform FixedFloat isn’t on the list of subpoena targets. Denuvo previously said that it found cryptocurrency transactions by the cracker on the crypto exchange, but it hasn’t asked the court for permission to subpoena the platform.

Subpoenas Granted

After reviewing the new request, Judge Gilliam granted the motion. This means that Denuvo can now serve Discord, Valve and Reddit with the revised subpoenas, to identify the defendant and serve the lawsuit.

The subpoenas set November 3 as the deadline for the platforms to produce the requested information. Whether that will be enough to put a name to ‘voices38’ has yet to be seen.

—

A copy of Judge Gilliam’s order to show cause is available here (pdf). Denuvo’s response, with the revised subpoenas, can be found here (pdf), and the order granting the motion is available here (pdf).

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

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 four newcomers on the list.

“Spider-Man: Brand New Day” is the most shared title.

The most torrented movies for the week ending on October 19 are:

Note: We also publish an updating archive of all the list of weekly most torrented movies lists.

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

Tencent is not the only Chinese platform to try its luck there. Last year, rival streaming service iQIYI used the same court and the same legal team to sue Aiyifan, a pirate streaming service for Chinese speakers outside China.

Aiyifan also operates under the names YFSP and IYF, with domains including aiyifan.tv, yfsp.tv and iyf.tv. According to Similarweb, yfsp.tv alone drew roughly 14 million visits last month.

Unlike Olevod, Aiyifan never appeared in court, and none of its operators were named as defendants. However, the U.S. case isn’t the only legal trouble the pirate site is up against. In China, one of the site’s operators has been sentenced to prison recently.

Operator Jailed in China

In August, iQIYI informed the Florida court that the Shanghai Third Intermediate People’s Court had upheld the criminal conviction of Wang Jianyang, describing him as one of Aiyifan’s principals.

According to the ruling, Wang ran a company in Chongqing that provided the technical support for Aiyifan’s website and app. He also handled advertising and promotion, working on the pirate platform since 2022.

The Chinese police detained Wang in March 2024, which was more than a year before iQIYI filed its lawsuit in Florida.

Wang had been convicted before. In 2021, a court in Jiangsu gave him a suspended prison sentence of three years and a 6 million yuan fine for setting up another pirate site.

Aiyifan launched while he was still on probation. In March of this year, a Shanghai district court revoked the suspension and added a new sentence of three and a half years, plus a 1 million yuan fine. Combined, Wang faces four and a half years in prison and a 7 million yuan fine.

Wang appealed the verdict, arguing that the evidence was insufficient and that, at most, he merely provided technical support. The appeals court disagreed, however, concluding that he played a major role in the operation. That ruling is final.

Florida: $1.96 Million Instead of $196 Million

In Florida, iQIYI’s civil case was launched in hopes to shut down the site. Aiyifan didn’t respond to the complaint in the U.S. federal court, after which a default was entered in July 2025.

iQIYI asked for a massive $196.55 million in damages. Most of that came from applying the $150,000 statutory maximum to 776 registered works, while thousands of unregistered works added another $78.55 million in proposed damages.

In January, Judge Melissa Damian ruled that Aiyifan is indeed liable. However, she rejected the damages award because it lacked support. iQIYI responded with a revised request for $54.4 million, but that was still too much for the court.

In an order issued last week, Judge Damian awarded $1,000 per registered work, doubled for willfulness, for a total of $1.8 million. The award covers a total of 901 works as more copyright registrations had been processed as the case moved on.

The trademark claims added $160,000, but there were no damages awarded for the roughly 5,000 unregistered works. This brings the total to $1.96 million, about 1% of the original request.

The reduces damages is not the only setback for the Chinese streaming company either, as its requested injunction is also limited.

Judge Won’t Transfer Domains

iQIYI specifically targeted the pirate site’s domain names, asking the court to hand them over and redirect them to iQIYI’s own site. It also wanted ISPs, hosting companies, CDNs, payment processors and WeChat to stop serving Aiyifan.

The amended motion for a default judgment dropped most of these third parties, but it still requested the domain takeovers, to effectively take these offline.

Judge Damian was not convinced that this would be appropriate. iQIYI admitted that it couldn’t say how much of the content on the sites was infringing, or whether any of the other content is licensed.

Aiyifan streams plenty of content that is not owned by iQIYI. Taking over the domains entirely would therefore go too far, the judge concluded.

The order acknowledges that “some other judges in this District have a more liberal approach to the dispensation of injunctive relief.” However, Judge Damian sided with the Eleventh Circuit’s requirement that injunctions must be narrowly tailored.

Partial Domain Registrar Suspensions?

Instead of transferring the domains, the judgment orders domain registrars to cancel the pages and subdomains that feature iQIYI’s shows or trademarks, once iQIYI provides a list.

If a registrar fails to comply, the registry must move the domain to a registrar of iQIYI’s choosing. That changes the registrar but would not transfer the ownership.

Whether registrars can comply is questionable. A registrar controls the domain registration, not the pages on a website, so the only tools at its disposal are suspending or redirecting a domain as a whole.

That is exactly the broad outcome the court is trying to avoid.

Even the subdomains are a stretch. Two of the listed sites, m.yfsp.tv and www.yfsp.tv, share a single domain, and a registrar can only switch one of them off if it also runs the domain’s DNS.

For now, the Aiyifan sites remain online. Without a response from the operators, it’s also unclear whether iQIYI will be able to collect any of the damages.

—

A copy of the final default judgment, issued at the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Florida, is available here (pdf). The accompanying order can be found here (pdf), and the translated Shanghai ruling, as filed by iQIYI, here (pdf).

The seven (sub)domains listed in the judgment: m.yfsp.tv, www.yfsp.tv, www.yfsp.lv, www.iyf.tv, www.iyf.lv, www.aiyifan.tv and www.ayysp.com.

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

The order followed a familiar pattern. It was requested by beIN Sports, which holds the exclusive French rights to most WTA tour matches. A day later, the broadcaster secured a similar order against Cloudflare.

In its initial request, beIN asked for penalties of €2,000 per day for each domain that two of the VPN providers failed to block. The court refused to grant that, however, as nothing showed that the providers intended not to comply. If problems arose, the parties could return to court. That’s exactly what happened.

beIN Loses Penalty Request

As first reported by L’Informé, the broadcaster went back to the Paris court, complaining that VPN providers and Cloudflare had not fully blocked the sites. This time, it requested a daily penalty of €10,000 for every domain that remained accessible.

Cloudflare, Surfshark and NordVPN, all represented by the same lawyer, cited technical constraints and said they had done their best to comply. Proton was also targeted but did not show up at the hearing.

The blocking efforts were indeed not bulletproof. Cloudflare blocked three of the four sites, but only through its CDN. Surfshark and NordVPN blocked six of eleven, and only through the DNS service on their servers in France.

‘Reasonable Effort’

For the court, those measures were enough. In two rulings issued on October 7, it concluded that the intermediaries must make a reasonable effort to block the sites, but they don’t have to guarantee the outcome, in line with EU Court of Justice case law. The case files also showed that all companies had carried out the orders, at least in part.

“The requested penalty (…) therefore does not appear necessary or proportionate, given the need to strike a fair balance between the protection of the intellectual property rights of copyright and neighboring rights holders, and the freedom to conduct a business enjoyed by economic operators,” the court wrote, as quoted by L’Informé (translated).

The original blocking orders themselves remain in effect until the end of the WTA season, which is currently set for November 14. Meanwhile, beIN can still appeal.

The outcome mirrors the Paris court’s ruling in Canal+’s case against Cloudflare last month. There, Canal+ was refused daily penalties of €50,000 per site, as the court concluded that Cloudflare only had to take reasonable measures, which it did by blocking through its CDN.

DNS resolver Quad9 is next in line. According to the Swiss foundation, beIN wants €10,000 per domain, per day, which adds up to €580,000 a day. Quad9’s position is different, however, as it isn’t blocking any of the domains at all. A decision on that request is expected later this month.

