These submissions traditionally focus on torrent sites, cyberlockers and pirate IPTV services. In recent editions, however, intermediaries such as hosting companies and Cloudflare have been added to the mix.

LaLiga takes this expanding reach a step further. In its submission for the 2027 edition, the Spanish football league asks for NordVPN, ProtonVPN, ExpressVPN and Surfshark to be listed.

The 14-page submission targets a wide range of sites and services, including traditional piracy threats, but the VPN section is new. The league notes that it doesn’t take offense with the technology itself, but with how these providers are marketed by others through their affiliate programs.

“The conduct that takes these services beyond neutral technical provision is the deliberate marketing of circumvention, conducted at arm’s length through affiliate programmes,” LaLiga writes.

Geo-Unblocking Free Football Broadcasts

LaLiga explains that publishers and influencers with affiliate deals publish guides, updated for the 2026/27 season, on how to watch its football matches for free using these VPNs. Those pages rank the providers and link to discounted subscriptions, while earning a commission on resulting sales.

Some of these guides point out that football fans can use the VPNs to circumvent geoblocking, allowing them to watch free or cheap broadcasts in other countries. This isn’t linked to pirate streams, but LaLiga notes that it harms the territorial exclusivity of its licensing deals.

Guides of this type are not hard to find. We came across several Spanish-language pages, updated for the new season, that recommend connecting to a foreign VPN server to watch matches on free broadcasts abroad.

These recommendations are published by affiliates, not by the VPN providers themselves. LaLiga’s submission doesn’t claim that the providers write the guides themselves, but it argues that the providers profit from them.

Circumventing Pirate Site Blockades

In addition to bypassing geo-blocking, the submission also flags guides that it sees as a more serious concern. These are affiliate pages that name pirate streaming sites and services, explaining that a VPN can bypass court-ordered site blocking measures.

LaLiga says that anyone can verify this affiliate marketing activity, but the submission doesn’t name or link to a single guide or influencer that’s crossing a line.

According to LaLiga, the publishers behind the guides are not always independent, linking the vpnMentor review site to Kape Technologies, which owns several VPN services.

“Publishers of the guidance are in some cases not independent. Within one of the corporate groups identified above, VPN review and ranking publications are under the same ownership as the products they rank, a relationship those publications disclose,” the submission reads.

Which of these publications include the guides LaLiga describes isn’t mentioned.

The submission also argues that some VPN providers have released marketing material timed around its match calendar. This is not backed up with examples, but in February a Spanish court in Córdoba reached a similar conclusion when it issued an ex parte site blocking order against ProtonVPN and NordVPN.

Without hearing the VPN providers, the court reportedly concluded that both NordVPN and ProtonVPN actively advertise their ability to bypass geo-restrictions, citing match schedules in their marketing materials, while describing the VPNs as active participants in the piracy chain.

The matter is not settled yet. In May, the same court refused to fine NordVPN for not complying, accepting that the targeted IP addresses of pirate streams changed frequently. The main proceedings are still ongoing.

VPN Technology is Fine

LaLiga asks the Commission to list the four providers because they allegedly facilitate access to blocked pirate sites and services. The league stresses that it’s not targeting the technology itself.

“This request is based not on the provision of VPN services as such, but on the commercial exploitation and active promotion of their ability to circumvent court-ordered blocking measures,” LaLiga writes.

The submission also opens with a disclaimer. “This submission does not assert any finding of legal liability against the entities named,” it reads.

The main allegation hinges on the affiliate promotion angle, without naming any specific guides. Whether that will be sufficient for the European Commission has yet to be seen, especially since it is still contested in courts and among lawmakers whether VPN providers should be required to implement blocking orders.

AFTVnews Downloader Short Codes

VPNs are not the only general-purpose tools in LaLiga’s submission. The league also targets Downloader by AFTVnews, a popular app for Fire TV and Android TV devices that lets users download files by entering a URL or a numeric short code.

LaLiga says it catalogued 341 of these codes, 262 of which lead to pirate apps. The league describes the codes as a curated catalogue, under the operator’s “exclusive editorial control.”

“The ease and simplicity with which applications can be discovered and installed through this catalogue is itself demonstrative of its nature as an editorially-curated platform, distinct from the underlying distribution infrastructure,” LaLiga writes.

AFTVnews, which boasts more than 100 million users, describes the codes as being “generated by the AFTVnews URL Shortener,” which suggests that they are created from links submitted by users.

Downloader has been targeted before. In 2023, Google removed the app from its Play Store following complaints from Israeli TV companies, and again after a DMCA notice from Markscan. The app was later reinstated.

Whether the Commission will mention Downloader or any of the four VPN providers in its 2027 piracy watchlist has yet to be seen. The latest Counterfeit and Piracy Watch List, released in 2025, did not include any VPN services, but did mention various hosting providers, IPFS, and domain name privacy service Njalla.

—

We reached out to ProtonVPN, the VPN Trust Initiative and AFTVnews for comment, but they did not respond before publication.

Disclosure: TorrentFreak uses VPN affiliate links, but not in a circumvention context.

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

The RIAA argued that the software circumvented YouTube’s rolling cipher technology. A few weeks later, GitHub reinstated the repository and set up a $1 million defense fund for developers facing similar claims.

The music industry had more success in Germany, where labels won a lawsuit against Uberspace, the hosting provider of youtube-dl’s official website. In November 2024, the Hamburg Court of Appeal rejected the host’s appeal.

While youtube-dl was never formally shut down, active development has been largely taken over by the open source fork yt-dlp. In fact, people who visit the original .org domain of youtube-dl’s former website are redirected to yt-dlp.

