The American tech company has been ordered to block access to pirate domain names through its DNS resolver in France, Belgium, Italy and Portugal, for example.

In a recent submission to the European Commission’s call for evidence on the review of the Copyright Directive, Google lists its site blocking critique in detail. The filing is marked “Privileged and Confidential” but it was posted publicly on the commission’s website, alongside other submissions.

Blocking Harms Outweigh Benefits, Google Argues

Google’s submission addresses a variety of topics, including the company’s opposition to broad site blocking measures. This includes VPN and third-party DNS blocking, which is seen as disproportionate and ineffective. The same applies to IP-address blocking, which risks targeting infrastructure of legitimate sites and services.

“Blocking DNS resolvers, IPs, VPNs, is ineffective, as it does not remove content at all and is easily circumvented by using alternative DNS resolvers. It is disproportionate, catching lawful services, raising extra-territoriality concerns and blocking entire domains,” Google writes.

“Similarly, blocking IP addresses neither removes the content nor achieves proportionate outcomes, as many lawful services may be using the same IP address,” the company adds.

The submission cited several real-world examples to support these claims. It mentions that Italy’s Piracy Shield blocked a Google Drive subdomain, as well as IP-addresses hosting over 42 million domains of Cloudflare customers. Meanwhile, in France, CISCO stopped offering its OpenDNS service after a local court ordered DNS resolver blockades.

Google also highlights a December 2019 incident in Portugal where ISPs blocked Google-hosted Virtual IP addresses, disrupting “core Google services and cut off legitimate traffic for other innocent Google Cloud customers sharing the same virtual IPs.”

These concerns are not incidental. A large-scale empirical study published by the Open Observatory of Network Interference (OONI) recently found that following a LaLiga blocking order in Spain, more than 554,000 domains were blocked at least once during football match broadcasts. This included website from Amnesty International and the ACLU, UNICEF, UNHCR, the Australian Senate, Stanford Law Review, and Amazon S3 endpoints.

Clear Guardrails

In addition to the overblocking concerns, the submission notes that any expansions of the blocking regime in Europe should be proportional and keep the safeguards in mind that are already provided by EU law. Google specifically notes that courts “should not serve as mere rightholder ‘mail boxes’, by simply rubber-stamping blocking demands.”

Google believes that blocking injunction should only be used as a last resort if regular takedown options failed. These injunctions should be transparent, limited in time, while both rightsholders and the intermediaries share the implementation costs.

The submission shows that Google is not outright opposed to site blocking, as long as it’s restricted to targeted and proportional measures. The real solution to piracy does not lie in enforcement, Google argues, but in creating superior legal alternatives.

“In our experience, unmet consumer demand is a key driver of piracy. That is why one of the best ways to combat piracy is to provide better, more convenient, and legitimate alternatives,” Google writes.

U.S. Site Blocking Gains Momentum

Google’s EU filing was submitted a few days before U.S. lawmakers doubled down on their site blocking intentions. On June 30, the House IP subcommittee held a hearing on copyright protection and enforcement on the Internet, with planned site blocking legislation as a key topic.

Subcommittee Chairman Rep. Darrell Issa told The Capitol Forum that he planned to introduce a site blocking bill that week. While there is no record of an introduced bill, it suggests that momentum is building.

This was also confirmed during the hearing, as Issa closed by signaling that the educational phase of the lawmaking process is over.

“Language is being distributed on what we’ll believe is final compromises to get to legislation,” he said. “It’s going to be my intention, with the help of my chairman and old friend, Mr. Jordan, that we will move it out of this committee.”

Rep. Issa is retiring at the end of his current term. Whether the bill has been formally introduced since his stated deadline is not clear. TorrentFreak has reached out to Issa’s office for comment, but we didn’t hear back.

Issa’s bill isn’t the only proposal. Rep. Zoe Lofgren, who introduced the competing FADPA bill last year, told The Capitol Forum she is negotiating a bipartisan, bicameral “four corners agreement” with Issa and Senators Blackburn, Coons, Schiff, and Tillis. That formally confirms out earlier reporting.

Meanwhile, the hearing made clear that the Supreme Court’s ruling in Cox v. Sony only intensified the call for site blocking. The Supreme Court concluded that ISPs cannot be held secondarily liable for user piracy unless they actively induce or tailor their services for infringement, which means that rightsholders will need an alternative enforcement tool.

Google is Silent on U.S. Plans

Google has not commented on the U.S. site blocking plans yet, but it is a member of the Software and Information Industry Association (SIIA) whose president, Chris Mohr, did testify at the recent subcommittee hearing.

According to Mohr, his members are “genuinely split” on site blocking. At the same time, he stressed that a U.S. blocking bill should have robust judicial backing, while the technical measures should be precise enough to prevent overblocking and protect shared infrastructure.

The Internet Infrastructure Coalition (I2Coalition), which represents major tech companies including Amazon, Cloudflare, and Google, has previously critiqued broad blocking plans. Last year the organization launched its DNS at Risk campaign, warning the public about DNS blocking threats.

Google’s EU submission is also quite outspoken. While it does not refer to the American plans, Google is clearly opposed to requiring blocking measures from third-party DNS resolvers, while noting that blocking is ineffective, disproportionate, and harmful to lawful sites and services.

Whether the company will make the same arguments publicly as the American bill moves forward remains to be seen.

—

Google’s submission to the European Commission’s consultation is available here (pdf).

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

The author’s personal GitHub account includes a widely referenced repository that hosts the official example code for titles including Java SE 8 for Programmers, C++ How to Program, and Python for Programmers.

These code examples are a key reference, but for a few weeks they have been unavailable due to a DMCA takedown notice. The notice in question was sent in April by Pearson’s anti-piracy vendor Link-Busters, which is the most prolific DMCA takedown sender in recent history.

Apparently, Link-Busters confused the educational code repository with an illegally posted copy of the book, which it clearly isn’t.

Deitel Files Counternotice

While Link-Busters generally has a decent track record, this notice caused clear collateral damage. In a counternotice that was sent to GitHub yesterday, July 9, Deitel requests his repository to be restored.

GitHub redacted his name in the published counter-notice, but the identity of the filer is clear from the context. The author explains that the targeted repo does not contain a copy of the book, but important code examples.

“I am the [private] of the book and [private] [private] GitHub page is where ALL [private] readers worldwide get the example code that goes with [private] books,” the counternotice reads.

“Whoever this [private] organization is has no idea of the damage they’re doing by automated scanning and sending of removal notices.”

“Had they done even the simplest bit of research they would have seen that the book was not posted in [private] GitHub repo and that it was just the supporting materials, and that [private] am the [private] of the book!”

The counter-notice stresses that access to the GitHub repository is “CRITICAL” as readers worldwide depend on it to access the example code that accompanies the book. Without it, the textbook’s code exercises are effectively inaccessible.

Waiting for Restoration

At the scale Link-Busters operates, sending billions of DMCA takedown notices on behalf of major publishers, mistakes are perhaps unavoidable. However, this example shows that even a minuscule error rate can result in real damage, even for the very people these notices aim to protect.

The contested April takedown notice covered roughly 25 book titles. Most of the targeted repositories did contain unauthorized PDF copies of textbooks, uploaded by students to “books” collections on GitHub. The Deitel companion code repo was the clear outlier.

At the time of writing, Deitel’s GitHub repository is still offline, pointing to the removal notice shown below.

Under the DMCA’s counter-notice procedure, GitHub has to restore the disabled repository within 10 to 14 business days unless Pearson or Link-Busters file a federal lawsuit to keep it offline. Since the takedown appears to be a clear mistake, it will likely be restored soon.

TorrentFreak reached out to Deitel for comment but had not received a response at the time of publication. Link-Busters has yet to respond to our request for comment too. We will update this article if responses come in.

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

As part of a crackdown on local torrent trackers, the government ordered ISPs to block access to the ArenaBG tracker in 2007.

The blocking actions resulted in public outrage and street protests. Some Internet providers pushed back as well, questioning the legality of the requested measures, and the blocking instructions were eventually withdrawn.

Today, nearly twenty years have passed and Bulgaria continues to struggle with site blocking. This, despite being part of the EU, where site blocking mechanisms are widely authorized.

Blocking The Pirate Bay and Zamunda

In February 2020, the Bulgarian Association of Music Producers (BAMP) and IFPI launched a civil lawsuit against three ISPs, seeking a court order requiring them to block The Pirate Bay and Zamunda, the country’s most-visited torrent site.

Two of the three ISPs fought back hard. They described the claim as “inadmissible” and “baseless.” One, identified only as ‘N.1’ in court documents, pointed out that Bulgarian law does not recognize a claim “for blocking access to Internet sites,” and argued that EU law requiring member states to ensure access to injunction applications against intermediaries would not apply because Bulgaria had not yet transposed those provisions into national law.

The Sofia City Court disagreed. In May 2023, it ordered the three ISPs to block both sites, including all mirrors and proxies, within six months. BAMP called it “a major step forward” in the fight against music piracy. IFPI chief executive Francis Moore welcomed the ruling. It was, by all appearances, a landmark win.

However, the first Bulgarian site blocking order wasn’t final yet, as the ISPs appealed.