Appeals Court Hits Pause

The penalty rulings are not the only setback for rightsholders. The VPN providers are also fighting the blocking orders directly, and that effort just got room to run.

Last year, NordVPN, Proton and CyberGhost appealed one of the first VPN blocking orders, which French football league LFP obtained in May 2025.

At the request of the VPN providers, the Paris Court of Appeal put that case on hold on September 30. Instead of ruling on the appeal, it will wait for France’s Supreme Court, the Cour de cassation, to decide on appeals against seven earlier rulings.

These rulings, issued in March and May this year, upheld blocking orders that Canal+ obtained against DNS providers. In the March cases, Google, Cloudflare and Cisco lost their appeals. Several DNS providers then took the matter to the Supreme Court.

The appeals court acknowledged that these cases are not identical to the VPN dispute. However, it sees enough overlap to pause the case and wait for the Supreme Court outcome.

“Despite the differences, namely that the seven decisions under appeal concern DNS providers rather than VPNs, and that they were issued at the request of the Canal Plus companies rather than LFP and LFP1, the present case has many legal questions in common with the rulings under appeal before the [Supreme Court],” the court writes (translated).

These overlapping questions include who can be ordered to help stop piracy, whether the French blocking law complies with EU law, how infringements must be proven, and when blocking measures are proportionate.

When the Supreme Court will rule on the matter is unknown, but the appeals court believes the outcome could affect the VPN case as well.

—

A copy of the Paris Court of Appeal’s ruling (RG 25/09229) is available here (pdf).

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

The annual review doesn’t make any legal findings. Instead, it aims to encourage the listed services, and the countries they operate from, to take proper action against piracy and counterfeiting.

Last week, the RIAA responded with a submission that mostly mentions familiar targets. It lists torrent sites, stream-rippers and cyberlockers, many of which were flagged in previous years. There are some notable newcomers too, including Anna’s Archive.

Anna’s Archive and the Spotify Scrape

In December last year, the shadow library announced that it had downloaded 86 million music files from Spotify, plus metadata for 256 million tracks. This prompted an aggressive legal response.

A few days later, the RIAA coordinated an emergency court action on behalf of its members and Spotify, which resulted in a temporary restraining order against the site. Following this order, domain registry PIR suspended the site’s .org domain, and RIAA says Cloudflare also stopped providing services to the shadow library.

Following this crackdown, Anna’s Archive initially reported that its Spotify metadata torrent was “unavailable until further notice.” In February, however, the site quietly released roughly 3 million music files.

While the torrents for those releases were delisted shortly after, the lawsuit continued, with the labels and Spotify on the winning end.

“On April 14, 2026, RIAA and Spotify obtained a $322 million default judgment against the unknown operators of Anna’s Archive,” the RIAA writes in its USTR submission.

Despite the legal victory, the music group stresses that Anna’s Archive remains available through its .gl, .pk and .gd domains.

The RIAA isn’t the only rightsholder group that flagged the shadow library to the USTR. The Association of American Publishers (AAP) also lists Anna’s Archive as a “notorious” online site (pdf). According to the publishers, traffic to Anna’s Archive’s domains grew 28% despite their enforcement efforts, to an average of 41 million visitors a month.

The AAP also highlights that Anna’s Archive offers AI developers high-speed access to its collection, in exchange for what the site describes as an “enterprise-level donation.”

Voice Clones and Leaks

The AI angle also applies to newcomer Lalals, a service operated by a company based in the United Arab Emirates. This AI platform allows users to change a vocal recording to sound like popular artists such as Taylor Swift and Drake, without their permission.

According to the RIAA, that infringes the artists’ rights of publicity and likely also infringes its members’ rights in the sound recordings that were used to train the voice models.

“The sound recording artists whose voices are being exploited include Taylor Swift, Drake, Ariana Grande, Bruno Mars, Ed Sheeran, Lady Gaga, Chris Martin, and Rihanna, among many others,” RIAA writes.

In the cyberlocker category, meanwhile, Mega is a familiar target. The European Commission added the file-hosting service to its own piracy watch list in 2022, and the RIAA now lists it among the notorious markets it wants the USTR to include.

“While Mega removes content that is specifically reported by rights holders, it does not implement effective measures to prevent the re-upload of infringing material or deter repeat infringement,” the RIAA writes.

RIAA stresses that users of the platform continue to share pre-release music and AI-related content, such as vocal models and cloned recordings. On what grounds Mega is required to prevent reuploads is not mentioned by the music group.

Several new cyberlockers are flagged for their role in pre-release piracy as well. These include Gofile, Sendgb and Imgur.gg.

Links to these services are reportedly shared on music leak forums, and the RIAA mentions Leaked.cx by name in the entries for Sendgb, Imgur.gg and Pixeldrain, which was already included in last year’s submission.

This Imgur.gg hosting platform doesn’t appear to be affiliated with the popular image host Imgur. When we checked, the site didn’t list any company details, but it did promote a music streaming app “Built by the imgur.gg team.”

RIAA goes on to mention that Telegram and Discord remain the primary mechanisms through which pre-release music is distributed. That accusation isn’t new, as the passage is nearly identical to last year’s submission.

Familiar Names, Familiar Words

Many other entries are familiar as well. The Pirate Bay, 1337x and RuTracker are listed in the torrent category, Rapidgator and Krakenfiles are flagged as cyberlockers, and Y2mate and Savefrom remain in the stream-ripping section.

Krakenfiles is still listed, even though the RIAA notes that it removed its upload functionality this year.

Whether any of the newly nominated sites will make it onto the USTR’s final list has yet to be seen. Last year, the USTR included several of the RIAA’s picks, including Y2mate, Savefrom and Krakenfiles.

Before the USTR makes its decision, the sites and services mentioned in the submissions can respond with rebuttals of their own, which Mega plans to do.

Responding to our request for comment, the company says that it removes reported content and permanently closes the accounts of repeat infringers, as is required under U.S. law.

According to Mega, infringing activity represents a small fraction of the overall use of the service. Last year, it processed close to 3.9 million copyright takedown requests and removed links represented around 0.002% of the more than 208 billion files stored by its 338 million registered users.

In the same period, 5,627 accounts were suspended under its “three strikes in six months” repeat infringer policy.

“Mega respectfully disagrees with the RIAA’s characterization, which fundamentally mischaracterizes the nature of the service, and will be filing its own submission with USTR setting out why its inclusion on the Notorious Markets List would be unwarranted,” Mega’s Legal and Compliance Manager Csaba Szabó informs TorrentFreak.

—

The RIAA’s full 2026 list of “notorious” sites and services can be found below, and the full report is available here (pdf). The cursive listings marked (new) are newcomers and those that were removed are crossed out. The RIAA stresses that this list is a non-exhaustive overview.

Stream-Ripping Sites

– Y2mate.gs (formerly y2mate.nu)
– Savefrom.net
– Ssyoutube.com
– Notube.net
– Y2mate.is (new)
– Snaptube app and related domains

Music Download/Streaming Sites

– Mp3.pm (new)
– Tubidy.cool (previously listed as a stream-ripper)
– Scnlog.me
– newalbumreleases.net
– waploaded.com
– hiphopkit.com

BitTorrent Indexing Sites

– ThePirateBay.org
– 1337x.to
– Rutracker.org

Cyberlockers

– Rapidgator.net
– Krakenfiles.com
– Chomikuj.pl
– Pixeldrain.com
– Pillows.su
– Mega.nz (new)
– Gofile.io (new)
– Sendgb.com (new)
– Imgur.gg (new)
– Ddownload.com (new)

Additional Issues

– Anna’s Archive (annas-archive.gl, .pk, .gd) (new)
– Lalals.com (new)
– Other intermediaries: Telegram and Discord
– Bulletproof ISPs: PRQ, Frantech Solutions/BuyVM/PONYNET, DDoS Guard
– Domain Name Registrars: NameCheap, Tucows and others

Physical Markets

– Counterfeit CDs and vinyl from China and Russia, sold through Amazon, eBay, Vinted, Marktplaats, Leboncoin and Wallapop (new)

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

The site appeared to have mirrored most of Anna’s collection and used a fork of its codebase. Since WeLib wasn’t sharing new collections or code improvements in return, Anna’s Archive cautioned prospective users.