The yt-dlp project launched in 2021 and has more than 16,000 forks and more than 190,000 stars on GitHub, making it the 32nd most-starred project on the site.

IFPI Flags yt-dlp as “Major Problem”

The music business is well aware of these developments and continues to see this type of software as a problem. In a new policy submission, music industry group IFPI highlights yt-dlp as a major problem, naming four developers by their online handles.

The callout is part of IFPI’s submission to the consultation for the 2027 EU Counterfeit and Piracy Watch List. Among other things, it asks for yt-dlp to be added to the list of stream ripping services, alongside Savefrom.net and two Y2mate sites.

“YT-DLP is a major problem for the music industry as it provides freely available open-source software that enables users to download and permanently store music and audiovisual content from licensed streaming platforms, including YouTube, without authorisation,” IFPI writes.

IFPI’s overview describes the project’s history, its stream ripping capabilities, and the copyright-critical Unlicense it’s released under. The group also explains why the software is hard to stop.

“Its open-source nature, extensive developer community and its widespread distribution results in the tool being difficult to contain and/or remove, while continuing to facilitate stream ripping at scale and depriving right holders, artists and licensed services from legitimate streaming and downloads.”

Four GitHub Handles

The submission identifies the project’s founder as GitHub user pukkandan, who it says was lead maintainer from 2021 to 2024. It also lists three current core maintainers: coletdjnz, bashonly and Grub4K. These handles are publicly listed on GitHub.

This is the first time we’ve seen yt-dlp, or the original youtube-dl, named as a target in a Watch List or Notorious Markets submission.

Besides the listing, the yt-dlp callout doesn’t ask for anything concrete. There is no takedown request, call for blocking measures, or any action against the developers. The submission also doesn’t mention that the software can be used for lawful purposes.

Circumvention?

The yt-dlp description does not mention the word ‘circumvention’ either, but the general stream-ripper intro does. IFPI argues that YouTube uses technical protection measures to prevent downloads.

“Stream ripping sites are circumventing these measures that enjoy legal protections under the international treaties and EU law,” the submission reads.

The music group also cites the German youtube-dl ruling, where the court held the website’s host liable for aiding and abetting the circumvention of these measures.

However, the submission itself describes the tool as “parsing webpage and player data, and interacting with platform-specific playback endpoints.” How circumvention potentially fits in there is not mentioned.

Officially Hosted in the United States

The European Commission’s Watch List highlights marketplaces and services outside the EU that reportedly engage in or facilitate piracy and counterfeiting. While the location of the developers isn’t discussed, GitHub is called out as the hosting platform.

“Github is YT-DLP’s official source; it serves as the main platform for accessing the scripts latest updates, source code, pre-compiled binaries and installation instructions,” IFPI writes, while adding that forks and copies are also available elsewhere.

GitHub is a Microsoft-owned company, based in the United States, which would make the yt-dlp repository US-hosted.

AI ‘Ripping’ Threats

IFPI’s submission is not limited to traditional threats. It also flags a newer type of ripping tool. AI music apps Rythmix and MusiQ AI allow users to paste a YouTube link and turn the recording into an AI cover song with a cloned artist voice.

Both these tools are available in Apple’s App Store, and Rythmix is also on Google Play, where it was already downloaded more than five million times.

In the months to come, the European Commission will go over all submissions and decide which of the proposed targets make it into the 2027 edition of the list. Whether that includes yt-dlp or the AI apps has yet to be seen.

—

We reached out to the yt-dlp maintainers and GitHub for a comment on IFPI’s submission, but they did not respond before publication.

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

This wasn’t the only bill in the works. As expected, there’s now competition from a unified bill, officially introduced by Senator Thom Tillis and Rep. Zoe Lofgren: the DEFEND IP Act.

Both lawmakers had already been working on similar legislation and the DEFEND IP Act merges Lofgren’s Foreign Anti-Digital Piracy Act (FADPA) and Tillis’s Block BEARD draft into a single bicameral bill.

While the bill’s title works on its own, it’s actually an acronym for “Deterring Extraterritorial Foreign Exploitation of Networks Damaging Intellectual Property.” Senators Chris Coons, Marsha Blackburn, and Adam Schiff are co-sponsors of the Senate bill, while Rep. Ben Cline co-leads the House effort.

“I am proud to work across the aisle on this smart, targeted approach to crack down on foreign piracy while protecting Americans’ free speech and access to a free and open internet,” Rep. Lofgren says in her announcement.

The Senate version of the bill, S. 5529, is now with the Judiciary Committee. Congress.gov has yet to publish the text, but Lofgren’s office has posted a copy of the House version of the bill, which allows us to take a closer look.

VPNs Are Exempt

Like Issa’s ACPA, the DEFEND IP Act allows copyright holders to obtain court orders that require intermediaries to block foreign pirate sites. The key difference is which intermediaries can be targeted.

The DEFEND IP Act covers broadband providers with at least 50,000 subscribers, as well as public DNS resolvers with more than $100 million in annual revenue. The latter would likely include Google and Cloudflare.

VPN services are not on the list, however. The bill’s definition of a service provider explicitly excludes “an entity that exclusively provides virtual private network services or similar service that encrypt and route user traffic through intermediary servers.”

This is different from the ACPA bill, where VPNs are included. The word “exclusively” leaves some room for interpretation, however. The bill doesn’t explain how the exemption applies to companies that offer a VPN alongside other services.

DNS resolvers get a similar exemption, but only if they provide their services “exclusively through encrypted DNS protocols,” such as DNS over HTTPS. This is a high bar and it likely means that major public DNS resolvers including Cloudflare and Google, which also handle unencrypted queries, would have to block on their encrypted services as well.