ISPs Win Blocking Appeal at Supreme Court

Earlier this year, Bulgaria’s Supreme Court of Cassation (SCC) issued its final ruling in the blocking case, siding with the ISPs. The court held that under current Bulgarian copyright law, rightsholders cannot obtain pirate site blocking injunctions in standard civil proceedings.

EU law, specifically the Enforcement Directive (IPRED), requires member states to provide mechanisms for injunctions against intermediaries. However, the court found that Bulgaria has not fully transposed those provisions into its national copyright legislation in a way that makes permanent blocking injunctions an option.

The court noted that ISPs are seen as mere conduits. Without clear national rules balancing freedom of information and proportionality, courts cannot issue site blocking injunctions based on current copyright law.

This effectively means that Bulgarian lawmakers have to address the shortcomings with new legislation, before site blocking orders can be granted.

BAMP Wants EU to Step In

The Supreme Court appeal concluded earlier this year but largely went unnoticed, as local press didn’t pick it up. The only public mention was a brief client bulletin published by Sofia law firm Dimitrov, Petrov & Co., which is intended for corporate clients rather than the public.

The ruling came on our radar last week, when BAMP submitted its response to the European Commission’s Call for Evidence on a targeted initiative for a better copyright environment. The Supreme Court ruling shows that the EU must require its members to implement existing EU directives.

“The Court identified a legislative deficiency, holding that the existing provisions of the Bulgarian Copyright Act do not provide a legal basis for granting final website-blocking injunctions against intermediaries on the merits and that this deficiency can only be remedied through legislative action.”

“This illustrates the importance of ensuring the full and correct implementation of the existing EU acquis across all Member States before considering further legislative initiatives,” BAMP’s submission adds.

It’s Not Over Yet

The Bulgarian ruling means that, after all these years, local rightsholders are still without site blocking options. This doesn’t mean that the country isn’t making any copyright enforcement progress. With help from the U.S., Bulgaria shut down the country’s largest torrent trackers earlier this year, including ArenaBG, Zamunda, and Zelka.

Not much later, the U.S. Trade Representative removed the country from the “Watch List” category in its annual Special 301 Report. The U.S. praised the country for its significant enforcement actions, among other things.

The Supreme court ruling presents a clear setback for rightsholders. However, they are not without recourse. As highlighted by Dimitrov, Petrov & Co., the Supreme Court noted that rightsholders that are harmed by Bulgaria’s failure to fully implement EU requirements, could potentially sue the state for damages.

Meanwhile, Bulgarian lawmakers have been working on an amendment to the Copyright and Related Rights Act that could potentially address the shortcomings. The amendment has been in preparation since at least 2022 but, as of today, it has yet to be approved.

—

A copy of BAMP’s submission to the European Commission Call for Evidence is available here (pdf). TorrentFreak did not have access to the Supreme Court’s full ruling. The reporting here is based on the BAMP submission and the coverage from Dimitrov, Petrov & Co.

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

In addition to targeting residential ISPs, the order also lists global domain name registrars and registries as defendants, compelling them to suspend domains.

By January, several registrars had indeed taken action. Domains linked to the American registrar Porkbun, the UK-based WHG Hosting services, and the Lithuanian registrar Hostinger were all fully suspended, suggesting that these companies complied with the Indian order. However, many other domains remained online.

For example, the long-running German websites S.to and BS.to, which both have millions of monthly visits, remained online. This did not come as a surprise. Tonga’s .to domains have generally been considered a safe haven for pirate sites, as it generally would not comply with foreign court orders.

Rightsholders, including the MPA, have repeatedly complained about the .to registry and last year anti-piracy company Warezio even threatened to sue ICANN over .to domain piracy. And then something changed.

.To Domain Names Suspended

Yesterday, the operator of SerienStream informed us that S.to and BS.to were suspended. The operator mentioned that ‘Tonic’ informed him that the domains were suspended in response to an Indian court order. Indeed, that is the December order, which was amended a few times over the past months.

The suspensions are also apparent from the WHOIS information, which shows that the domains are put on clientHold. This is an EPP status codesstatus code that is set by the domain name registrar, often in response to legal disputes.

The WHOIS result is telling in more ways than one. It clearly identifies the Government of Kingdom of Tonga as the domain registrar. This indicates that Tonga applied the clientHold status code, presumably in response to the Indian court order.

At the same time, the WHOIS data confirms that the .to domain management changed drastically. The ccTLD was previously managed by the US-based Tonic Domains Corporation, which did not offer a WHOIS service, nor could it apply EPP status codes.

Tonga Domains Restructured

Since last year, however, the Canadian domain name company Tucows is managing the technical registry backend for .to domains, with the Government of the Kingdom of Tonga being listed as the ccTLD manager or sponsor.

The structure change is more than a simple backend swap. Old IANA delegation records show that the .to registry was previously operated by Tonic’s US-based co-founder Eric Gullichsen, who was listed as both administrative and technical contact, working from the Tongan consulate address in Burlingame, California.

Gullichsen has since been replaced and the administrative contact is now Justin Kaitapu in Nuku’alofa, Tonga, while the technical contact points to Tucows in Toronto.

Tonic’s old system has been in operation since 1997 and did not support EPP status codes such as clientHold. The current Tucows-powered platform does. In other words, the infrastructure that made .to a safe haven for pirate sites simply didn’t have a suspension button. Now it does.

As mentioned earlier, the clientHold status code suggests that the Tongan registrar took action. However, when we reached out to the hostmaster address at Tonic.to, we were brushed off.

“With reference to your recent inquiry, we regret to advise that Tonic has no interest to discuss or make available the details of it’s [sic] actions or internal policies,” Tonic’s hostmaster told TorrentFreak.

We also reached out to Tucows, which handles .to’s registry services now, but the Canadian company informed us that the action was taken by the domain registrar, without providing further detail. That brings us back to the Government of the Kingdom of Tonga, which is the registrar on record.

No Safe Haven

While we were unable to get a comment on the record, it is clear that .to domain names are no longer the safe haven they were once considered. This conclusion was also drawn by the operator of SerienStream.

“In the long term, this will result in significant financial losses for Tonga and its .to domains, if they are no longer considered to be stable and safe,” the operator informed TorrentFreak.

“The Indian court has no jurisdiction in this matter, nor should an Indian judgment be binding on a German-language website,” he added.

As shown above, SerienStream now points its users to a backup (serienstream).to domain name, which was not listed in the Indian court order. These orders are regularly amended, though, so it might only be a matter of time before this one is suspended too.

In addition to S.to and BS.to, all other .to domain names listed in the Indian court order were also put on clientHold over the weekend. This includes yflix.to, anigo.to, watchflix.to, and 24drama.to and confirms that it is indeed linked to the Indian order.

Whether rightsholders will now target .to domain names en masse has yet to be seen, but the infrastructure to suspend them is now in place.

—

A copy of the paperwork shared by SerienStream’s operator, including the December order from the High Court in New Delhi and several additions, is available here (pdf).

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

The site, which was a prime destination for many anime pirates, surprisingly shut down in March without offering an explanation for the sudden move.

HiAnime has been a major target for rightsholders for years. The operators were believed to reside in Vietnam, which was highlighted in the U.S. Trade Representative’s (USTR) Notorious Markets report just days before HiAnime said its goodbyes.

American rightsholders and the U.S. Government urged the Vietnamese authorities to take action against the site. These calls were serious, as the USTR doubled down in May with its latest Special 301 Report classifying Vietnam as a “Priority Foreign Country,” opening the door to potential trade sanctions.

Vietnam Arrests HiAnime Piracy Ring

The Vietnamese authorities take these concerns seriously. Late last week, Vietnam’s Ministry of Public Security announced that its anti-corruption and economic crime unit (C03) has charged seven suspects with copyright infringement and money laundering in connection with a pirate streaming network that operated more than 100 websites.

The written reports don’t mention any sites by name, but a broadcast of the government operated state broadcaster Vietnam Television clearly identifies footage of HiAnime.to, which is crossed out.

The investigation identified four alleged ringleaders, Nguyễn Đình Minh Khoa, Nguyễn Trung Anh, Nguyễn Đình Xuân, and Nguyễn Hoàng Thanh, who were arrested and charged with copyright infringement and money laundering. Three others, Nguyễn Phước Toàn, Doãn Thành Luân, and Nguyễn Khương Duy, were charged with copyright infringement only.

According to C03, the group operated from 2020 until April 2026, offering more than 26,000 unlicensed titles across their network of sites. The operation allegedly generated roughly $12.8 million through advertising revenue.

HiAnime has already been inactive since March and in a VTV broadcast investigators browse through the Wayback Machine, which clearly identifies HiAnime.to as the target. No other domain names are mentioned.

ACE and HSI Cooperation

The investigation was not a purely Vietnamese effort. According to the Ministry of Public Security, C03 acted on intelligence provided by U.S. Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) and the Alliance for Creativity and Entertainment (ACE), the MPA’s anti-piracy arm.

The U.S. involvement comes as no surprise as both countries have been discussing the piracy problems for years. In addition to the USTR’s recent diplomatic escalation, ACE has been seeking identifying information about the operators of HiAnime.to and related sites for years.

The American intelligence eventually helped the Vietnamese authorities to locate the suspects and dismantle one of the largest piracy rings that ever operated.