“We recommend not using them,” the team wrote at the time.

In June, major book publishers came to a similar conclusion, but for different reasons. They filed a lawsuit against WeLib in New York federal court, alleging that the site “was created after its operators copied the source code and most of the contents of” Anna’s Archive.

Despite these and other copyright infringement allegations, WeLib’s anonymous operators never responded to the lawsuit. This prompted the publishers to move forward and the court clerk entered a default in August, opening the door to a final judgment request.

$19.5 Million, Again

On Monday, the publishers, including Penguin Random House, Elsevier, and HarperCollins, asked U.S. District Judge Victor Marrero to issue a default judgment against WeLib and its unnamed operators.

“Defendant WeLib is a pirate site whose sole business is the distribution of protected content in violation of the rights of Plaintiffs and other copyright owners,” their brief reads.

The publishers request the maximum statutory damages of $150,000 for each of the 130 works listed in the complaint, ten per publisher. That adds up to $19.5 million, the same amount Judge Jed Rakoff awarded in the Anna’s Archive case.

The brief also puts a spotlight on WeLib’s revenue model. The site can be used for free, but it asks users for “donations” of up to $90 a month. According to the publishers, these are simply payments for faster downloads.

In addition to the damages, the publishers want a permanent injunction. This would require domain registries and registrars to disable welib.org, welib.st, and welib-public.org, and to block their transfer to anyone other than the publishers. Hosting providers would have to stop serving the sites.

The injunction would apply to all applicable intermediaries, but the proposed order names five specifically: Public Interest Registry, Cloudflare, Tucows, and two Njalla entities. That’s a much shorter list than the Anna’s Archive judgment, which named more than twenty.

Borrowed From Anna’s Archive

It is not unusual that arguments from a similar case are reused and that also applies here. Large parts of the WeLib brief mirror the one that law firm Oppenheim + Zebrak filed against Anna’s Archive in May, on behalf of the same publishers.

However, not everything fits. According to the brief, WeLib diverts revenue from the publishers “at a scale made worse by their use of the viral BitTorrent protocol.”

We haven’t seen any evidence that WeLib uses BitTorrent, and the WeLib complaint doesn’t mention it either. Instead, the cited paragraphs discuss various harms including lost sales and harm to the market for AI training data.

The same sentence appears, word for word, in the brief against Anna’s Archive. There, it was backed up by the complaint, which described how Anna’s Archive offers torrent files for bulk downloads on a dedicated “Torrents” page.

WeLib’s own complaint mentions another download mechanism. It describes how the site serves files directly from its servers, through “slow” and paid “fast” downloads.

The brief also mentions that WeLib’s infringement continued “despite this and several other cases against them.” That entire paragraph comes straight from the Anna’s Archive brief. While Anna’s Archive was sued before, we are not aware of any other lawsuits against WeLib’s operators.

Even a typo and a garbled sentence with a double negative were copied. Both briefs mention what happens if the court “is satified” that the default standards are met, and both argue that the defendants “cannot establish that they have not presented any meritorious defenses.”

A Paper Victory?

It’s now up to Judge Marrero to decide on the request. Whatever the outcome, the publishers are unlikely to collect much, if anything, as WeLib’s operators remain anonymous.

Anna’s Archive lost several domains to an earlier injunction obtained by music companies. However, it remains online through .gl, .pk, and .gd domains, which are tied to registries and registrars outside the United States.

If Anna’s Archive is any indication, the injunction may cost WeLib some of its domains. However, that is no guarantee that the site will shut down permanently.

—

We reached out to Oppenheim + Zebrak for comment on the BitTorrent claim, but they did not respond before publication.

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

That changed in August, when the operators announced a surprise shutdown. The site was taken offline in stages over more than a week, with the last domains going dark in early September.

At first, the operators did not explain why they threw in the towel. In a final statement, however, they said that their two main video providers, which they named as the “Sflix group” and “1Movies group,” went down about three months earlier, and that the service never fully recovered.

No anti-piracy operation was mentioned and the usual enforcement groups, including the Alliance for Creativity and Entertainment (ACE), did not claim it either, until now.

The MPA Takes Credit

Last week, the Motion Picture Association (MPA) sent its annual overview of notorious foreign piracy markets to the U.S. Trade Representative (USTR). Before listing the threats that remain, the Hollywood group highlights what it sees as positive developments since its previous submission.

The demise of Cineby is one of them, together with the linked embed service Videasy.

“On another positive note, 2025 submissions Cineby[.]app and Videasy[.]net have ceased operations following MPA and ACE actions,” the MPA writes.

Earlier in the new filing, the MPA links the takedown of Cineby-associated domains to an “extensive investigation and multi-region enforcement effort.”

Following this effort, the main cineby.at domain is “nonfunctional” and Videasy is offline, the MPA notes. Vidking, which is mentioned alongside them, is still accessible but “has no connected source servers.”

The submission doesn’t mention a court or a police force, so it appears to be a private enforcement effort. Further details are not shared.

The same filing does credit Vietnamese law enforcement with dismantling the HiAnime piracy network, which according to the MPA also included Sflix/MyFlixer and Megacloud/Vidcloud. Seven suspected operators were charged in July.

This is likely the same “Sflix group” Cineby referred to, suggesting that Cineby used services from the Vietnamese group that was shut down.

While the MPA lists Cineby as “no longer active,” the brand hasn’t disappeared entirely. There are several copycats that popped up, including cineby.vg, which the MPA mentions in its report.

AnimeFLV Too

Cineby isn’t the only unexplained shutdown that the MPA now counts as a victory. The submission also lists the Spanish-language anime portal AnimeFLV, which previously received more than a billion annual visits, according to the MPA.

“Additionally, the AnimeFLV family of sites included in last year’s submission has shut down following MPA and ACE actions. This shutdown represents a significant enforcement success,” the MPA writes.

In July, we reported that AnimeFLV had stopped serving video in mid-June. The operators stayed silent and no anti-piracy group took credit, until now.

Today, the AnimeFLV domain no longer loads anything. Instead, it returns an HTTP 502 error. Of course, this brand has also been taken over by copycats since.

The Hydra Keeps Growing

Aside from the successes, the MPA’s submission lists dozens of sites and services that remain a problem. The group stresses that its overview is not intended to be comprehensive, but it highlights several key threats.

Last year, Myflixerz/Sflix, Cuevana, and HiAnime were listed as priority linking and streaming sites. This year, Kisskh is the only priority entry, while Cuevana moved to the regular list.

Kisskh, which specializes in Asian dramas and Hollywood content, received more than 70 million visits on its kisskh.is domain in August, mostly from India.

The “hydra sites” category that the MPA introduced last year remains a key concern. These pirate portals often rely on third-party Piracy-as-a-Service (PaaS) platforms for their videos. This includes the live sports PaaS service Streamed.

According to the MPA, the roughly 30 sites that use the live sports PaaS Streamed had 463 million visits in July, up from 134 million a year earlier.

New hydra threats include 1Shows/1Flex, CineHD/VidBox, and StreamEX. On the PaaS side, Videasy and MegaCloud are shut down and no longer listed, but there are newcomers. VidFast, for example, is reportedly used by at least 158 pirate sites with roughly 629 million monthly visits combined.

In the cyberlockers and video hosting category, Telegram now tops the priority list, while DoodStream moved to the regular list. Among other things, the MPA notes that Telegram’s response to takedown notices ranges from swift processing to weeks of inaction.

“Telegram is a platform of immediate concern,” the MPA writes.

In the hosting category, the MPA shares new details on Netulu, which was already mentioned last year. The company was incorporated in Delaware in April and MPA says that, at that time, all piracy sites hosted by Private Layer were transferred to it. According to the MPA, U.S.-based investigators are “following leads.”