Designate First, Block Later

The blocking process itself follows the same two-step approach as Issa’s ACPA bill. The first step is for a federal court to classify a website as a “foreign digital piracy site.”

To qualify, the site must be primarily designed for piracy, have no commercially significant purpose other than piracy, or be intentionally marketed as a piracy destination. Operators have 20 days to respond, but the court doesn’t have to wait for them and can issue an ex-parte order when the requirements are met.

With the designation in hand, the rightsholder can return to the same judge and request a blocking order. The court then has to decide whether blocking is “technically feasible and effective” or whether there are less burdensome options available.

Blocking orders remain valid for a year and can be renewed. When a pirate site moves to a new domain or IP address, rightsholders can ask the court to update the order.

As with ACPA, the DEFEND IP Act also covers live streaming events, including sports. Rightsholders can request a court order when a live transmission “will likely violate” their rights, which means that a site can be flagged before the match starts.

Hollywood Applauds, Public Knowledge Objects

As with earlier proposals, service providers get several safeguards. Blocking orders can’t prescribe specific blocking techniques, providers are immune from liability when they comply in good faith, and they can ask rightsholders to cover part of the costs.

Websites that are blocked by mistake can ask the court to modify the order. However, unlike Issa’s bill, which offers up to $250,000 in compensation, the DEFEND IP Act has no payout for collateral damage.

The unified bill has broad industry support from the start, with more than a dozen organizations backing it, including the MPA, RIAA, Copyright Alliance, SAG-AFTRA, and the Directors Guild.

“By enacting this legislation, our country can deploy a highly effective tool to protect creators and consumers from overseas digital piracy, all while safeguarding free speech and preserving the open internet,” MPA Chairman and CEO Charles Rivkin says.

Public Knowledge, which also opposes Issa’s bill, sees it differently. The group views both site blocking proposals as part of the same push.

“For the second time in as many weeks, rightsholders have convinced Congress to build out an expansive infrastructure for censorship rather than go after the root of the problem: operators of overseas piracy websites,” Public Knowledge writes.

“Let us repeat: Applying blocking orders to global DNS resolvers causes global blocks,” the group adds.

More than fourteen years after SOPA was shelved, two site blocking bills are now competing for support in Congress.

Time is limited, however. Both bills expire when the current Congress ends in January. Rep. Issa is retiring and Senator Tillis is not seeking reelection, so neither will be around to reintroduce their proposals next year.

Whether either proposal will get further than SOPA did remains to be seen.

—

A copy of the DEFEND IP Act, as published by Rep. Lofgren’s office, 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 one newcomer on the list.

“The End of Oak Street” is the most shared title.

The most torrented movies for the week ending on September 28 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.

This involves sending a steady stream of cease and desist letters and takedown notices. If those don’t work, the company is prepared to take action in court.

In June 2024, it filed a lawsuit at a Washington federal court against Arizona resident James C. Williams, known online as ‘Archbox’. Nintendo accused him of operating several ‘pirate shops’ that offered large libraries of pirated Switch games to the public.

According to Nintendo, Williams promoted these shops on the SwitchPirates subreddit, where he was a leading moderator. He also allegedly helped users install circumvention software and asked for eShop gift card “donations” to buy games that were then decrypted and added to the shops.

Williams never responded to the complaint. This prompted Nintendo to request a default judgment last October, asking for $4.5 million in statutory damages as well as a permanent injunction.

Judge Grants Default Judgment

This week, U.S. District Judge Lauren King granted Nintendo’s motion in full. She stressed that the defendant was aware of the case, as he hired a lawyer to object to a Google subpoena, but he failed to answer the complaint.

Williams’ activity on Reddit didn’t help his case and is cited in the court order. These posts suggest that the defendant knew that the games were copyrighted and that he distributed them anyway.

In one post cited in the order, Williams calls himself a “pirate” who “[is]n’t going to give Nintendo $50 for a game.”

$4.5 Million Damages Award

Nintendo requested the statutory maximum of $150,000 per title for 30 games, including The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, Mario Kart 8 Deluxe and Super Smash Bros. Ultimate.

The judge agreed. At roughly $50 per game, lost sales could easily run into the hundreds of thousands of dollars, making the maximum damages request “not an unrealistic estimate” of Nintendo’s actual damages, the order reads.

This and other posts made clear to the judge that the infringing activity was willful. She therefore found the $4.5 million award appropriate, partly as punishment.

“Williams’ egregious infringement activities merit substantial punishment here,” Judge King concludes.

As a “gesture of reasonableness,” Nintendo didn’t request DMCA damages or attorneys’ fees. This did not go unnoticed by the judge, who notes that this worked in favor of granting the maximum copyright infringement damages.

Shops and Reddit Account Already Gone

In addition to the damages, Judge King also issued a permanent injunction. This prohibits Williams from distributing any pirated Nintendo game, not just the 30 listed titles, as well as any software that circumvents the protections on Nintendo’s games and consoles.

He is also barred from encouraging others to download pirated games or circumvention tools. To enforce the ban, the order requires Williams to disable his pirate shops and the accounts he used to distribute or promote them.

The order covers his Reddit account, as well as accounts on Instagram, X, TikTok, Discord and Telegram that were used for the infringing activity.

It appears that, in practice, there is little left to disable. The ‘archbox’ Reddit account is already self-deleted, and the shops named in the complaint were shut down long ago, most of them after Nintendo’s cease and desist letter in March 2024.

By filing the lawsuit, Nintendo said it wanted to “put a stop to” Williams’ activities, and presumably send a deterrent message to others. Recouping the $4.5 million will likely be hard, particularly since the defendant is unresponsive.

Although the judgment goes in Nintendo’s favor, none of the legal claims were tested. Because Williams failed to respond, the court took the allegations in the complaint as true, resulting in an uncontested win.