Crypto and Real Estate

The seven suspects are all relatively young and some are described as recent IT graduates. The four ringleaders remain in custody while they await their trial and the others were placed under travel restrictions.

The national broadcaster featured interviews with several suspects including Nguyễn Đình Minh Khoa, who managed relationships with advertising platforms and was responsible for driving traffic to the sites.

Khoa reportedly confessed on camera to earning approximately 50 billion Vietnamese đồng (roughly $2 million) in revenue from 2019 onward, which he spent on cars and personal expenses. The other ringleaders, who reportedly worked on website design or IT infrastructure, also generated substantial revenue.

According to investigators, the suspects received payments in cryptocurrency from foreign advertising platforms. These funds were then laundered through multiple intermediaries, after which they were transferred to personal Vietnamese bank accounts.

From there, the money was used to purchase real estate and vehicles, which prosecutors allege was intended to legitimize the illicit proceeds.

‘Deterrent Prison Sentences’

This is not the first time that Vietnamese authorities shut down a large piracy operation with help from ACE and U.S. law enforcement. American intelligence also helped to shut down the Fmovies piracy ring in 2024.

Two Fmovies operators were eventually prosecuted and, while both confessed in full to all alleged crimes, they received only suspended prison sentences. This means that, similar to previous convictions in Vietnam, they did not have to serve any prison time.

These relatively mild sentences are a thorn in the side of rightsholders. The USTR also highlighted it as a problem in its recent report, urging the Vietnamese authorities to seek “significantly more criminal prosecutions against online piracy operations” while “seeking deterrent-level prison sentences”.

The first part of this request already appears to have started. On May 5, Vietnam’s Prime Minister issued Urgent Telegram No. 38, ordering a nationwide crackdown on intellectual property violations. The Ministry of Public Security followed with its own classified directive the next day.

During the following weeks, Vietnamese police reportedly opened 90 cases involving 142 suspects across various IP crimes, and shut down hundreds of infringing websites, including eight pirate film sites and 159 unnamed pirate football streaming platforms.

Whether the prosecution of the HiAnime-linked defendants will result in more deterrent sentences has yet to be seen, but it is clear that American rightsholders and U.S. authorities will be watching it closely.

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 two newcomers on the list.

“Obesession” is the most shared title.

The most torrented movies for the week ending on July 06 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.

The academic torrent client Tribler is a notable exception and if it’s up to the people running it, it will go on indefinitely.

Tribler is part of a research project at Delft University of Technology, headed by associate professor Johan Pouwelse. Over the years, Tribler found itself to be a safe haven for pirate site channels, a decentralized music streaming platform, and an AI-powered search engine, among other things.

The core idea always revolved around decentralization. The software and the network should be impossible to shut down. While academic achievements are not always picked up broadly, the research project’s output is highly valued and just secured funding through 2032.

Ironically, the development of the decentralized BitTorrent client is highly centralized. It’s run by a university team and paid for by subsidies. However, its own research may offer an eventual solution to that problem, starting with a self-replicating seedbox.

The Self-Replicating Seedbox

One of Tribler’s latest projects is a self-replicating seedbox called Mycelium, named after the underground fungal networks it is meant to resemble. This is part of a larger superorganism experiment into a decentrally governed community.

In simple terms, the seedbox starts a single server. When community members fund the project with bitcoin a new VPS server launches a fresh seedbox, after which the process will repeat itself. This results in an ever-expanding service as long as sufficient funds come in.

The content being seeded is Creative Commons material, not copyrighted works. The BitTorrent seeding is managed by libtorrent and the Bitcoin mechanics by a standard wallet. Once it’s set up, it can function independently.

The combination of all these elements, including voting and payment, could do more than replicate seedboxes. The same technology and framework can also be used to set up mirror websites, to replicate URLs, or to register new domain names.

A Decentralized Digital Democracy

The seedbox project isn’t completely decentralized, as it relies on GitHub and the VPS provider SporeStack. The researchers acknowledge this and in a recent master thesis, Stan Verlaan described this as the “governance paradox of decentralized systems”.

While there is no immediate solution, the thesis does offer a solution for how a community can help decide on the future of a project, while also funding it.

The proposed solution is a TwoStepDemocracy. In the first step, users vote on which problems are worth solving or which feature needs to be implemented. Based on these votes, the developers can then submit solutions.

The community then votes on whether the proposed solutions or changes should be implemented. If a solution passes that community vote and enough users have pledged Bitcoin to fund it, the developer gets paid.

This setup sounds straightforward, but it is significantly different from how software development usually works. A project’s evolution doesn’t rely on a group of gatekeepers who decide, but on the votes of a broader community, which in turn is independent of the funding.

The Utopian Dream

The researchers don’t understate their ambitions. On the superorganism-experiment GitHub page, the project’s future vision, or “Utopian dream”, is described with little reservation

“We are creating our own society. A place citizens have FULL control, have their own MONEY, have AI that serves THEM, and CONTROL together. Unstoppable by design, self-replicating, self-hosted, self-evolving, and human oversight with democratic governance,” the description reads.

That framing isn’t necessarily limited to software. Tribler’s Dr. Pouwelse tells TorrentFreak that the project has been collaborating with the Dutch tax authority and the authority for the financial markets on trust, identity en governance isues. At the same time, he’s increasingly finding an audience among European Commission officials as well.

The connection makes sense. In recent years, Internet infrastructure and AI development have become further concentrated in the hands of a few large American companies, so Europe has a growing interest in public, decentralized alternatives.

Tribler’s research doesn’t propose any groundbreaking new technologies. Its strength lies in the combination of technologies. Whether this can scale into anything concrete remains highly uncertain.

For now, the TwoStepDemocracy idea remains a technical proof of concept. The thesis itself acknowledges this, and stresses that a larger study is needed to combine all elements, from voting to payment to development, to see how it functions.

The Tribler team isn’t letting the self-replicating seedbox loose on The Pirate Bay either, for those who are wondering. But they may have planted a seed.

—

The Superorganism repository is available on GitHub. The TwoStepDemocracy thesis can be found here (pdf).

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

The hacker, known as Gr0lum, breached the site’s infrastructure, exfiltrated 19 GB of data, drained its crypto wallets, and wiped its servers.

That proved to be too much to come back from and YggTorrent decided to throw in the towel instead. In many cases, that would be the end of the story. However, the French Gendarmerie nationale had other plans in the works.

Twelve YggTorrent Arrests

This week, the police announced that it dismantled ‘the structure’ behind YggTorrent. This wording is carefully chosen and avoids taking direct credit for the site’s shutdown, which took place months earlier.

The police operation was conducted by the UNCyber unit from the Montpellier Section de Recherches, under the direction of the JIRS and JUNALCO in Paris. Twelve people have been arrested and put under investigation.

The press release suggests that not all reported arrests are recent, noting that they were carried out since late 2023. The twelve people are suspected of organized copyright infringement (contrefaçon), money laundering, and operating a platform facilitating illegal transactions.

In French legal terms, the suspects have been placed under formal judicial investigation (mise en examen), which signals that prosecutors believe there is serious evidence of criminal involvement.

The investigation was initiated following complaints from SACEM, ALPA, and the French Video Publishing Union. SACEM’s enforcement interest in YggTorrent dates back to at least 2018, when one of its complaints forced the site to abandon its .com domain.

The scale of YggTorrent’s operation may explain the severity of the charges. According to data in the Gr0lum leak, the site generated an estimated €8.5 million in revenue in 2025, allegedly routing payments through dozens of fake e-commerce storefronts to disguise transactions from payment processors including PayPal and Stripe.

‘Dismantling The Site’?

The police note that searches across France uncovered crypto-assets linked to the site’s revenues and approximately €45,000 in computer equipment.

These details were proudly shared on social media too, with a notable exaggeration.

As shown above, the French police claim to have dismantled the “#YGGTORRENT download site”, which is not exactly true. The site itself has been offline for months, after all, and was directly linked to the hack.

The police press release does not mention the hack at all. Their investigation already started years earlier, but it is possible that the leaked information may have been useful as added intelligence.

When YggTorrent’s hacker came forward in March, they explicitly noted that the data could be “of interest to law enforcement.”

Wider Fallout

The arrests appear to have triggered a wave of closures across France’s broader warez community.

According to KultureGeek, the former leaders of release groups Forward (FW) and TFA, both specializing in WEB-DL rips of streaming content, have been arrested, along with a community member known as Fervex. Several former YggTorrent moderators were also detained.

Forward, which was responsible for an estimated 35,000 torrents before being banned from YggTorrent during the Turbo Mode controversy last December, confirmed its permanent closure. Predb FR, a release indexer, shut down. Nexum, a private tracker, was destroyed by its own operator as a precaution, while Usenet indexer UNFR also went dark.

Whether the FW and TFA arrests are part of the Gendarmerie’s twelve or whether they are part of a separate investigation remains unclear. Other community reports on Reddit and elsewhere could not be immediately verified either, but it is clear that the French piracy scene is in turmoil.

For now, the investigation remains ongoing, and the Gendarmerie has not ruled out further arrests.

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

As part of this process, the Commission launched a public consultation, inviting rightsholders, intermediaries, and other stakeholders to weigh in.

We previously reported that the submission of European ISPs argued that rightsholders should be held accountable when site-blocking orders result in avoidable overblocking. The same submission also warned against IP-address blocking, as that could more easily affect legitimate services.