Pirate app MovieBox is back on the list as well. The MPA cites more than 243 million downloads from Palm Store alone, but as we reported last week, the store’s counter has already passed 300 million.

The USTR will review the MPA’s submission, together with input from other stakeholders, in the coming months. Its own notorious markets list is expected early next year.

—

– .CC Registry
– .IO Registry
– .RU Registry
– .SX Registry
– .TO Registry
– .TV Registry
– .SU Registry

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

The resulting list of ‘notorious markets‘ traditionally features torrent sites, cyberlockers and streaming portals. In recent years, hosting companies and other intermediaries were added as well.

Last week, the Entertainment Software Association (ESA), which represents many of the major video game companies, submitted its latest recommendations. These include the usual suspects, but also a target that doesn’t have a website of its own.

A Game Cracker as a Piracy ‘Market’

ESA’s submission lists ‘voices38’ as one of its new threats. The game industry group describes the anonymous cracker as a persistent operation that specializes in beating Denuvo Anti-Tamper, the popular technical protection measure that’s used by at least nine of its members.

According to ESA, Reddit’s r/CrackWatch index attributes roughly two dozen cracked or bypassed games to ‘voices38’. The gaming group stresses that the cracker plays a key role in the piracy ecosystem as its releases are picked up by repackers, torrent sites, cyberlockers and piracy forums.

“Each crack therefore unlocks an entire downstream market for an unauthorized copy of that title. For a title that no other actor has made usable, but for Voices38’s crack there would be no functioning pirated copy for those markets to offer,” the submission notes.

“Treating only those downstream services as markets would overlook the upstream operation that determines whether protected games can be offered by them at all.”

The fact that the cracker has no public identity or “traditional homepage” shouldn’t stand in the way of a Notorious Markets listing either, ESA notes. In fact, it argues that a listing could help rightsholders crack down on the cracking operation.

“Designation would focus attention on identifying the operator, preserving evidence, disrupting distribution accounts and donation channels, and coordinating action across the forums, repositories, hosting services, peer-to-peer infrastructure, and other intermediaries used to seed each release,” ESA writes.

Ideally, ESA would like to identify the person or people behind the popular cracker handle and it’s not alone in this. Identifying the operator is also what Denuvo is trying to do through a U.S. federal court.

Lawsuit Doesn’t Stop the Cracks

Last month, Denuvo sued ‘voices38’ at a California federal court and it recently asked for permission to subpoena Discord, Valve and Reddit. ESA’s submission doesn’t mention this lawsuit.

So far, this hasn’t stopped the cracks from coming out. After a few quiet weeks, ‘voices38’ released cracks for Atomfall and The Adventures of Elliot: The Millennium Tales last week, as well as a crackfix for Dead Space Remake.

These releases swiftly spread over torrent sites and cyberlockers. Popular repacker FitGirl has already picked them up too, which brings us to ESA’s next target.

Billion Dollar FitGirl

After already being included in USTR’s 2024 and 2025 notorious markets lists, FitGirl gets a recommendation from ESA for the next installment.

FitGirl’s site is currently blocked in Germany, Italy, Spain and elsewhere, but ESA notes that these measures didn’t change much. The repack site received 41.77 million visits in August and continues to offer games published by ESA members.

“FitGirl’s scale and persistence demonstrate that prior blocking and designation have not induced meaningful remediation by its operator. ESA’s takedown notices to the site are ignored, with zero links removed between August 2025 and August 2026,” ESA writes.

The game companies also put a billion-dollar price tag on the losses, which they report down to the last cent.

“Between March and August 2026 alone, ESA detected 15,484,145 users in peer-to-peer swarms for games repacked by FitGirl, with an estimated lost value of $1,083,735,308.55,” the submission notes.

A footnote explains that this figure is based on a retail price of $69.99 for every user ESA spotted in a swarm.

Other targets are not very responsive either. DODI-Repacks removed 22% of the reported links and RuTracker, the Russian torrent site, complied with just 3% of ESA’s notices over the past year.

While these sites are not responding, ESA highlights that tracking their finances, including crypto transactions that go to KYC-vetted platforms such as Binance, could help to identify these targets.

Handheld Consoles as ‘Superfakes’

This year, the USTR’s review has a special focus on high-quality counterfeit goods, known as superfakes. ESA uses this opportunity to highlight handheld consoles that come preloaded with pirated games, which it sees as the video game equivalent of superfakes.

The group nominates Anbernic.com, the official store for a widely sold line of handheld emulation devices. ESA says these are routinely offered or shipped with memory cards that hold hundreds or thousands of unauthorized games, and notes that they are sold through Amazon and eBay as well.

The submission further lists G2A, FunPay and Eldorado.gg, where game accounts and in-game items are traded, as well as cheat sellers including Cronus Zen. ESA argues that cheats belong on a piracy list because they circumvent the technological protection measures of games.

It’s now up to the USTR to decide which of these recommendations make the final list. The previous edition was published in March, so we might have to wait a while before the final Notorious Markets list arrives.

—

A copy of ESA’s submission for the 2026 Notorious Markets review is available here (pdf).

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

The site is built on links from its own DHT crawler and dozens of external torrent sites and aggregators. In just a few months, the site has grown into an index of more than six million torrents, including the latest Hollywood blockbusters and hit series.

The homepage looks more modern than traditional torrent sites and has some clear AI-design tells. That’s not a secret. On the contrary, AI plays a central role in the site’s development and marketing.

According to TorrentClaw’s developers, who all use the name Deivid Soto, the platform is largely built and run with the help of AI.

“Basically, the core framework is Claude Code combined with local LLMs for specific execution and ingestion tasks,” Soto tells us.

For example, AI is used to match torrents to film and TV titles, so these can be neatly organized. The AI-driven categorization process takes over tasks that would otherwise be manual work, and AI helped to build novel tools as well.

One of the features built this way is TrueSpec, which checks whether torrents actually contain what their names suggest. That helps to spot fake torrents and malware.

TrueSpec: Download and Verify

On most torrent sites, release names are the main source of information for torrent users. They list the resolution, codec, audio and release group, but there’s no guarantee that any of it is accurate.

Mislabeled torrents are often handled by moderators on well-run torrent sites, but most automated indexes have no active moderation. That’s where TrueSpec comes in.

TrueSpec joins the torrent swarm, reads the file listing, and downloads enough pieces to check the video with the analysis tool ffprobe. According to the site and its developers, that’s between 10 and 20 MB per torrent.

In addition to verifying the names, TrueSpec also checks suspicious files. It looks up their hashes on VirusTotal and, if the files are small enough, uploads these for a scan. TorrentClaw doesn’t run its own virus scanner, the malware verdicts come from VirusTotal.

When TrueSpec finds malware, the torrent remains listed on the site, but with a “Malware detected” label and the download button disabled. At the time of writing, one fake Jujutsu Kaisen episode with this label still had 34 seeders while it remained available on some external sites.

Not Perfect

The TrueSpec system isn’t perfect. In July, an earlier dataset counted 6,450 malware cases, but many were false positives. These included the harmless RARBG_DO_NOT_MIRROR.exe file, fansub scripts that switch audio languages, and scripts that simply open a website.

The TrueSpec data from late September paints a different picture. TorrentClaw now only counts malware when VirusTotal confirms it, which leaves 34 torrents. We checked some of these against the evidence in the data, which links to a VirusTotal report for every confirmed case.

Detected malware is rare, but the count is likely too low. TrueSpec doesn’t download large executables, it prioritizes well-seeded torrents, and dead swarms can’t be checked at all. TorrentClaw also focuses on films and TV shows, so pirated software and games are largely left out.

Malware is only part of what TrueSpec flags. In total, 1,265 of the 687,057 probed torrents were flagged as deceptive, including programs disguised as videos and fake resolutions. That’s less than 0.2% of all checked torrents.