This outcome differs from Nintendo’s parallel lawsuit against Modded Hardware, which was filed on the same day. That case ended last year when its operator agreed to a $2 million judgment to settle.

—

A copy of Judge King’s order granting default judgment and a permanent injunction is available here (pdf). The judgment can be found here (pdf).

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

This also applies to Olevod. The site, which operates from a .com and .tv domain, has appeared in a batch of DMCA subpoenas obtained by ACE, as well as an Australian blocking order. However, it never showed up in the annual USTR lists of key foreign piracy threats.

In recent years the site continued to serve a stable audience, specifically targeting Chinese-speaking people outside of China, including many U.S. residents.

Tencent Sues ‘Chinese’ Pirate Site in Florida

In an effort to stop the site, Tencent filed a copyright complaint against Olevod at a federal court in Florida last October. Tencent Video is one of China’s streaming giants, and the complaint lists more than 150 of its shows, including hits that have reportedly been streamed as many as 30 billion times.

According to the complaint, Olevod.com and Olevod.tv offer full-length copies of Tencent’s films and series. Visitors can watch these for free with ads, or pay for a VIP membership that removes them.

“Olevod’s websites include full-length copies of Tencent content, including the Tencent Exclusive Shows. This content includes newly released movies, archived movies, and television show episodes—all available at the click of a button and often made available immediately after the original premiere,” the complaint read.

Tencent points out that Olevod advertises itself in Google search results as an “online video media platform for overseas Chinese.” In fact, it blocks visitors from mainland China to avoid issues with local rightsholders, Tencent argues.

$100 Million in Potential Damages

In addition to accusing it of direct copyright infringement, Tencent also alleged trademark infringement, while noting that ads for gambling, pornography and counterfeit diplomas appeared next to its name and logos.

The complaint lists 670 registered episodes, with Tencent seeking up to $150,000 in statutory damages for each, putting the theoretical maximum in damages at more than $100 million.

Since pirate site operators typically don’t pay damages in full, Tencent also requested a broad injunction, asking the court to order ISPs, hosting companies, DNS resolvers, VPN providers, banks and payment processors to cut the site off within seven days.

Olevod Fights Back

Where many alleged pirate sites choose not to appear in court, Olevod lawyered up, hiring Florida lawyers. In January, they asked the court to throw the case out, arguing that a U.S. court has no jurisdiction over it.

The company behind the site identified itself as Jiayi Network Technology SL, which is a Spanish company without a U.S. connection.

The site’s servers are in Germany and France, the defense said, adding that its prices are in yuan and euros, with most payments running through Alipay and WeChat Pay. The site has no employees, offices or contracts in the United States.

Tencent countered with evidence that the site accepts U.S. dollars through PayPal, sells advertising space, and uses IP addresses managed from a mail drop in Destin, Florida.

In June, Magistrate Judge Panayotta Augustin-Birch issued a report and recommendation, siding with Olevod. While Tencent had shown that Floridians could reach the site, it failed to show that a single one had actually watched a Tencent show there, she concluded.

If access to a website would be sufficient to invoke jurisdiction, that would “subject every company or individual that has a website anywhere in the world, and whose website can be accessed in Florida, to suit in Florida,” she wrote, citing an earlier ruling.

Judge: Olevod Can’t Escape Florida Lawsuit

Last week, District Judge David Leibowitz rejected the magistrate’s recommendation, denying the motion to dismiss, keeping the case alive.

The ruling comes after Tencent shared fresh traffic data from Semrush, showing that Olevod.com attracted 123,400 visits from Florida in June alone, making the state its fourth-largest source of U.S. visitors.

These numbers may have helped Tencent’s case, but the advertisements and premium subscriptions it offered turned out to be crucial. These show it does business with Floridians. For the judge, that was enough to compare the site to an online seller of counterfeit Louis Vuitton bags, who previously lost a similar jurisdiction battle.

“The core of Tencent’s claims is that Jiayi traffics in pirated Tencent content. And the record shows Jiayi has built a business doing just that in Florida—both by selling ad space visible to Florida residents and by selling premium subscriptions to U.S. consumers, including Florida residents,” Judge Leibowitz wrote.

That pirate streams are digital and designer bags physical does not matter, he added. Olevod is not a hobbyist running a one-man business from home, but “a sophisticated company running interactive websites.”

Roadmap for Chinese Rightsholders?

Tencent is not the only Chinese platform to try its luck in Florida. Last year, rival streaming service iQIYI sued the pirate site Aiyifan TV at the same court, using the same legal team.

The anonymous operators of Aiyifan TV never showed up and a default was entered within months, but when iQIYI asked for $196.55 million in damages and a broad injunction, the judge slammed on the brakes.

The court granted a liability judgment but requested additional evidence for both the damages and the domain-transfer request, criticizing the rightsholders for seemingly pulling the per-work damages figures “out of thin air.” This damages request remains pending.

Unlike Aiyifan TV, Olevod chose to fight in court where it just lost the first round. However, the ruling says nothing about the copyright claims themselves. The court only found that it has the authority to hear the case; whether Olevod actually infringed Tencent’s rights, and what that should cost, remains to be decided.

Olevod has until October 2 to file its answer to the complaint. Whether it will continue to defend itself or follow Aiyifan into default is unknown. At the time of writing, both Olevod domains remain online.

For Chinese rightsholders, the order confirms that a foreign pirate site with ad-supported streams and paid subscriptions can be sued in Florida, even without a U.S. plaintiff, U.S. servers or a U.S. office. Whether more cases against Chinese-language pirate platforms will follow has yet to be seen.