Blacklist for the ‘European Internet’

Not all stakeholders share this cautious attitude. In fact, many rightsholders believe that the European Commission could do more to block pirate sites and services. For example, by facilitating the creation of an EU blacklist for rogue hosting providers.

The blacklist idea is proposed in the submission of broadcaster beIN Sports, which holds sports media rights across several continents. The company specifically argues for broader blocking powers, not narrower ones.

BeIN’s proposal goes beyond IP-address blocking and suggests creating a blacklist of problematic hosting providers. These companies can be identified by their autonomous system number (ASN), which is a collection of connected IP-addresses.

“beIN proposes that the Commission should establish a means for rights owners to report offshore noncompliant hosting providers, identified by their ASNs,” beIN writes.

“A competent authority would assess these providers based on criteria such as failure to comply with takedown requests, involvement in illegal content, non-compliance with legal obligations, and location outside the EU.”

Blocking the Tubes

BeIN envisions a European blacklist that would be enforced by ICT providers which would cover data centers, transit providers, internet exchanges, ISPs, among others. These companies would be required to block the associated traffic, with the goal to keep these rogue providers out of the European Internet ecosystem.

“‘Designated providers’ IP addresses and ASNs would be placed in a public database, which compromises [sic] a ‘blacklist’. European ICT providers would then be under a legal obligation to stop providing services to, or transmitting data from, these identified entities, thereby limiting their ability to operate within the European internet ecosystem,” the submission reads.

The Internet is a global network, which typically doesn’t stop at the European borders, so these measures could potentially introduce new overblocking concerns. However, beIN stresses that it is needed to curb online piracy.

The company’s vision is supported by the Audiovisual Anti-Piracy Alliance (AAPA), which also represents other sports rightsholders, including the Premier League, LaLiga, DAZN, Sky and Viaplay. Like its member beIN, AAPA’s submission explicitly mentions blocking hosting providers on the network level

“Provide a regulatory means for a competent authority, on application of rights owners, to designate ASNs and IP ranges associated with off-shore non-compliant hosting providers,” AAPA notes.

“This information should then be communicated to European Information and Communication Technology (ICT) providers, who would be obliged to cease carrying traffic from, and otherwise deny services to the designated ASNs and IP ranges.”

Porn Industry Agrees

The ASN blacklist proposal isn’t limited to sports and broadcast interests. Adult content producer Aylo, the company behind Pornhub and brands such as Brazzers and Reality Kings, filed its own submission backing a similar ASN blacklist.

Aylo proposes a central European blocking scheme. This would include a framework where an appropriate authority can “designate the ASNs and IP ranges of offshore non-compliant hosts.”

In addition to the European blacklist for rogue hosting providers, rightsholders also made various other suggestions. For example, beIN asked for a strict 30-minute takedown window for hosting companies, real-time dynamic blocking orders, and “know your business customer” obligations for key Internet infrastructure companies.

Whether any of these recommendations will be picked up has yet to be seen. However, the submissions show a clear divergence between rightsholders demanding tougher measures on the one hand, versus intermediaries cautioning against overbroad blocking powers.

—

A copy of beIN’s submission to the call for evidence is available here (pdf), AAPA’s version can be found here (pdf), and Aylo’s copy is here (pdf).

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

The U.S. accused Dotcom of being the leader of a criminal “Mega Conspiracy,” which it claims earned many millions of dollars by profiting from copyright infringement.

With the stakes this high, no legal resources are being spared. Many millions of dollars have been poured into this legal battle since 2012, with Dotcom doing everything in his power to avoid being extradited to the United States.

In 2020, the Supreme Court of New Zealand ruled that Kim Dotcom and his colleagues could indeed be extradited to the United States. After further challenges, New Zealand’s Justice Minister Paul Goldsmith approved Kim Dotcom’s extradition in 2024.

By then, Megaupload defendants van der Kolk and Ortmann had already opted for a deal. The pair pled guilty but were allowed to serve their respective 30 and 31-month prison sentences in New Zealand. Dotcom, meanwhile, kept fighting.

Court of Appeal Rejects New Zealand Prosecution

Dotcom’s latest opposition targets two decisions. The first is the Police Commissioner’s refusal to charge Megaupload’s founder in New Zealand, and the second targets the Minister’s order to surrender him to the United States.

The High Court rejected these challenges in September 2025, but as expected, Dotcom appealed again. Today, New Zealand’s Court of Appeal ruled on the matter, rejecting all challenges.

Dotcom argued that the Police Commissioner should have charged him in New Zealand, pointing out that his co-defendants signed plea deals with the authorities in 2022. These deals allowed them to avoid extradition to the U.S.

The Court of Appeal concludes that there was a proper basis for the Commissioner’s decision.

The Commissioner previously refused to charge Dotcom, who did not offer to plead guilty, noting that his position as Megaupload’s ringleader differed from the other defendants. More importantly, the U.S. would not be willing to cooperate.

“Most critically of all, however, the US was not prepared to withdraw its request for extradition of Mr Dotcom in the way it was for the others,” the Court of Appeal writes in a summary of the order.

30 Years to 150 Years in Prison

The second challenge deals with the severity of the sentence Dotcom faces in the United States. A court can block an extradition request if a foreign punishment is so severe that it would “shock the conscience” of properly informed New Zealanders.

Before signing the extradition order, the Justice Minister heard from an expert that Dotcom faces an estimated sentence of 30 to 150 years, if he’s convicted in the United States.

While that is substantially higher than the comparable sentence in New Zealand, which would fall in the range of 12 to 15 years, the Minister concluded that it would not “shock the conscience” of properly informed New Zealanders given the scale of the alleged offending.

Dotcom argued that the comparison should factor in the actual sentences his co-defendants received. The Court of Appeal disagreed, finding that the correct approach compares the likely sentence in the requesting country with the likely sentence in New Zealand for the same conduct, not the sentences of his co-defendants.

Dotcom separately argued that the U.S. sentence would likely amount to an “irreducible life sentence,” which could violate international human rights law. However, the Court of Appeal rejected this, noting that the U.S. system allows for both compassionate release and executive clemency, which allow sentences to be reduced.

All in all, the Court of Appeal dismissed the challenge in its entirety, with Dotcom ordered to pay costs. However, this isn’t necessarily the end of the legal challenges yet, as Dotcom and his lawyer Ron Mansfield KC could still take the matter up with the Supreme Court.

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

Fast-forward a year, and the providers’ concerns have only grown.

In a new filing to the Commission’s ongoing assessment of the Copyright in the Digital Single Market Directive, EuroISPA once again sounds the alarm, pointing out that the piracy blocking climate in some countries is getting more extreme.

EuroISPA starts by explicitly referencing the Commission’s own conclusions. Its evaluation of the 2023 Recommendation on combating piracy of live events concluded that the measures had “limited positive effects” and did not lead to a substantial reduction in piracy.

“This finding is an important baseline for this consultation: it suggests that in many cases the problem lies in the enforcement of existing law, not in a gap in the legislative framework,” the ISP organization notes.

The European Commission should prioritize the implementation of current law, instead of introducing any new enforcement obligations, the filing argues. That doesn’t mean that everything is functioning fine now. On the contrary, the ISPs flag a myriad of overblocking incidents.

Blocking Goes Beyond ISPs

In recent years, site blocking orders have expanded to other intermediaries, including DNS resolvers and VPN providers. This is problematic, EuroISPA argues, as these services have no direct link to the infringing content and often lack the technical means to implement geographically restricted blocks.

This expansion, combined with various overblocking incidents throughout Europe, is problematic, the ISP association notes, while listing various examples.

In Italy, Piracy Shield’s IP-level blocking caused collateral damage to over 7,700 domain names. In addition, a Portuguese hosting provider lost email connectivity with Italian customers for 16 days. When Cloudflare declined to comply with blocking demands, Italy’s communications regulator AGCOM fined it 14 million euros.

In Spain, LaLiga obtained a blocking order that targeted shared IP addresses, which were also used by thousands of legitimate sites. EuroISPA says that millions of Spanish internet users have lost access to banking apps, developer tools, and payment platforms, as a result of the site blocking measures.

In Belgium and France, site blocking is also expanding. Cisco pulled OpenDNS from France in 2024 and Belgium in 2025, after being ordered to block pirate sites. It resumed its service in Belgium when it appealed this decision, which could have far-reaching consequences.

“The outcome of that appeal may have significant consequences for the scope of future blocking orders across the EU, as the trend of extending obligations to DNS resolvers and VPN providers continues to grow across Member States,” EuroISPA notes.

Overblocking Accountability

The ISP organization cites the CEPS report published in April, which cautioned against IP-address blocking.

The same report also recommended that rightsholders should be held liable for overblocking damage. EuroISPA is now making the same demand directly to the Commission. This doesn’t require any new legislation, as EU’s Intellectual Property Rights Enforcement Directive (IPRED) supports it.

EuroISPA argues that “rightsholders should be held accountable” for “collateral damage caused by overbroad blocking actions, with compensation mechanisms that are clearly defined and enforceable.”

The ISP organization also argued against the rapid blocking requirements, which require services to implement blockades in a short timeframe. That would include Italy, where providers have to take action within 30 minutes, which can be problematic for smaller companies.