The most common type of ‘mislabeling’ is actually quite harmless. More than half of all probed torrents, 55%, include subtitle tracks that their release names don’t mention. TorrentClaw flags this as a missing label, but subtitles are typically not added to titles unless they are hardcoded. Scene rules don’t require this either.

VLC Player Malware

Most of the confirmed malware torrents follow the same pattern. In 31 of the 34 cases, the torrent includes an executable named after a new episode or film, a file called libvlc.dll, and a playable video in a subfolder.

The application is a renamed copy of the genuine VLC media player. According to TorrentClaw, it’s identical to VideoLAN’s official release and carries its code signature. The malicious part is the DLL, which VLC loads when it starts, and which VirusTotal engines flag as a trojan.

The torrents are named after popular new releases, including episodes of The Boys, Jujutsu Kaisen and Frieren, and films such as Dune: Part Three and Zootopia 2. Many also carry the names of known release or distribution groups, including SubsPlease, ETHEL and YTS.

This type of malware vector is not new. Earlier this year, a security researcher documented a campaign that used fake SubsPlease releases on Nyaa to spread the Vidar infostealer. These were reportedly uploaded from a stolen account.

TorrentClaw sourced its 31 torrents between February and August. Most of them, 22, came in through its own DHT crawler, while the rest were found via Nyaa, The Pirate Bay and TorrentDownload. All had seeders when indexed, and 15 were still active in early October, according to Soto.

Built For AI, By AI

TrueSpec isn’t the only thing that sets TorrentClaw apart. The torrent site also offers an MCP server, which allows AI assistants such as Claude and Cursor to search the index and fetch .torrent files directly.

Technically, this means that users can ask an AI assistant to find a release and load the torrent file, without ever visiting the site. According to Soto, some accounts make around 10,000 API requests a day, which might be external sites or services that use it.

Running TrueSpec doesn’t cost much either. In July, Soto said the system ran on three nodes costing well under $50 a month combined.

“The implicit point: if verification is this cheap, any indexer could be doing it, and none are,” Soto explained.

That said, partially downloading content from hundreds of thousands of torrents can also come with a legal cost. TorrentClaw’s DMCA page states that the site doesn’t host, store, upload or distribute files, but rightsholders may see things differently.

When asked about this, Soto describes TrueSpec as a read-only client that doesn’t upload or seed. It only fetches the first part of a video file, enough to read the container headers.

“[It] deletes everything once the analysis is done. We don’t store or serve any content, and we process every valid takedown notice we receive,” Soto says.

TorrentClaw also uses AI to handle these notices. It introduced an AI-managed system in late September that has handled 23 takedowns so far. Before that, the site received just over 300 notices, mostly duplicates.

TorrentClaw also charges for its premium features. PRO costs $3.99 a month, while PRO+ adds a VPN for $6.99. Whether that business model will hold up has yet to be seen, but commercial torrent services typically draw more attention from rightsholders than free ones.

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

In 2021, the domain was bought at auction by a new team, which says it isn’t part of the original one.

The new Series.ly, which requires a login to access, became pretty popular on its own, with nearly two million monthly visits, and nearly 90% of its traffic coming from Spain.

That popularity didn’t go unnoticed by rightsholders, which haven’t given up on shutting it down yet. In May, film and TV producers’ group EGEDA filed a complaint with the Second Section of Spain’s Intellectual Property Commission, which falls under the Ministry of Culture, aiming to shut the site down.

The Commission’s investigator checked a sample of 42 of the 110 titles that were listed in the complaint. Of these, 35 could be streamed or downloaded from Series.ly at the time. The Commission also ordered the site to remove the infringing content in July, but it says Series.ly never responded.

From Google to a Libyan Registrar

At the end of July, the Commission sanctioned a series of anti-piracy measures against the site, targeting third-party intermediaries. For example, the resolution requires Google and Bing to remove the site from their search results, while ISPs with a market share of more than 1% must block the domain name.

The ISPs are also urged to redirect visitors to a government page. This informs users that the Commission blocked the domain “for having illegally facilitated access to content protected by intellectual property rights” (translated).

The order also lists Cloudflare and Ukrainian hosting company Virtual Systems, whose Kyiv data centers were hit by Russian missile strikes last month, as well as Series.ly’s domain registrar, Libyan Spider Network. These measures apply to the current domain name, as well as new ones that the operator may use for the same purpose.

The Commission’s resolution needs court approval before it can be enforced. This came on September 28, when a judge at the Central Court of First Instance in Madrid concluded that the measures were proportionate, approving them as requested.

The Libyan Registrar Acts

Little more than a week later, at least one intermediary appears to have taken action. Earlier this week, Series.ly unexpectedly lost its domain name after the domain registrar, Libyan Spider, stepped in.

WHOIS records show that series.ly was placed on ‘clientHold’, a status set by the registrar to take a domain offline. This pulls the domain from the .ly zone, which means that Series.ly no longer resolves.

Libyan Spider hasn’t commented publicly, but the Series.ly operator says the notice cited the Spanish order. It reached them through the auction house that sold them the domain, which acts as a reseller for the registrar.

“The reason they gave us was a Spanish copyright resolution and a court order authorizing suspension measures against the domain,” the operator tells TorrentFreak (translated).

It is not clear whether the other intermediaries have taken action yet, but the court order remains valid.

Interestingly, soon after the Series.ly domain was suspended, a similar site with the Cinubo brand appeared online. The Series.ly Telegram and Discord were also renamed to Cinubo.

No Plans to Appeal

Regarding the suspension, the operator says it didn’t see the warnings before the domain was suspended. An EGEDA email it later found was sent to support@series.ly, while the address listed on the site is soporte@series.ly.

According to the operator, Series.ly is a non-profit that hasn’t generated any revenue since it launched. The site doesn’t host any video files, and the links to other services are added by the community, he explains.

“Our position is that complaints about those video files should be directed at the services that host or distribute them,” the operator says (translated).

“We think it’s disproportionate that a complaint about content hosted by third parties ends up getting our entire domain suspended, including email and the personal library features.”

For now, the operator doesn’t plan to appeal the Spanish order. The company behind the project is based in Nevis, which raises questions about the reach of the Spanish order, the operator argues.

“We question whether a procedure handled in Spain justifies suspending our domain worldwide, which also affects email and services that have nothing to do with the works in question,” the operator notes (translated).

This may not be the end of it though. The Spanish order also covers new domain names that are used for the same purpose, which could include the new Cinubo one. In addition, other intermediaries may take action as well.

—

Update October 9, 2026: A few days after it was suspended, the series.ly domain appears to be back under the control of its owner. The operator informs us that the registrar lifted the suspension, but stressed that the domain can no longer be used to link to copyright-infringing content.

Update 2: Series.ly now shows a page documenting the history of the domain. It no longer links to a streaming portal.

—

A copy of the Commission’s resolution is available here (pdf). The court’s authorization can be found here (pdf). The Series.ly operator’s answers were provided in Spanish. The quotes in this article were translated by TorrentFreak.

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

In addition to regular ISPs, the orders now target public DNS resolvers, VPN services, search engines and CDN providers, all of which can help people bypass existing blockades.

Internet infrastructure company Cloudflare has received several of these orders. In April, the Paris Judicial Court ordered the company to block 21 domains linked to pirate Formula 1 streams and 16 linked to MotoGP.

The orders covered Cloudflare’s DNS resolver as well as its CDN. However, they didn’t prescribe how the sites should be blocked, only that access from France had to be prevented “by any effective means.”

French pay-TV provider Canal+, which requested the blockades, concluded that Cloudflare’s efforts fell short. The broadcaster went back to court and, as first reported by L’Informé, it didn’t get what it wanted.

Canal+ Requested €50,000 a Day

In May, Canal+ asked the Paris court to add daily penalties to the April orders. It requested €50,000 per day for every site that remained accessible, and the same amount for every new site that media regulator Arcom reports to Cloudflare.

According to Canal+, Cloudflare had deliberately failed to comply with the site blocking orders.

“[Cloudflare] allegedly circumvented the measures by only implementing the decision through its CDN service, which meant that only three of the 21 domain names listed by the court were blocked,” Canal+ argued, according to the court’s summary (translated).