—

A copy of Judge Leibowitz’s order, issued at the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Florida, is available here (pdf).

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

Responding to the pirate stigma and pressure from rightsholders, last year Amazon stepped in and disabled several popular pirate apps that were sideloaded onto users’ devices.

Amazon’s targets included LiveNetTV, a popular TV streaming app that had been around for a decade. This ad-supported app offered access to hundreds of channels in dozens of countries and was one of the most popular of its kind.

The block didn’t stop the app though. The developers released new versions that slipped by Amazon’s countermeasures and LiveNetTV was still working as usual at the start of the year.

Then, in late February, LiveNetTV’s channels went dark for another reason. The app still opened and the thumbnails were still there, but the streams were dead. The operators never offered an explanation but many people simply assumed that the developers had quit, possibly under legal pressure.

With the developers remaining silent for months, the shutdown of the popular app remained a mystery, until now.

LiveNetTV Shutdown and Settlement

In a press release shared with TorrentFreak, the Alliance for Creativity and Entertainment (ACE) takes partial credit for the app’s demise. The anti-piracy coalition identified and tracked down the two operators in Istanbul, Turkey, and reached a settlement that shut it down for good.

The two operators are identified only as A.B. and R.B., and the release notes that the settlement followed “legal proceedings,” without going into detail. It does highlight a mea culpa from the two, which they agreed to share after signing the settlement.

“What started as a way to make money online quickly got out of hand. We didn’t fully appreciate the legal consequences or the impact our actions would have.”

“Looking back, the financial gains were simply not worth everything we’ve lost,” they conclude.

Police Raid in February

The public statement reads as a cautionary tale. What it doesn’t say is what prompted it, and the press release doesn’t either, besides thanking the authorities in Türkiye and mentioning “legal proceedings.” However, ACE filled in the blanks when we asked.

“A search & seizure was executed in February by the local police and a court appointed expert,” an ACE spokesperson informed us. The shutdown that followed “was the operators’ decision after the search & seizure was executed and before settlement discussions.”

The raid was the result of a criminal complaint that MPA member companies filed at the prosecutor’s office in Istanbul, ACE says. The eventual settlement was signed in late June, four months after the operators were raided.

This means that the app wasn’t shut down by the police or ACE directly. Instead, the operators pulled the plug back in February, after the police came knocking on their doors.

Domain Name Takeovers

The LivenetTV Domain records fill in the rest of the timeline. Most of the transferred domains were originally registered in 2016, when the app first entered the scene. Ten years later they were signed over to the Motion Picture Association, which manages the ACE coalition.

The domains no longer point to an APK but instead they refer visitors to ACE’s Watch Legally page. The first domains were signed over late June, some others followed in August, and livenettv.xyz eventually switched earlier this month.

The press release notes that the domains had 2.4 million annual visits at the height of their popularity. That’s a small number compared to streaming sites, but ACE confirmed that this only counts website traffic, not the app’s actual usage, which was likely much higher.

ACE could not say whether the settlement involved financial compensation. That said, for a coalition whose press releases often include a million-dollar damages figure, the mea culpa from two pirate operators may be worth more than the money.

—

– livenettv.net (June 29, 2026)
– livenettv.info (June 29, 2026)
– livenettv.pro (June 29, 2026)
– livenettv.cc (June 29, 2026)
– livenettv.co (June 30, 2026)
– livenettv.org (August 12, 2026)
– livenettv.me (August 13, 2026)
– livenettv.us (August 24, 2026)
– livenettv.tv (August 24, 2026)
– livenettv.xyz (September 8, 2026)

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

The text wasn’t public when TorrentFreak first reported on the filing, but an earlier discussion draft suggested that only ISPs and DNS resolvers would be covered. That has changed.

The full text of the bill surfaced online after Public Knowledge shared a copy with Ars Technica. This shows that the final version of the bill goes further than the draft did, explicitly covering ISPs, DNS resolvers, and VPN providers.

Update September 22: The text of the bill has been posted on Congress.gov.

VPNs Join the Blocking Parties

The bill allows copyright holders to ask a federal court to determine that a website is a ‘foreign piracy site’. With that declaration in hand, they can then petition for a blocking order that requires specific service providers to prevent people from accessing the site.

These providers exclude domain name registries and root nameservers, but virtual private networks are explicitly covered.

“The term ‘service provider’ includes providers of broadband internet access services, providers of domain name resolution services, and virtual private networks, but excludes root nameserver operators and top level domain registries,” the bill reads.

This VPN category is new. The discussion draft TorrentFreak reported on in June last year stated that “both internet service providers (ISPs) and DNS resolvers” would be covered, nothing more.

The bill doesn’t explain why VPNs were added, but it follows a European trend, including orders in France and Spain, where a broader set of intermediaries is required to block pirate sites.

Smaller services are exempt, as the proposed bill excludes “any entity that provides services to fewer than 100,000 monthly users or subscribers in the United States.” That means that it will target the larger providers.

Blocking ‘From the United States’

When an order is issued, providers have 14 to 30 days to “take all commercially reasonable steps to prevent users or subscribers from using its systems or networks to access the foreign piracy site from the United States.”

For a regular ISP, that requirement is pretty straightforward. However, for a VPN provider with servers in dozens of countries, it can be interpreted in more than one way, with varying consequences.

A VPN could block the pirate site on its U.S. servers only. That would mean that American subscribers are free to connect through servers in Amsterdam or Toronto, while a Canadian user who connects through New York would be blocked.

Alternatively, a VPN could block the site for everyone who connects from an American IP address, regardless of the server they choose. That should be technically possible without logging a user’s IP address.