“The current absence of such mechanisms creates a structural burden that falls disproportionately on smaller providers,” the submission notes.

Whether the Commission will pick up these suggestions has yet to be seen. For now, the CDSM review continues, which will undoubtedly also see calls from rightsholders to further expand the current site blocking powers.

—

A copy of EuroISPA’s submission to the European Commission’s CDSM review is available here (pdf).

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

In 2022, the U.S. government already carried out a similar World Cup-themed enforcement action, which was repeated yesterday at roughly five times the scale.

The Department of Justice announced that it had seized nearly 400 domains that were used to illegally stream the 2026 FIFA World Cup. The action, branded “Operation Offsides 2026”, was led by the National Intellectual Property Rights Coordination Center with HSI Washington and the Computer Crime and Intellectual Property Section.

“We have seized hundreds of domains, used to illegally stream World Cup matches for profit, to disrupt the international networks that profit from the global popularity of the World Cup,” said Assistant Attorney General A. Tysen Duva of the Justice Department’s Criminal Division.

Seizures with Broad Support

This is far from an isolated action. The DOJ credits FIFA as the lead rightsholder, with supporting information from beIN Media Group, NBCUniversal, the MPA’s Alliance for Creativity and Entertainment, the Ultimate Fighting Championship, and Warner Bros.

The seizure banner, shown below, also reveals support from a variety of foreign organizations and authorities, including Europol, City of London Police, Ecuador’s SENADI, Argentina’s Ministerio Público Fiscal, the NCFTA, as well as anti-piracy outfit FriendMTS.

In addition to the domain seizures, international coordination through the ICHIP network also targeted pirate streaming services in various other countries.

“Servers and domains linked to illegal streaming of World Cup games were targeted in Peru and Bulgaria, two known centers of online piracy activity. Additional ICHIP-supported disruptions took place in Croatia, Romania, Poland and Colombia,” the press release states.

Tracing the Seized Domains

The DOJ released no list of seized domain names. However, DNS data shows that dozens of new domain names have added seizedservers.com nameservers in the past 24 hours. These nameservers are used in the U.S. government’s seizure actions for well over a decade.

The domains we traced include kooora365.com, kora-shoot.com, bein-match-worldcup.com, beinmatchtv.com, rojadirectastv.org, pelotalibrehd.org, futbollibreusa.com, viper-play.org, and redditsoccerstreams.name. A non-verified and non-exhaustive list of domains can be found below.

These domains all use popular brands, either from beIN as a broadcaster, or popular pirate brands such as rojadirecta and futbollibre. That doesn’t necessarily mean that these domain names were popular, as most appear to be copycats.

For example, the seizure action targeted futbollibreonline.com, which had just over 166,000 visits last month, while futbol-libre.su remains online with more than 73 million monthly visits. A likely explanation is that domains operated by foreign registries, such as the Russian-operated .su, typically don’t fall under U.S. jurisdiction.

The seized domain names we identified all use .com, .name, and .org domains (TF: see update below for new info), which are maintained by the American organizations Verisign and the Public Interest Registry. The affidavit from the first Operation Offsides targeted both registries and registrars.

A Fitness Blog and a CBD Site

At first glance, the list of seized domains includes several unusual targets. fitforcedaily.com, for example, was a site that presented itself as a fitness blog with articles on insulin sensitivity, strength training, and pregnancy workouts. But there was more going on under the hood, as the domain’s main referral traffic came from a Rojadirecta site.

Several other entries in the slice appear to be expired and reused domains. Freedomgloryproject.com was originally an Iranian-American music activism site, last updated in 2015. Gonutradeal.com hosted CBD wellness content as recently as 2023. Interoutemediaservices.com matches the brand of a European telecom, Interoute, acquired by GTT Communications in 2018 and retired shortly after.

This is not as unusual as it seems, as pirate site clone operators often buy lapsed domains to leverage their existing search-engine credibility.

Since the news broke hours ago, it is possible that the seizure actions are ongoing, so more domains, including different gTLDs, may be added as well. We will update this article if new information becomes available.

Update: ee have traced many more domain names. This includes ones with significant traffic, such as istreameast.app which had 15 million visits last month. There are also several .app domains, for which Google is the registry.

Update June 30: several new domains were seized by the authorities, including .lat, .click, .online, .to, .site, .tech, and .xyz. This expands the actions to other registries, also one outside of the U.S. Whether domain registrars or registries have taken action is not clear, however.

—

The DOJ press release for Operation Offsides 2026 is available here. The seizure warrant and affidavit, filed in the Eastern District of Virginia, were not immediately available to us on PACER.

A list of several domain names that added seizedservers nameservers in the past 48 hours is available below. These are traced by TorrentFreak, not confirmed by the authorities.

Update June 28/30: we have added many more domains.

viper-play.org
surfg.org
rojadirectastv.org
pelotalibrestv.org
pelotalibrehd.org
pelota-libretv.org
kora-yalla.org
kevinsport.org
futbollibrehd.org
futbol-libres.org
kora999live.com
kora999.com
kora999-live.com
kora48.com
kora360-tv.com
kora360-lives.com
kora360-live.com
kora1lives.com
kora-show.com
kora-shoot.com
kora-onlineone.com
kora-online24.com
kora-live4k.com
kora-gol.com
kora-city.com
kora-999.com
koorati.com
koorallive24.com
kooraliveworldcup.com
kooralive69.com
kooralite.com
kooragol-live.com
kooragoal24.com
kooraa4live.com
koora4livehd.com
koora48.com
koora1live.com
koora-tv.com
koora-live-live.com
koooraa4live.com
kooora4livetv.com
kooora365.com
kooora-sport.com
kooora-sia.com
kooora-mobashir.com
kevinsport.com
interoutemediaservices.com
hdlive7.com
hd7-new.com
hayasport.com
gosporttv.com
gonutradeal.com
golygoal.com
gollibre.com
golkoora.com
goheali.com
goalkora.com
go4koraa.com
go4kora.com
fuutbollibre.com
futbollibreusa.com
futbollibreonline.com
futbollibre-tv.com
futbollibre-hd.com
fullmatch-hd.com
freekora.com
freedomgloryproject.com
fotytv.com
flixmv.com
fitforcedaily.com
ekoralive.com
egynoww.com
deportelibretv.com
deportelibree.com
defendersportstreams.com
crichdbest.com
childluresprevention.com
cagesharkdive.com
bolasrolando.com
beinmatsh.com
beinmatchtv.com
beinmatch26.com
bein4kora.com
bein-mattch.com
bein-match.com
bein-match-worldcup.com
bein-live.com
beiin-match.com
alwansport.com
alkooralive.com
akora-live.com
ahsa-news.com
808ball13.com
360koratv.com
360kora.com
360koora-live.com
360kkora.com
1kora.com
11kora.com
redditsoccerstreams.name
yallalivenews.net
yalla-shoot-7sry.net
yalla--live.net
yala-shoot.net
viperplay.net
tv-sport-hd.net
telefullhd.net
tarjetarojatvblog.net
strumyk.net
sportytrend.net
socceraccess.net
sirtv.net
sia-bth.net
rojadirectatvhd.net
rojadirectatv.net
rojadirectastv.net
pelotalibres.net
mundialenvivohd.net
mpokora-online.net
livescorer.net
kora999live.net
kora-online.net
kooora365.net
jokerlivestreams.net
go4koora.net
futbollibrestv.net
fawanews-tv.net
espnlive.net
egoal.net
digi-hdsport.net
deporflix.net
bein-match.net
atkorat.net
365kora.net
yalalive.app
totalsportekz.app
streamfree.app
sportshd.app
sportsfeed24.app
istreameast.app
imethstreams.app
icrackstreams.app
fbstream.cc
kevinsport.lat
foxtrend.click
futbollibretvenvivo.click
pirlotvonline.click
pockeemtv.click
streamcorner.click
panda-hd.online
pirlotv.online
pirlotvs.online
worldcuplives.online
yallashoot4k.online
ihdstreams.site
pirlotv.site
thefootybite.site
crichd.tech
gomitoep.xyz
ifootybite.xyz
streamtpday1.xyz
yallaspor.xyz
ppv.to


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

Among other things, the Dutch anti-piracy group reports that it shut down 50 IPTV/VOD subscription vendors, 42 streaming sites, while also stopping 673 pirate site proxies and mirrors.

BREIN also keeps the Dutch pirate site blocklist up to date. By the end of 2025 it covered 303 unique domains, 13 platforms, and 8 IP addresses. These are part of the dynamic blocking efforts, backed by a voluntary agreement with ISPs, as well as court orders.

BREIN Shares Blocklist Data With DNS4EU

By now, most Dutch site blocking efforts are standard practice, but BREIN also shared a new and intriguing detail in its full report, which involves the European DNS resolver DNS4EU.

As it turns out, BREIN is actively and automatically sharing the Dutch blocklist data with DNS4EU.

BREIN was under the impression that the blocklist data would be used to block pirate sites. Understandably, that is something the group wholeheartedly supports.

“BREIN sees several advantages, particularly the ability to block illegal sites more effectively. BREIN therefore shares the details of websites blocked in the Netherlands and sends DNS4EU up-to-date lists of blocked websites,” BREIN’s annual report reads.