In the MotoGP case, Canal+ counted three blocked domains out of 16. In both cases, it added that two of the three blocked sites were back online a week later; one switched to a different CDN, while the other used a mirror site.

Court Sides With Cloudflare

On September 17, a panel of three judges ruled on both penalty requests. Cloudflare had pointed to technical constraints that only allowed it to comply through its CDN. It also stressed that the court had expressly left it free to choose which of its services to use, as long as it contributed meaningfully to the fight against sports piracy.

The court first noted that the way Cloudflare implements the blocking orders is not in dispute.

“It is undisputed that Cloudflare only implements the ordered measures by blocking through its CDN service, when the site uses that service,” the court writes (translated).

Cloudflare told the court that this is incomparably more effective than DNS blocking. It added that the architecture of its public DNS resolver doesn’t allow for blocking, making such measures unreasonable.

Canal+ had argued that Cloudflare only blocked 72.6% of the domain names the court ordered it to block. The court, however, saw the figure as evidence of a genuine willingness to help stop the infringements.

The ruling doesn’t explain how this percentage relates to the three out of 21 blocked domains that Canal+ cited earlier.

The court also concluded that Cloudflare can’t be blamed for the sites that switched to another CDN or moved to a mirror.

“Cloudflare cannot be held responsible when the owners of the sites in question switch to another CDN or set up a redirect to a mirror site,” the court writes (translated).

Instead, it is up to Canal+ to ask the new intermediary to block these sites and to report mirror sites to Arcom, the court notes.

Canal+ also argued that, under the EU Court of Justice’s UPC Telekabel Wien ruling, intermediaries must block effectively. The Paris court disagreed. In its view of the same ruling, intermediaries only have to take reasonable measures, which Cloudflare did with its CDN blocks.

The court therefore rejected the requested penalties as neither necessary nor proportionate. In addition, Canal+’s request for €20,000 in legal costs was also denied.

1.1.1.1 Stays Block-Free

As a result, Cloudflare will not be penalized under these orders, even though its public DNS resolver is not blocking the sites in question. That is in line with the company’s long-standing claim that it doesn’t interfere with its DNS.

In its recent transparency reports, Cloudflare repeatedly stated that it hasn’t blocked any content through 1.1.1.1, despite orders from French and Italian courts.

“To date, Cloudflare has not blocked content through the 1.1.1.1 Public DNS Resolver,” the company’s latest report reads.

Blocking through the CDN is another matter. According to the same report, Cloudflare geoblocked 1,238 domains in France in the second half of 2025, all under a single court order. In the first half of the year, it geoblocked 662 domains under seven orders.

Cloudflare recently explained its position to the European Commission, in a submission to its Counterfeit and Piracy Watch List consultation, stressing that global public DNS resolvers should not be used to block or restrict access.

Instead, it highlights its real-time pirate stream blocking program, which allows vetted rightsholders to flag pirate streams that run through its network. These streams are disrupted “within seconds,” Cloudflare says, without any DNS or IP address blocking.

“For live content, where speed is crucial, Cloudflare has built real-time mitigation mechanisms that allow vetted rightsholder partners to flag infringing streams. When those streams are running through our network, we act on them in seconds,” Cloudflare informed the Commission.

For now, Cloudflare can continue to block pirate sites through its CDN only, while its 1.1.1.1 DNS resolver remains untouched. Canal+ can still appeal the rulings, so it may not be the last we hear of it.

Non-profit DNS resolver Quad9 faces a similar, potentially bankrupting penalty request from beIN Sports for not blocking pirate content on its DNS resolver. How the Paris court will view this will become apparent later this month.

—

Copies of the Paris Judicial Court’s rulings in the Formula 1 (RG 26/08243) and MotoGP (RG 26/08228) cases are available here (pdf) and here (pdf). Cloudflare’s submission to the EU Counterfeit and Piracy Watch List consultation can be found here (pdf).

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

The site swiftly moved to a new domain, as we reported at the time, and its Android app remained widely available.

However, the app is now drawing attention in Brussels. In submissions for the European Commission’s 2027 Counterfeit and Piracy Watch List, both the Motion Picture Association (MPA) and French TV company Canal+ report MovieBox as a large piracy operation.

From 243 to 305 Million

Both rightsholders highlight the same app distribution channel. In its overview of piracy apps, the MPA notes that MovieBox was downloaded more than 243 million times from Palm Store alone.

Palm Store is the app store that comes preinstalled on Tecno, Infinix and itel phones. These brands all belong to Chinese phone maker Transsion, which sold 61.5% of all mobile phones in Africa in 2024, according to its own filings.

Canal+ adds more detail. It notes that MovieBox switched to moviebox.ph after enforcement action against its .ng domain in 2025.

According to Canal+, the app continued to grow after this switch. The site remains online today and the same is true for the app, which more than doubled its number of downloads in less than a year.

“As of 16 June 2026, PalmStore reported approximately 243.3 million MovieBox application downloads, representing growth of approximately 108% since August 2025, with MovieBox continuing to rank as the number one application in the Entertainment category on the PalmStore platform,” Canal+ writes.

The reported June count is already outdated. At the time of writing, Palm Store lists 305.6 million downloads for the app, an increase of more than 60 million in less than four months.

MovieBox’s store listing explicitly promotes movies, TV series and live sports. “Enjoy free access to sports live streams right in our app,” the description reads, with a specific mention of Europe’s five biggest leagues. Its promotional artwork features copyrighted shows and categories such as Marvel and Disney.

Transsion’s Own App Store

Palm Store is not an independent app marketplace. In a draft prospectus for its planned Hong Kong listing, Transsion describes it as its own app distribution platform, which had more than 180 million monthly active users on average last year.

This prospectus also explains how the app store makes money. Transsion states that it typically charges third-party developers based on the number of installs that go through its distribution platform. Whether this also applies to MovieBox is unknown.

‘Closely Linked’

Hosting an app in a store doesn’t mean that the store’s owner has anything to do with it. However, Canal+ suggests that the ties run deeper.

“MovieBox has been closely linked to the Transsion / Transsnet ecosystem. Historical domain registration records identified Transsion-linked registration details for moviebox.ng, while technical analysis of the Android application revealed certificates signed under the Transsion name and references to Transsion-owned infrastructure and services,” Canal+ writes.

The submission doesn’t explain what these registration details and certificates revealed. It also doesn’t state that Transsion owns or operates MovieBox.

Canal+ further mentions Excellent Innovation Limited, a Hong Kong company it connects to MovieBox through domain registrations, SSL certificates, developer attributions and trademark filings. Palm Store indeed lists this company as the app’s developer.

The MPA’s submission doesn’t mention Transsion at all. The Hollywood group merely notes that MovieBox is believed to be operated out of China.

Canal+ also has a more direct commercial interest in the matter. The French group owns MultiChoice, the pay-TV company behind DStv, which operates in the same African markets.

Neither of the submissions mentions whether anyone has asked Palm Store or Transsion to remove the app.

Before the Commission decides, the services that are reported will be offered a chance to respond.

“The Commission will also make reasonable efforts to contact the service providers reported in the submissions and invite them to respond in writing to the allegations made against them,” the consultation document reads.

The new list is expected to be released in the spring of next year. The Commission notes that a mention wouldn’t be a finding of wrongdoing or a confirmation of legal violations. It is simply meant to encourage operators and governments to take action against infringement.

—

A copy of Canal+’s submission is available here (pdf) and the MPA’s submission can be found here (pdf).

We reached out to MovieBox and Transsion for a comment on the submissions, but we did not receive a response at the time of writing.

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

The Irdeto-owned company accuses the cracker of bypassing its Anti-Tamper protection on 26 games, including Hogwarts Legacy and Black Myth: Wukong.

For now, Denuvo does not know who it is suing. The complaint listed voices38’s Discord user ID, a Reddit account, and seven Steam profiles, but no name. As the lawsuit unfolds, Denuvo hopes to change that, with the court’s help.