The bill doesn’t explain how the technical implementation should work and a judge has no say in it either. The blocking orders can’t prescribe or require any specific blocking techniques, so this choice is left to the providers.

VPN providers can contest their inclusion in a blocking order. Before naming a provider, the court has to weigh several factors, including the “technical feasibility and efficacy” of the blocking.

VPNs raised similar objections in France, with little effect. Among other things, the Paris court concluded that a no-log policy doesn’t prevent VPNs from blocking sites.

Live Sports Fast Track

Not all blocking orders have to wait 14 days before being implemented. The court can shorten any deadline in the bill if it finds good cause. This includes blocking measures that target “time-sensitive events.”

Issa previously made it clear who this is for. At a House hearing in June, he said that enforcement has to be fast enough to make a difference during live sports broadcasts, which lose their value quickly.

“[W]hat is the reasonable speed? Can we do it at the speed of sound? Can we do it at the speed of light? More importantly, in a 45 minute or sometimes a fraction of that live sports broadcast, can we do it soon enough to make it no longer profitable for those who pop up and sell their clandestine wares?” he said.

In addition to sports, the “time-sensitive” carveout can also be used to protect movies and TV shows that leak online “not more than 24 hours after” their first authorized release in the United States.

To Be Continued

VPNs are not the only change since the first draft appeared last year. There are other nuances as well, which will be highlighted in future coverage.

For now, most commentary on the bill has come from opponents, including Public Knowledge and Re:Create. Rightsholders have been quiet so far and the MPA informed TorrentFreak that it will share a statement once Issa’s office issues its press release.

Whether Rep. Issa will get the bill across the finish line is uncertain. He retires at the end of this year, so he won’t be around to reintroduce it if it doesn’t pass during the current session.

Notably, this is not the only U.S. site blocking bill that’s being prepared. As previously reported, Senator Thom Tillis and Rep. Zoe Lofgren are working on a bicameral site blocking bill of their own.

This means that, after the SOPA-ghosts were defeated, there’s now some internal site-blocking competition on the Hill.

—

A copy of the American Copyright Protection Act of 2026 (H.R. 10364) is available here (pdf).

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

This Lumière Summit closed with the signing of several thematic declarations, including one on international cooperation against piracy.

Representing Hollywood, Motion Picture Association (MPA) CEO Charles Rivkin was scheduled to give a keynote before a session on “the race against piracy,” but was held up in a presidential meeting. While MPA’s EMEA president Emilie Anthonis filled in briefly, the tone was already set by a minister, who put the piracy talk in perspective.

Gayton McKenzie, South Africa’s Minister of Sport, Arts and Culture, shared the stage with the chair of French regulator ARCOM and a deputy director general of WIPO, who outlined their anti-piracy track records.

As a representative of the South African government, McKenzie said he agreed that piracy is bad. However, he took issue with almost everything else.

“We need to define what is piracy,” he said. “There’s a failure by the people tasked to fight piracy not to define it definitively,” the minister added, before going into more detail on an alleged double standard.

His first example came from the same summit. That morning, McKenzie said, a filmmaker had told the audience that his film was banned in Egypt but that people could still see it there thanks to piracy.

The filmmaker said he was glad people could see it “and then people clapped,” McKenzie said.

He gave a second example, a Canadian production about a gay hockey player, apparently the series Heated Rivalry, which he said is now being pirated in the countries where it is banned, to add that “everybody in the industry is clapping.”

From personal history the minister also recalled that, during South Africa’s apartheid regime, several films were not allowed to be distributed, leaving piracy as the only option.

When dealing with this type of banned content and censorship, piracy is put in a different light, apparently with filmmakers praising it. However, when poor people pirate, they face legal issues, McKenzie said. He called the industry’s approach “a bit schizophrenic” with “dual standards.”

‘Egyptians Love Piracy’

The filmmaker that McKenzie referred to was Tarik Saleh, the Swedish-Egyptian director of The Nile Hilton Incident and Cairo Conspiracy. These movies are set in Cairo, but they are banned in Egypt.

At the opening session of the summit, Saleh said he was told to leave the country before shooting his first film.

“I was going to shoot my first film in Egypt and I was asked to leave. Uh, I’m putting it nicely. I mean, they said, ‘Get the f*ck out of here,'” he said, after which he chose to make the films in Morocco.

Saleh added that Egyptians can still see his films thanks to piracy, which he doesn’t mind.

“[H]ere is where piracy come into the picture in a little reversed way. Egyptians love piracy, which is working very well for me,” he said with a laugh.

There was no applause though. Instead, the moderator jumped in noting that the regulators on the afternoon’s piracy panel could be asked about it. Nobody asked them. McKenzie is the one who brought it up.

‘We’re Not Children’

McKenzie’s second point was addressed to the people sitting next to him. ARCOM chair Martin Ajdari just said they issued more than 22,000 blocking and delisting injunctions in five years, with 10,000 alone in 2026, while the piracy audience was slashed in half since 2018.

McKenzie said that was impressive, but he stressed that successes in one country are less effective if other countries do little to nothing. He compared it to two people in a boat that is leaking on only one side.

“We on the same boat. We both hate piracy,” he said. “The boat is leaking on our side and you are praising, like, where we are sitting we’ve done this.”

The minister also criticized that developing countries are being pressured into compliance. This came after WIPO’s Sylvie Forbin listed some of the conditions that came with WTO membership in the 1990s. This appeared to strike a nerve with McKenzie, who pushed back.

“Don’t try to punish us like we are children, because we are not children,” he said, not directly aiming at his fellow panelist.

South Africa has more recent experience with that kind of pressure. In 2020, U.S. copyright groups asked Washington to review the country’s trade preferences over the fair use provisions in its copyright bill, which they considered too broad.