Speaking with TorrentFreak, BREIN’s director Bastiaan van Ramshorst explains that they offer secure access to the same blocklist server that ISPs use. In addition, DNS4EU reportedly said that it would be interested in getting similar data from other countries as well.

Funded by the EU, Blocking in Mind

BREIN’s report and comment don’t explain why the DNS provider might be interested in blocklists, but the DNS provider’s origins provide useful context.

DNS4EU is a public DNS resolver, co-funded by the European Commission and currently operated by a consortium led by Czech cybersecurity company Whalebone. The service launched last year as a sovereign European alternative to non-EU resolvers such as Google Public DNS and Cloudflare.

When the European Commission published its call for proposals in 2022, the tender specified that the resolver should be able to filter illegal material on legal grounds. As we reported at the time, the documentation listed the following requirement.

“Filtering of URLs leading to illegal content based on legal requirements applicable in the EU or in national jurisdictions (e.g. based on court orders), in full compliance with EU rules.”

This type of blocking can also expand to copyrighted content. This is already taking place in response to court orders, such as in France, but the agreement between BREIN and DNS4EU suggests that voluntary blocking could be an option too.

Whalebone now runs DNS4EU without EU funding, but it appears that the interest in blocking remained.

No Voluntary Pirate Site Blocks

The logical assumption that DNS4EU would use the blocklist data to block sites can’t be backed up by data. TorrentFreak’s tests show that blocked domains, including The Pirate Bay, are readily accessible, also from The Netherlands.

To find out more about DNS4EU’s plans with this case, we reached out to the operating company Whalebone, which declined to confirm any blocking and pointed to the DNS4EU resolver policy instead.

Under that policy, DNS4EU commits “not to block DNS resolution except for when required by law, enforceable decision of the competent court or other government authority or elected by the User.”

The Dutch blocklist is based on civil court orders against the ISPs, not against DNS4EU. This means that DNS4EU is not legally required to take action.

DNS4EU’s own numbers confirm that it is not taking any voluntary action, at least where copyright is concerned. Its first transparency report, covering June through December 2025, logs roughly 63 million voluntary “own-initiative” blocks. These are almost all linked to phishing and scam domains.

The number of blocked domains in the copyright infringement category is zero, as is the total for the broader intellectual property category.

No Reason to Block

This chain of events raises an obvious question. Why would DNS4EU reach out to BREIN to request access to the blocklist, and ask for more, only to leave it untouched?

When we first pressed Whalebone, a spokesperson explained that, while the company leads the DNS4EU consortium, other members are involved and there was no agreement yet on how to move forward.

“I need to check with them what was the agreement,” the Whalebone spokesperson informed us two weeks ago. “These discussions are currently ongoing.”

Shortly before publication, after consulting the consortium, Whalebone followed up with a fuller statement, which it says was also sent to BREIN. This time the answer was clear: the data will not be used.

“DNS4EU team contacted BREIN regarding this matter, however, we later discovered that BREIN is not the governmental regulatory body. Therefore, there is no reason to proceed with implementing their blocking list. The data has not been used in any way,” the statement reads.

This neatly explains why BREIN’s blocklist is not put to use by the DNS provider. However, it also raises additional questions. Does DNS4EU currently block sites based on blocklists from governmental regulators, and if so, are any of these blocklists currently in place?

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

For millions of sports fans in the region, these are the go-to sites to enjoy live sports, including the FIFA World Cup and the UEFA Champions League matches.

Rightsholders have been well-aware of the operations and have tried to counter them on several occasions. Earlier this year, for example, UEFA obtained a site blocking order in India that ordered ISPs to block pirlotv2.pl, rojadirectaenvivo.pl, and many others.

This order also required domain registrars disable the domain names. While some complied with this order, several domains remained available. However, following a recent enforcement operation, some of these gaps were addressed.

44 ‘PirloTV’ Domains Targeted

Some domain names that initially stayed online have now been targeted in a new enforcement action. This includes pirlotv3.pl, rojadirectaenvivo.pl, and elitegoltv.pl. These are now under control of the MPA, pointing to the following ACE banner.

Yesterday, the Alliance for Creativity and Entertainment, together with UEFA and the Mexican Institute of Industrial Property (IMPI), took credit for a major ‘disruption’ action targeting the Mexican ‘PirloTV’ piracy ring.

According to the announcement, the 44 targeted domains attracted more than 950 million visits per year, including approximately 230 million from Mexico alone. The network’s strongest audiences were in Mexico and Colombia, with significant traffic also coming from Spain and the United States.

The press release mentions no domain names, but it does reference PirloTV, which likely means that the aforementioned domain names were part of this sweep.

Mexico’s First ACE Operation

The action is the first enforcement operation carried out under a memorandum of understanding between ACE and Mexico’s IMPI, which was signed in December 2025.

Under the agreement, IMPI and ACE committed to exchange intelligence on pirate streaming operations and coordinate enforcement actions across the region. The PirloTV operation is its first public output.

“This operation demonstrates the power of collaboration between ACE, UEFA, key industry stakeholders and government partners to protect the creative economy and combat large-scale digital piracy,” said Larissa Knapp, MPA’s Executive Vice President and Chief Content Protection Officer.

UEFA joined ACE as a member in October 2025, and the two organizations have since worked closely on enforcement, including the Indian domain blocking operation we referenced earlier.

New Domains Surfaced Quickly

This action already took place last month, before the UEFA Champions League final. The press release doesn’t explain why it was made public weeks after, but it is possible that some domain names still had to be properly secured.

It’s also worth noting that ACE’s press release doesn’t mention any enforcement actions against the operators. Instead, it refers to the action as a domain name “disruption”. However, disruption rarely means the end on the story.

This type of wordage suggests that the operators have not necessarily been stopped. That could also explain why several new PirloTV and RojaDirecta domain names emerged recently.

For example, in May a new pirlotvplay.pl surfaced, which later started to redirect to pirlotvplay.dev, which is live and fully operational at the time of writing.

The site carries standard PirloTV branding and is serving today’s sports schedule, including World Cup matches. Interestingly, the canonical URL points to rojadirectahd.vip, which points to a broader piracy network structure.

Whether these new domains are directly linked to the operation ACE targeted is unknown. In any case, there are dozens of copycat sites operating under the PirloTV and RojaDirecta brand names. Most of these are opportunistic clones, trying to capture search traffic, rather than the same operation.

While the recent enforcement action has not taken the operators out of action, it likely cost them significant traffic and revenue. Whether ACE and IMPI will pursue the people behind the network, besides these domains, remains to be seen.

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

Over the years, several ad-focused anti-piracy initiatives and partnerships have tried to prevent branded ads from appearing on these sites.

To track what kinds of ads appear on pirate websites and apps across Europe, the EU Intellectual Property Office (EUIPO) commissioned UK-based research firm White Bullet. The resulting report is one of the most detailed pictures available of how online piracy is funded.

The latest report on the state of the pirate advertising landscape was published this week. It covers 5,671 websites and 337 mobile apps monitored across 18 EU member states from January to November 2025, with the UK and US included as control countries.

White Bullet compiled a similar advertising report for EUIPO in 2021 and 2024, which makes it possible to measure progress over half a decade.

Major Brand Ads Surge on Pirate Sites

In 2024, major brands accounted for 20% of all estimated ad impressions on the monitored pirate websites. In 2025, that figure reached 36%, which is an 80% market share increase in a single year.

The EUIPO report defines major brands as those appearing on recognized industry lists such as the AdAge Global Marketers Index, and the Forbes Global 2000. These are not obscure companies, but include some of the most recognizable companies in the world. None are mentioned by name.

The increase in major brand market share on pirate sites is not an isolated incident. On the contrary, major brands represented just 3% of pirate site ad impressions in the 2021 report, which means that the cumulative increase over the past five years is over 1,000%.

The report also provides a possible reason for the increase, linking it to the termination of industry policing efforts. These may be connected to the EU’s MoU on online advertising and IPR, which has published no updates since early 2023.

“The massive growth in Major Brand advertising on IPR-infringing websites may be correlated with the 2023 termination of several coordinated outreach programmes focused on educating brands that had been placing advertising on IPR-infringing websites,” the report states.

The report does not mention any programs by name, nor is there hard evidence that their termination is driving the increase. It does, however, highlight some other intriguing trends.

Most Ads on the Worst Sites

The pirate sites tracked in the report were classified as either“high-risk” or “illegal”. Sites in the latter category are deemed copyright infringing by judicial or administrative authorities, typically as part of site blocking schemes.

These “illegal” sites featured by far the most major brand ads, growing to 59% of all ads on these sites in the fourth quarter of 2025. This means that on known pirate sites, major brand advertising is now the single largest category of ad content.

This problem is further illustrated by the performance of existing advertising blocklists, including those offered by the UK’s City of London Police Intellectual Property Crime Unit (PIPCU) and the WIPO ALERT platform.

These lists should help to prevent ads from appearing on pirate sites. However, the 2025 data suggests they fail to reach this goal.

Of the 404 pirate sites on PIPCU’s IWL blocklist, major brand advertising from UK advertisers reached 73.8% of estimated ad impressions, which is well above the pirate site average.

This doesn’t necessarily mean that the blocklist itself is inadequate. Instead, the report finds that two brands with “global operations from China” together accounted for 96% of estimated major brand ad impressions on these sites. Logically, these Chinese brands do not use PIPCU’s blocklist.