In a recent filing, the company asked the court for permission to subpoena the platforms for information that could identify the cracker, ahead of the regular discovery phase.

Subpoenas for Discord, Valve and Reddit

In its ex parte motion, Denuvo explains that it reached out to the three companies directly, without success. Valve and Reddit replied that their privacy policies prevent them from sharing user data without legal backing and Discord didn’t respond at all. A subpoena is the next step.

“Denuvo seeks leave of the Court to serve limited discovery on Discord, Inc., Valve Corporation, and Reddit, Inc. solely to determine Defendant’s true identity,” the motion reads.

The proposed subpoenas show what type of information Denuvo is after. Valve, for example, is asked to hand over the registration data, names and billing addresses for seven identified Steam user accounts.

One of the Steam profiles listed in the filing uses the name Enzo Favara, the main character of Mafia: The Old Country. That is one of the games Denuvo alleges voices38 cracked.

Denuvo’s proposed subpoena also requests the payment methods and transaction histories of these accounts, as well as IP addresses with timestamps, device identifiers, and any linked accounts.

The seven Steam profiles don’t show much activity, but Denuvo likely linked them to cracking activity associated with ‘voices38’.

The proposed subpoenas for Discord and Reddit request detailed account data as well. Discord should list the servers the account is a member of and the roles assigned there. Reddit, meanwhile, is asked to produce all posts and comments by ‘voices38’, as well as the account’s subreddit memberships.

Crypto Transactions on FixedFloat

The motion also reveals new details. For example, it shows that Denuvo’s own investigation did not stop at these three platforms.

In a declaration filed alongside the motion, attorney Ryan Morris writes that Denuvo uncovered cryptocurrency transactions by the cracker on the exchange FixedFloat. These crypto transactions involve Bitcoin, Ethereum, and Solana.

The declaration doesn’t explain how Denuvo linked these transactions to ‘voices38.’ It also doesn’t say whether the transactions reveal anything about the person behind the handle.

FixedFloat is an instant crypto exchange that promotes its service as hassle free, with “no registration and unnecessary details.” Despite mentioning it explicitly, Denuvo doesn’t ask the court for permission to subpoena the crypto platform, and the filing doesn’t say why.

What’s Next

It’s now up to Judge Haywood S. Gilliam Jr. to decide whether Denuvo can send its subpoenas to Discord, Valve and Reddit.

Meanwhile, the lawsuit already appears to have caused some broader damage. Late last month, Tom’s Hardware reported that DenuvOwO, a group that released hypervisor bypasses for dozens of Denuvo games, had disbanded. A member reportedly said the lawsuit was a concern, while the CS.Rin forum removed links to the group’s releases.

The person or group targeted in the lawsuit didn’t seem impressed when the complaint was filed. “All is fine. Everything will continue as normal,” voices38 wrote on Reddit, shortly after the news broke.

Since then, however, no new ‘voices38’ releases have been posted. Whether that’s related to the lawsuit is unknown.

—

Update: Irdeto was recently taken over by Canal+.

—

A copy of Denuvo’s ex parte motion for expedited discovery is available here (pdf).

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

Not every provider accepted this. For example, OpenDNS suspended its service in France in response to the first blocking order.

Quad9 stayed in France. The Swiss non-profit foundation said that it had to block the targeted sites for all users worldwide to remain in compliance, and announced that it would appeal. Meanwhile, the blocking orders kept coming.

In May, the Paris Judicial Court required Google, DNS4EU operator Whalebone and Quad9 to block pirate streams of WTA tennis matches for users in France. This order was requested by beIN Sports and initially listed six domains. According to Quad9, 52 more were added in two later updates, bringing the total to 58.

Now, Quad9 is not blocking any of the domains. In fact, the foundation informed TorrentFreak that it never has. That is a conscious decision, and one that may come at a price.

beIN Returns for Penalties

beIN wanted financial penalties from the start. When it requested the blocking order, the broadcaster asked the court to add a penalty of €2,000 per day for every domain Quad9 failed to block. Quad9 was singled out specifically and the other DNS resolvers didn’t face the same request.

The court declined beIN’s penalty request, explaining that nothing indicated at that point that the foundation intends to resist (“entende résister”) the order. If problems arose later, the parties could return, the court wrote.

That is what beIN has done indeed. Quad9 informed TorrentFreak that the broadcaster went back to the Paris court to request penalties. According to Quad9, beIN now seeks €10,000 per domain, per day, which adds up to €580,000 per day for the 58 domains on the list.

The case was heard before the Paris court last Thursday and a decision is expected to follow in three weeks. The potential penalties would apply from the moment the order comes in and run in the millions of euros per week.

There are no public notes of the hearing that we know of, but Quad9 explained in detail why it is not blocking any of the domain names, despite facing the potentially bankrupting fines.

The DNS Blocking Problem

Technically Quad9 can block the domain names and avoid further pressure. However, the foundation says that it can’t limit the pirate site blocks to users in France, which is what the court order requires.

The DNS resolver doesn’t collect user data. This means that it would have to rely on third-party databases that link IP addresses to locations to pinpoint users. That’s a problem, Quad9 argues, because these databases are incomplete or inaccurate.

“There is no legally useful way for us to define a French user,” Quad9 tells us.

The foundation has learned this the hard way. In Germany, where Sony Music took the DNS resolver to court and, according to Quad9, judges found that its attempt to limit a block to German users was not good enough. Quad9 eventually won the case on appeal, but that finding was never overturned.

Convincing the Paris court will not be straightforward either. In the May order, the court noted that the defendants failed to show that limiting the blocks to French territory would be costly or technically impossible.

Alternatively, Quad9 can block the domain names globally, as it said it would in 2024. It also did so in Germany in 2023, under the threat of penalties. When asked why it isn’t doing the same now, the foundation explained that the German block was a temporary measure while the case played out. It added that conditions in Germany were different, and that it approaches each case on its own terms.

“We remain entirely confident in our core argument: DNS recursive resolvers are the wrong place to counter the problem of online piracy, and will result in significantly worse outcomes for the citizens of France,” Quad9 says.

Quad9 is not the only party that raises these concerns. Earlier this year, a report published by the Internet Society warned that smaller DNS operators pay the highest price for blocking orders.

“Large, well-resourced operators may be able to absorb the compliance costs, but smaller and non-profit operators risk being excluded from the market if they cannot afford the staffing and compliance infrastructure demanded by jurisdiction-specific blocking orders,” the report reads.

Leaving France?

If the court grants beIN’s request, Quad9 will have to take action to avoid millions of euros in fines per week. The foundation told us that it essentially has three options left then.

Quad9 can implement a block for French users only, which it says would be inaccurate and still leave it open to fines. Alternatively, it can block the domains globally which, according to Quad9, would essentially extend French jurisdiction across the world.

The final option is to stop serving users it believes are in France altogether, as OpenDNS did in 2024. How accurate that measure is remains to be seen as well.

Quad9 says it has yet to discuss these options with its Foundation Council, noting that it must remain law-abiding without putting its own existence at risk.

“Additionally, we are required by Swiss law to abide by our founding principles of privacy, security, and stability of the internet and how those principles are applied to our user community in a consistent and predictable manner in all areas,” Quad9 notes.

‘Recklessly Dangerous’

The decision isn’t getting any easier now that France prepares to expand its blocking measures. In July, the French Parliament adopted a law that allows new domains to be added automatically during live broadcasts, with regulator ARCOM reviewing them after the fact.

Quad9 sees this as a dangerous development, on top of an already quite concerning blocking requirement.

“An unfettered, unencumbered and delegated power given to an unspecified list of commercial parties to block any content they desire seems to us recklessly dangerous, un-necessary, and counter-productive,” it tells us.

The foundation believes that this will drive people to use less secure systems in unknown jurisdictions. At the same time, the costs associated with continued real-time updates would likely rule out any meaningful vetting, Quad9 adds.