‘We Are Not Beggars’

Toward the end of the session, McKenzie stressed that his position has nothing to do with money. South Africa is not short on funds to pay for anti-piracy efforts. It could pay as much as Sweden or the UK, but it mostly wants to be taken seriously.

“We don’t lack the money. There are countries that lack the money,” McKenzie said. “But we don’t want to be treated like, here’s money for you, do one, two, three. We want you also to listen to our ideas.”

“We are not beggars,” he added. “We want a partnership of equals.”

McKenzie said his government is already in touch with Canal+ about football piracy and that anti-piracy warnings now run before every match in South Africa. South Africa wants to help address piracy, as long as it is treated as a serious partner.

The Lumière Summit closed with a formal declaration to strengthen international anti-piracy cooperation.

This voluntary agreement does not include any hard commitments, and for now it has not been signed by any South African representative either.

—

The videos for all the sessions are available through the summit website. The quotes used in this article were transcribed by TorrentFreak from these recordings.

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

The first blocking order under this new regime, obtained by sports rightsholder DAZN in April 2025, started quite aggressively. In addition to major ISPs, it required Cloudflare, Google and Cisco to stop resolving pirate streaming domains through their public DNS services, under threat of €100,000 in fines per day.

Cisco’s response was also aggressive, as the company pulled its OpenDNS service out of Belgium entirely. Google and Cloudflare, meanwhile, complied in their own ways, but all three companies challenged the order.

In July 2025, the court suspended the DNS blocking requirement against Cisco pending a final ruling, after which OpenDNS returned to Belgium. This also put additional DNS blocking orders on hold. However, that may very well change in the near future.

Court Upholds DNS Blocking

That final ruling has now arrived, and it’s not what the DNS providers were hoping for. On August 20, the President of the French-speaking Business Court of Brussels rejected the core of their challenge. The DNS blocking requirement stands.

The order itself hasn’t been published, but a new implementation decision from Belgium’s anti-piracy department summarizes the outcome and explains how the blockade will work in practice.

According to the decision, the court ruled that it’s technically possible for alternative DNS resolvers to block domains, and that the companies failed to show that the costs would be disproportionate. Worries that some users near the border could be caught by geolocation overblocking errors did not change that decision.

“Imposing a blocking measure on the main alternative DNS resolution service providers helps strengthen the effectiveness of the blocking injunction imposed on ISPs, which is regarded as a relevant measure,” the decision reads.

“The combination of these measures is intended to discourage users seeking access to unlawful content, as their experience as consumers of football matches, which they are very attached to watching live, will be disrupted,” it adds.

The court order also included some small wins for the DNS providers. For example, it scrapped the requirement to redirect users to a warning page, noting that this measure can’t be imposed on DNS resolvers.

The penalties for non-compliance were also softened. The €100,000 per day fine remains, but it only counts on days that DAZN matches are broadcast live. There’s a €20 million maximum per company, and fines don’t apply to under-blocking caused by “an exceptional geolocation error.”

Evolving Blocklist with a 90-minute Clock

The department’s decision also explains how the blocking will work in practice. The order covers matches from Belgian football competitions, including the Jupiler Pro League. As the season continues, DAZN can submit one blocklist update per week, with a maximum of 100 new domains.

There’s no fixed schedule. Instead, DAZN tells the department which matchday it wants the blocklist updated for, at least seven working days in advance. The DNS resolvers then get five working days to implement the changes.

The actual blockades should go live 90 minutes before a match starts, to catch pirates off guard.

“It is also with this effectiveness of the blocking measure in mind that it was decided that it should operate intermittently, and that it should only be implemented one and a half hours before the start of matches,” the implementation order reads.

“In this way, users find it more difficult to anticipate the blocking and plan around it in advance.”

The evolving nature of the blocklist is apparent from the publicly shared data, which shows that the domains blocked under this order have grown from 58 to 258 after it was first issued.

OpenDNS Exit Looms

As reported last year, Google and Cloudflare complied with the original order. The latest order doesn’t change anything for them. However, for Cisco it’s a different story.

During the hearing, Cisco informed the department that it will pull OpenDNS out of Belgium again.

The company stated that the public DNS system “does not allow for the implementation of selective, geolocated and dynamic blocking as required by the order,” and that enabling it “would compromise the performance, stability and security of that service.”

Pulling out of Belgium is the only concrete measure Cisco is “technically able” to implement, the company added. The Belgian anti-piracy department accepts this drastic measure as compliance with the order.

The DNS resolvers have three months to implement the blocking measures. For now, OpenDNS remains available in Belgium and Cisco indicated it intends to appeal the ruling. TorrentFreak was told that a formal statement was still being finalized at the time of publication.

Unless the appeal changes anything, OpenDNS users in Belgium can expect the service to go dark for a second time later this year.

—

Update: Cisco did not go into most of our questions and released a short statement instead.

“OpenDNS currently remains available in Belgium,” a spokesperson said.

—

A copy of the Belgian anti-piracy department’s implementation decision of September 7 is available here (pdf).

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

However, those bypasses weren’t Denuvo’s only headache. For those who preferred a less invasive approach, an anonymous cracker going by the name “voices38” continued to release many old-school cracks that patch Denuvo’s checks directly.

These traditional cracks don’t require users to disable Windows security features, which makes them quite popular. Catering to this demand, voices38’s output accelerated this summer, resulting in five Denuvo releases on a single day earlier this month. This didn’t go unnoticed at the Denuvo headquarters.

Denuvo Takes ‘voices38’ to Court

On Monday, Denuvo GmbH took legal action. In a complaint obtained by TorrentFreak, filed at the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, the Austrian company accuses voices38 of bypassing its Anti-Tamper technology on 26 games. This is a violation of the DMCA’s anti-circumvention provision, it argues.