Relatively Speaking

The report’s headline figures deserve some context, as we also noted when covering last year’s edition.

The 80% year-on-year increase in major brand ads is a relative share figure, not an absolute count. The total pool of monitored websites shrank from 7,250 in 2024 to 5,671 in 2025, and overall estimated ad impressions in the monitored countries dropped from 14.4 billion to 12.7 billion over the same period.

Last year, the data left room for an alternative explanation, suggesting that the surge in major brand ads was partly driven by a collapse in low-quality non-brand advertising, with the overall number of ad impressions dropping rapidly.

However, this doesn’t hold up in 2025, as the major brand share surged again, while the total advertising pool is shrinking far more slowly.

Big Business?

All of this raises the obvious question: how much money are pirate sites actually making from advertising?

The report estimates that worldwide ad revenue for the 5,671 monitored pirate websites reached 382 million euro ($433 million) in 2025. The 18 monitored EU countries accounted for 28.5 million euro.

The average pirate website generated 22,261 euro in estimated annual ad revenue, while the average pirate app brought in 44,447 euro.

Those figures are estimates based on extrapolated data, and the report points out that the actual numbers may be different. Also, there will be some large sites making well over a million annually, while most smaller ones make a few euros per day, if at all.

While piracy apps bring in more revenue than sites, on average, the earnings per impression are slightly lower for apps. Similar to sites, apps also saw an increase in major brand advertisements, from a 7% share in 2024 to 16% in 2025.

An overview of these and many other pirate advertising trends is available in the full EUIPO report, which is available below.

—

The full report, titled ‘Online Advertising on IPR-Infringing Websites and Apps 2025’ was originally posted on the EUIPO website.

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

With help from Internet providers, these addresses can then be linked to an account holder.

ISPs don’t hand over this data voluntarily; they typically require a subpoena or court order to take action. In the United States, these subpoenas are typically obtained by filing a copyright complaint in federal court against a “John Doe” who’s known only by an IP address.

Limited Retention

Internet providers typically store IP-address assignment details for a limited period that varies per company. For Comcast, this data retention period is 180-days.

The data retention policy has consequences for BitTorrent lawsuits. It means that rightsholders have to go to court within this window, if they want to unmask an alleged BitTorrent pirate.

This deadline is common knowledge and by now most rightsholders simply accept it for what it is. However, several recent movie piracy cases handled by attorney Kerry Culpepper show that there is another way to identify suspects, potentially for years after the infringing activity.

Borrowing Strike 3’s Records

The cases, filed on behalf of Capstone Studios, among others, targeted allegedly infringing IP-addresses that passed the 180-day deadline. However, since these same IP-addresses were previously targeted in lawsuits filed by adult producer Strike 3 Holdings, the film company saw an opening.

Instead of asking Comcast to dig up records that no longer exist, the movie companies asked the ISP to produce the subscriber information it had reportedly provided to Strike 3 for the same address.

Strike 3 is the most prolific rightsholder when it comes to filing BitTorrent piracy lawsuits, with thousands of new IP-addresses being targets every year.

These cases eventually landed on the desk of Magistrate Judge Cyrus Chung, who was skeptical about the tactic. In April, he denied the request, finding no reason to believe Comcast still held the requested information in its records.

“In short, the plaintiff provides no information that the third party has retained the information produced in the 2024 lawsuit, and the information it has provided affirmatively indicates that the third party does not retain such information,” Chung wrote in April.

Comcast Has the Requested Information

The movie companies didn’t give up easily and returned to court early June, with the missing piece. According to Culpepper’s declaration, Comcast had indicated that the records fell within its retention period for litigation documents.

Comcast’s retention limit for legal documents is longer than the 180 days for IP assignment logs, and the ISP purportedly said that it would produce the records if ordered. The movie company, meanwhile, agreed to pay the associated fees.

This new information was sufficient for Magistrate Judge Chung to grant the subpoena. In his order, he cites a 2009 federal appeals decision, Gotham Holdings v. Health Grades, that allows a party to subpoena documents that were produced in a separate lawsuit.

“Here, the plaintiff has shown that the third-party ISP possesses information relevant to its claim and that the limited discovery sought will not impose an undue burden or significant expense,” Judge Chung concluded, while granting the request.

This novel discovery technique is new for BitTorrent lawsuits. It means that, if a person is accused on one lawsuit, the chances that they are targeted in future cases increases, even outside the regular retention limit.

Are They the Same Person?

Taken together, the same IP address, the same client, a matching peer-ID fragment, do carry some circumstantial weight. The question is how much.

The ‘piggyback’ subpoenas were granted in at least four lawsuits, listed below, but there could be more. Whether this strategy will be used more regularly in the future has yet to be seen, but it raises a few questions.

The legal paperwork suggests that the defendants used the same IP-addresses, around the same time, as well as the same peer-ID. Therefore, plaintiffs conclude that they “are same person.”

However, it should be noted that in some cases, weeks have passed between the movie piracy and Strike 3 infringement, so in theory the IP-address could be assigned to a new person. The peer-ID argument tries to undercut that defense, but that also raises questions.

The legal paperwork references a peer-ID prefix, for example 2D5554333535572DC4B, which does indeed appear unique. However, most of this prefix (2D5554333535572D) identifies the torrent client ID in HEX, in this case it’s a version of uTorrent 3.5.5.

That would mean that only the three remaining characters of the prefix are unique. What complicates the matter further is that uTorrent typically generates a fresh peer ID per session, and a restart starts a new session, so the random portion of the ID changes.

Tit-for-Tat

All of this isn’t to say that the defendants aren’t the same people. The same IP address pointing to the same household, on the same client, is certainly possible and in many cases likely. However, proving it with certainty is another matter.

It’s also unknown whether any of these subscribers admitted wrongdoing in the related Strike 3 cases. Those suits are typically dismissed without context.

Whether Comcast will actually hand over the information has yet to be seen, but the plaintiffs arguments suggested that it has no objections before the subpoena was issued. If any subscribers are indeed targeted, they may also choose to push back.

For Capstone, the orders are welcome after the movie company lost a subscriber identification battle at the appeals court last year. There, the Ninth Circuit ruled that copyright holders can’t use a “DMCA subpoena shortcut” to identify internet subscribers suspected of copyright infringement.

As a result, rightsholders have to file slower more expensive federal lawsuits, including the ones at stake here. But with the new “piggyback” rulings, they are no longer tied to the 180-day retention windows.

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– Boy Kills World Rights, LLC v. John Doe (76.130.128.15), 1:26-cv-00305 – Boy Kills World

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

With the tournament in full swing, rightsholders are doing all they can to crack down on pirate sites and services.

Most of this enforcement takes place behind the scenes, through site blocking efforts and takedown notices, for example. This activity is typically picked up by broadcasters, but over the past day we also noticed a series of takedown actions appearing to come from FIFA directly.

FIFA Takedown Notices

While browsing through the Lumen Database, the transparency tool maintained by Harvard that archives copyright complaints, we spotted dozens of recent DMCA takedown notices that were sent to Google, listing “FIFA World Cup” as the sender.

FIFA has engaged in anti-piracy activities in the past, so the action doesn’t come as a surprise. However, the boilerplate language used in the notices stands out for various reasons.

For example, the targeted sites are accused of using “unauthorized brand configurations, proprietary digital layout assets, and trademarked media frames” to impersonate FIFA’s official platforms in Google Search results.

This appears to be a rather convoluted way to note that the pirate sites are using FIFA’s intellectual property without permission. Also, terms such as “brand configurations,” “trademarked media frames,” and “proprietary brand identity” are trademark concepts, which are typically not handled through copyright takedown notices.

AI-Generated?

It doesn’t stop there. The notices further claim that the pirate sites deploy “automated database scrapers and programmatic indexing matrices” to capture search traffic, and that “cloaked link structures” are “engineered explicitly to hijack our organic search footprint.”

This type of language is not something we see every day. In fact, the question remains whether it is written by an actual person. The reputable AI-checker tool Pangram clearly has its doubts, labeling it 100% AI-generated.

Full-domain Removal

The demands made in these takedown notices are not imaginary. However, these go well beyond what we typically see in a takedown notice. Instead of merely asking for the removal of the listed URLs, ‘FIFA’ wants Google to delist full domains.

“We request the complete, permanent de-indexing of this root domain and all its subdirectories from Google Search,” the notices read.

This type of demand goes well beyond what a DMCA takedown notice is intended for. While Google does remove full domain names in response to site blocking orders, DMCA takedown notices typically don’t warrant such a drastic remedy.

Over the past several days, more than 40 DMCA takedown notices were filed, identifying domain names including beststreameast.xyz, falconstreams.net, footybite1.live, streameastnow.net, streamiz.click and us-sport.eu.

How Google classifies these notices is unknown, but it does not appear to have fully delisted the domains. None of the URLs we checked triggered the standard DMCA removal notice in the search results, suggesting that these URLs were not removed either. Alternatively, these URLs were not indexed at all.

Who is Behind This?

The URL lists themselves raise further questions, as the “FIFA World Cup” notices do not stop at flagging FIFA content. The notices also target other sports with no obvious connection to the World Cup, including the NBA, Formula 1, NFL, WWE, and many others.