“Dynamic injection of false answers weaponizes the DNS against end users,” the foundation says. “This blocking method will be proven to be ineffective, wasteful, and will not achieve the goal of removing the content which remains as reachable as ever.”

For now, the next step in this blocking saga is up to the Paris court. A decision on the penalties is expected to come in later this month and Quad9 will likely announce its response shortly after.

—

A copy of the May 13 order (RG 26/02207) is available here (pdf). We reached out to beIN Sports for a comment, but the company informed us that it will not comment on the ongoing procedure.

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

That changed last month, when two site blocking bills were introduced in Congress within ten days of each other.

The first, introduced by Rep. Darrell Issa, is the American Copyright Protection Act (ACPA) which would allow courts to order ISPs, DNS resolvers, and VPNs to block foreign pirate sites.

The second is the DEFEND IP Act, introduced by Reps. Zoe Lofgren and Ben Cline in the House, with Senators Thom Tillis, Chris Coons, Marsha Blackburn, and Adam Schiff leading in the Senate. It merges Lofgren’s FADPA and the Senate’s Block BEARD proposal into the unified bill TorrentFreak reported on in April.

At first glance, both bills look fairly similar. They use federal courts to target foreign pirate sites only, and both leave the technical blocking measures up to the providers. The differences are in the details, however, starting with which intermediaries can be ordered to block.

Who Has to Block?

Under the ACPA, any broadband provider, DNS resolver, or VPN with 100,000 or more monthly users or subscribers in the United States can be named in a blocking order. Smaller services are exempt, as well as root nameservers and top-level domain registries.

The DEFEND IP Act takes a different approach. It covers broadband providers with at least 50,000 subscribers, which effectively means that more smaller ISPs are covered. DNS resolvers, however, only qualify if they are public and have more than $100 million in annual revenue.

VPNs are left out altogether. The DEFEND IP Act explicitly excludes services that exclusively provide VPN connections or similar encrypted routing, as well as DNS services that only work through encrypted protocols, such as DoH.

That makes VPNs the clearest difference between the two U.S. blocking bills. A VPN provider with 100,000 American users could be ordered to block pirate sites under Issa’s bill, while it would not be targeted by Lofgren’s version.

The ACPA wasn’t always this broad in scope. The discussion draft that we covered last year exempted any ISP with 1% or less of the U.S. broadband market. That excluded pretty much every provider with fewer than 1.2 million customers. The introduced bill dropped that exemption, adding smaller ISPs and VPNs as blocking intermediaries.

What is a Pirate Site?

Both bills rely on a three factor test to decide if a foreign site can be blocked. A site qualifies if it is primarily designed for infringement, if it is marketed to promote infringement, or if it has little legitimate use. The bills describe that requirement differently.

The DEFEND IP Act requires that a site has “no commercially significant purpose or use” beyond copyright infringement. The ACPA, on the other hand, settles for a site that has only limited commercially significant purpose beyond providing access to infringing material. That is a lower bar.

There is a second difference that’s more subtle. The ACPA targets sites that provide access to pirated material, which covers linking and indexing sites as well as hosts. The DEFEND IP Act refers to sites designed for the purpose of infringing, which is less explicit about sites that only link to content hosted elsewhere.

Both bills also let rightsholders act before any infringement takes place. The ACPA covers operators who will violate a right, not only those already doing so. DEFEND IP does something similar for live events, allowing a site to be targeted when a transmission will likely infringe, and it lets courts issue designations ex parte, without hearing the site operator first.

The Liability Shield

The largest difference between the two bills has little to do with blocking itself. It relates to what happens to the piracy liability of ISPs and other providers after a site has been declared a pirate site.

The ACPA includes a broad liability shield, which covers every service provider the bill applies to, whether it was ordered to block anything or not.

“A service provider, whether or not named in an order issued under section 1604(d), shall not be liable for monetary relief for any claim of direct or secondary infringement of copyright arising from the service provider having provided or enabled, or continuing to provide or enable, access to a foreign piracy site, unless the service provider acted or is acting in active concert with the foreign piracy site to infringe the exclusive rights of any copyright owner,” the bill reads.

This means that, once a court has declared a site a pirate site, no copyright holder can win damages from a provider for carrying traffic to it, unless that provider is actively working with the site. This provision takes effect on the day the bill is signed, which is six months before the rest of the law.

The shield has expanded quite a bit since last year. Issa’s early discussion draft only protected providers that were named in an order, only against the rightsholder that obtained the order, and only for activity after the order was issued. The introduced bill dropped these limits.

The DEFEND IP Act takes a different approach. It protects providers that implement an order in good faith, and it shields them from claims by the blocked site. There’s no piracy liability shield. In fact, the text specifies that nothing in the bill affects the DMCA’s safe harbors or the principles of secondary liability.

Liability was a key point of contention in site-blocking discussions last year. In May 2025, Senator Chris Coons told a Senate hearing that progress was finally being made, but that Internet providers wanted something in return.

“It finally feels like we’re making some real progress here on site blocking after years. One of the key roadblocks to getting a final deal is whether ISPs should benefit from immunity, both prospectively and retrospectively,” Senator Coons said.

The MPA’s Karyn Temple responded that site blocking laws elsewhere had not led to lawsuits against ISPs, so there was little to protect them from.

“ISPs have not routinely been sued for enforcing site blocking regimes. So, you know, I think in our experience, we don’t think that this is a provision that is necessary at all,” Temple replied.

Sixteen months later, the bill Coons co-sponsors has no piracy-damages shield, while Issa’s has a broad one.

Who Pays?

Site blocking costs money, and both bills allow providers to recover some expenses from rightsholders. How much differs between the two proposals.

Under the DEFEND IP Act, reimbursement is at the court’s discretion and only direct compliance costs can be claimed. Capital expenditures, infrastructure, overhead, and attorneys’ fees are excluded.

“Upon motion by a service provider subject to an order issued under this subsection, the court may order the petitioner that sought the order to pay reasonable costs directly incurred by the service provider to comply with the order,” the bill reads.

The ACPA is more generous. If a provider documents its costs, the court must order reimbursement. It can’t deny it, but the amount can be reduced. These costs can also include overhead that’s linked directly to the order, such as the salary costs of specialized staff for the time they spend on it.

The ACPA requires rightsholders to post a bond for each site blocking order, to cover any provider that is wrongfully enjoined. DEFEND IP doesn’t have this requirement.

Overblocking is treated differently too. Under the ACPA, the operator of a legitimate site that gets blocked by mistake can claim up to $250,000 in compensation, provided the rightsholder caused the error. DEFEND IP allows site operators to ask the court to fix an order, without offering compensation.

A Public Blocklist?

Transparency is a key element to inform the public on site-blocking, but it is often lacking. In most countries, the public has no official way to find out what is blocked. The U.S. bills do offer transparency, at least on paper.

The ACPA requires the Copyright Office to keep a public registry of all active blocking orders. In addition, rightsholders must also file a notice of each case at the Copyright Office, which is then published in the Federal Register.

The DEFEND IP Act requires courts to notify the Register of Copyrights whenever an order is issued, amended, or rescinded, and those notifications are published on the Copyright Office website. Since courts can amend orders when a site moves to a new domain, those updates should be added to the public record as well.

How useful either registry will be depends on what the orders contain. The bills don’t require domain names and IP addresses to appear in the published version. As TorrentFreak noted last year, publishing orders without those details creates a transparency illusion. The public sees that something is blocked but without further detail, which makes it hard to check for overblocking.

The two bills also differ on who handles the blocking requests. The ACPA sends everything to a roster of district judges picked by the Judicial Conference. DEFEND IP leaves cases with any appropriate district court.

Finally, it’s worth noting that two of the sponsors have limited time. Issa retires at the end of the year and Tillis’s term ends in January, so their bills have to move before the session closes. Whether the two will be merged, or one will simply overtake the other, has yet to be seen.

—

The full text of the ACPA (H.R. 10364) is available on Congress.gov, as is the DEFEND IP Act (H.R. 10575).

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