FIFA’s own digital operations have not been without issues either. Security researcher BobDaHacker recently documented how a flaw in the organization’s Agent Platform exposed live camera feeds and stream keys to anyone who registered with a valid ID.

Given all the open questions and the unusual approach, we doubt whether FIFA is indeed behind these notices. The AI-generated boilerplate language, trademark complaints in a DMCA notice, and URLs of completely unrelated sports, are not what you would expect of a reputable organization.

TorrentFreak contacted FIFA to ask whether the organization, or a vendor acting on its behalf, submitted the notices. At the time of writing, no response has come in yet.

But if this isn’t FIFA, who is behind these notices then?

We can only speculate, but we have seen similar tactics in the past. In this case, that would mean that the operator of a pirate streaming site tries to get higher ranking competitors removed from Google search.

Whether these DMCA notices represent FIFA’s own enforcement operation or an attempt to exploit FIFA’s name during the world’s most-watched sporting event has yet to be seen. In any case, it shows that these types of broad takedown efforts deserve some serious scrutiny.

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

WIPO is well-respected internationally and part of the United Nations, which ensured cooperation from a wide variety of countries.

In 2019, WIPO launched an advertising blocklist that lets member states flag infringing sites. This list can then be shared with advertisers, who can use it to make sure that revenues don’t end up going to these sites.

This “WIPO Alert” system has been running for years with thousands of domain names being added. While it still functions today, WIPO has quietly been working on a new “WIPO Alert Pay” system that targets the payment services that counterfeit and pirate sites rely on.

WIPO Alert Pay

At the WIPO Advisory Committee on Enforcement session in Geneva this month, WIPO’s Todd Reeves described it as the next iteration of the same follow-the-money approach. While it is not publicly announced yet, Reeves presented the setup and results of the initial pilot.

WIPO Alert Pay relies on voluntary cooperation between rightsholders and payment service providers (PSPs), such as Mastercard and PayPal. Rightsholders can use the alert system to flag instances where pirate sites use their payment services, for subscriptions or VIP access for example.

Rightsholders have to supply required information, which is checked by WIPO for completeness before a domain name enters the system. The PSPs can then decide what action, if any, to take against the merchant’s account under their own terms and conditions.

Report, Check, Notify, List

As with the advertising blocklist, WIPO stresses that its role is limited. It hosts the platform, receives the flagged sites, and aggregates the results for the PSPs. According to Reeves, it makes no infringement determinations of its own.

“We’re not making any infringement determinations. We’re simply securely hosting the platforms,” Reeves said.

“We receive the list of the flagged sites by the right holders and verify that the required information and attestations are provided for the flagged sites. So it’s more of a formalities check than anything else.”

The process runs on a notice-and-review timer. Rightsholders first notify the site owners. If there is no response after three working days, WIPO steps in to send a second notice. If another three working days pass without a response, the site is added to the WIPO Alert Pay list and the payment providers take it from there.

71% of Flagged Listings Removed

The new Alert Pay system ran as a manual pilot from November 2024 to August 2025. Six unnamed rights holders took part, together with two payment providers.

Over that period, WIPO processed 17 actions covering 35 sites of concern. Reeves said 71% of the flagged listings were removed, and that all participants reviewed the system positively and that it was ready to scale.

The slide below, which was shown by Reeves, specifically notes that “broad adoption could be highly disruptive.”

The pilot also uncovered that some sites were displaying a Mastercard or PayPal logo without actually offering those services, presumably to signal trustworthiness.

The mention of Mastercard and PayPal is notable, especially since these two providers are also named in the system’s online forms. This doesn’t make it hard to guess who the two unnamed payment providers were that participated in the pilot.

From Pilot to Platform

With the pilot closed, WIPO is now working on finalizing the development. A software engineer has spent the past few months turning the manual workflow into an automated platform, which Reeves said is close to completion.

The platform already covers PayPal and Mastercard, but WIPO wants to add support for more providers to broaden the coverage. After that, the system will be promoted to rightsholders and their representatives, as well as the member states.

To get more information on the system, TorrentFreak reached out to WIPO two weeks ago, but the organization has yet to reply to our request for comment. However, it is expected that more information will come out when the official launch of WIPO Alert Pay is near.

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The update on WIPO Alert Pay was presented at the 18th session of the WIPO Advisory Committee on Enforcement on June 4, 2026. The supporting slide deck was not publicly available at the time of writing. All quotes and screenshots used in this article were pulled from the meeting’s webcast.

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

This week, the same publishers, including Penguin Random House, Elsevier, and HarperCollins, filed a new complaint at the same court, this time with the relatively young pirate library WeLib as the target.

Again, the stakes are substantial, with the publishers seeking up to $19.5 million in potential damages for direct copyright infringement.

A New Entrant

The similarities don’t stop at the legal arguments and stakes. Anna’s Archive already highlighted the newcomer in a blog post last year, describing WeLib as a “new entrant” in the space that had copied both its collection and its code.

“They appear to have mirrored most of our collection, and use a fork of our codebase,” Anna’s Archive noted.

The same blog post was also critical of WeLib for not contributing back to the ecosystem and recommended that people avoid using the site.

This week, the publishers also warn against using the site, albeit for different reasons. Their complaint accuses WeLib’s unnamed and anonymous operators of widespread copyright infringement, while also confirming that connection to Anna’s Archive.

“Defendants’ entire business is the illegal copying and distribution of literary works,” the complaint notes, adding that “WeLib was created after its operators copied the source code and most of the contents of the Notorious Pirate Site, Anna’s Archive.”

Not a Library

WeLib describes itself as an “endless library” founded on the principle that “education and literature belong to everyone.” The publishers, however, clearly don’t agree with the library framing, noting libraries can be trusted; pirate sites not.

“Libraries are trusted institutions that serve the communities that fund them by lending books and other publications they have lawfully acquired. Using this label for WeLib explicitly misleads the public and allows WeLib to hijack the goodwill that libraries enjoy and have legitimately earned.”

“WeLib is no more than a pirate website that reproduces and distributes works of authorship owned by others to users for a profit, without authorization from or compensation to the copyright owners,” the complaint adds.

The complaint notes that WeLib’s operators made efforts to keep their identities hidden. However, the site itself quickly became a go-to portal for many book pirates.

The complaint notes that, by WeLib’s own account, its collection includes 43 million books and 98 million articles. The site reportedly has over 80,000 active monthly users who accessed more than 51.7 million books and downloaded 14.5 million files last month.

While the site can be used for free, users can pay for fast downloads and to skip the queue. Subscriptions start at $7 per month for 25 fast downloads and 25 fast reads per day; while the top tier costs $90 a month for 1,000 daily downloads.

These payments, or “donations” as WeLib calls them, can be made through cryptocurrency, WeChat, and Alipay. They are allegedly processed through a company called Malum.co, which offers payment services to high-risk vendors, without the need for any KYC identity checks.

Damages and Domain Seizures

The complaint lists a sample of 130 copyrighted works as evidence. This mirrors the Anna’s Archive lawsuit, where the court awarded $150,000 per work, which is the statutory maximum, resulting in a total of $19.5 million.

In addition to the monetary damages, the publishers are also seeking a permanent injunction that aims to take the site offline. They ask the court to order third-party registries, registrars, and hosting providers to disable WeLib’s domains and render them untransferable.

This also includes a specific request to disable the authoritative nameserver for the .st domain, registered through Njalla, a Costa Rica-based registrar that is not necessarily responsive to U.S. court orders.

The AI Training Conundrum

As with other recent publisher lawsuits, the complaint also mentions AI training. Specifically, it alleges that WeLib supplies copyright infringing data to AI companies.

“WeLib has also been an illegal supplier of stolen content to the AI industry. In a recent lawsuit, publishers alleged that Meta utilized WeLib to train their Llama models,” the complaint reads.

The recent lawsuit they refer to is Elsevier Inc. v. Meta Platforms which is filed by several of the same publishers through the same law firm, Oppenheim + Zebrak. However, what that complaint actually says about WeLib is more specific and not in line with the current case.

The Elsevier v. Meta complaint describes WeLib as a source found within C4 training dataset Meta used, but identifies it as “formerly known as PDF Drive.” This dataset was built years ago from a Common Crawl snapshot and predates WeLib and even Anna’s Archive.

More confusingly, the complaint against WeLib that was filed this week makes no mention of it formerly being known as “PDF Drive”, or the C4 dataset for that matter.

According to our knowledge, there is no evidence that content hosted by WeLib was included in the C4 database. All we can confirm is that the database does include “PDF Drive” data and that the pdfdrive.com domain redirected to the new WeLib site at some point.

PDF Drive is a long-running PDF hosting site that has operated for years, predating Anna’s Archive entirely. It has no documented connection to Anna’s Archive’s codebase or collection. Whether it shares more than a domain redirect with the WeLib now being sued is unclear.

The publishers’ framing of WeLib as an active AI training pipeline may be backed up with further evidence later, or not. For now, WeLib has yet to respond. However, since anonymous operators typically don’t show up in court, this case may also copy Anna’s Archive’s path, heading to a default judgment.

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A copy of the complaint, filed by Oppenheim + Zebrak on behalf of the thirteen plaintiff publishers, is available here (pdf).

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