Denuvo explains that the person using the ‘voices38’ handle has targeted the protection measures of a wide range of titles. This includes older titles such as FIFA 20 and PES 2020, as well as recent blockbusters including Hogwarts Legacy, Black Myth: Wukong, Resident Evil Requiem and Doom: The Dark Ages.

“Defendant is a computer hacker who is focused on reverse engineering, hacking, or ‘cracking’ video games employing Denuvo’s Anti-Tamper product,” Denuvo writes in the complaint, while mentioning that Reddit is one of their release channels.

“Defendant has bypassed DRM restrictions in copyrighted works, removing protections that allow copyright owners to restrict who may access their works, and allowing for pirated versions of those copyrighted works,” it adds.

Circumvention, Not Copyright Infringement

Denuvo doesn’t actually own the copyrights to any of these games. This means that Denuvo can’t sue “voices38” for traditional copyright infringement, as the game companies could.

Instead, Denuvo’s complaint relies on the anti-circumvention provisions of the DMCA. Under this section of US copyright law, it is prohibited to bypass a digital lock that controls access to a copyrighted work, or to distribute tools and instructions that help others to bypass copyright protections.

Importantly, the DMCA allows anyone that’s harmed by these bypasses to file a lawsuit. Denuvo argues that, since its entire business revolves around selling tamper protection to game companies including EA, Ubisoft, Capcom, and Sony, the cracks are directly hurting its business.

As far as we know, this is the first time Denuvo has sued a cracker in a U.S. court. While the lawsuit mentions game titles and their respective owners, none of the rightsholders are part of the lawsuit.

Reddit User, Steam Accounts and a Discord ID

The obvious problem is that nobody knows who voices38 is. The complaint names the defendant as “an unknown individual or entity,” together with ten unnamed Doe defendants.

Denuvo has done some homework, though. The filing lists a Discord user ID, a Reddit account and seven Steam profiles that it believes are linked to the cracker.

Denuvo hopes the information linked to these accounts will eventually unmask the cracker. Games have to be bought before they can be cracked, for example, and Steam purchases come with payment details.

With a case on file, Denuvo can ask the court for permission to subpoena Valve, Reddit and Discord for the associated account details. There’s no discovery request in the docket yet, but that will likely follow soon.

The complaint includes two DMCA anti-circumvention claims and requests damages, as well as an injunction that would bar voices38 from circumventing Denuvo’s Anti-Tamper protection in any games, including future ones that have yet to be created.

The ‘future’ part will be needed, as the list of 26 games was already outdated when the complaint was filed. In recent weeks, ‘voices38’ has released several new cracks, including Persona 3 Reload and Star Wars Outlaws.

What’s Next

Whether Denuvo will be able to identify ‘voices38’ has yet to be seen. Typically, these types of crackers take their precautions. But even if the subpoenas don’t deliver, the lawsuit is not necessarily pointless.

If Denuvo obtains a default judgment with an injunction, it will be easier to have accounts and download links removed.

A ruling in Denuvo’s favor could act as a deterrent, as confirmation that Denuvo can sue crackers directly may spook some people involved.

For now, the case is in its early stages. Time will tell what information Denuvo will request from Reddit, Discord and other third parties, and whether ‘voices38’ will make an appearance in court.

—

Update: responding to the news, voices38 shared the following comment on Reddit: “All is fine. Everything will continue as normal.”

—

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

That changed in January last year, when Rep. Zoe Lofgren introduced the Foreign Anti-Digital Piracy Act (FADPA).

This proposal set the blocking wheels in motion and a last summer, Senators launched the Block BEARD draft. Meanwhile, Rep. Darrell Issa, who chairs the House IP subcommittee, continued working on a draft of his own blocking bill, the American Copyright Protection Act (ACPA).

Issa’s bill was being discussed among stakeholders but was not formally introduced in the U.S. House of Representatives, until now.

Congressional records show that Issa introduced H.R. 10364, describing it as a bill “to establish procedures for blocking access to foreign online locations engaged in copyright piracy, and for other purposes.” There is no name listed, but Issa previously used the “American Copyright Protection Act” title.

A Site Blocking Bill Without Text

At the time of writing, the text is not online yet. Congress.gov notes that the Government Publishing Office has not yet received it, and Issa’s office has not issued a press release. TorrentFreak contacted Issa’s office for a comment and a copy of the text, but we didn’t immediately hear back.

That leaves the 2025 discussion draft, of which we had previously reviewed a copy, as the best indication of what the bill might be. That blocking framework would let copyright holders obtain court orders, requiring both ISPs and DNS resolvers to block foreign pirate sites.

Unlike the other blocking proposals, Issa’s early draft stipulated that the Judicial Conference would maintain a roster of designated judges to hear all blocking cases, while the Copyright Office would publish a list of active orders.

Issa’s proposal also uniquely targeted overblocking. The draft included a provision stating that a third party whose site was wrongly blocked as the result of a rightsholder’s error could claim up to $250,000 in compensation.

Whether any of these provisions have made it into the recently introduced bill is unknown, we will update this article when the text becomes available.

Competing Site Blocking Bills

The bill doesn’t come as a surprise. On June 30, Issa told The Capitol Forum that his intention was “to introduce it this week before we go on this district work period.” That never happened, however.

Notably, Issa is retiring at the end of this term, which leaves a few months to get anything through the House. While that is not impossible, the bill does face some competition on the Hill.

There are currently three separate site blocking efforts in the US. Earlier this year, TorrentFreak reported that Senator Thom Tillis and Rep. Lofgren were merging FADPA and Block BEARD into a single bicameral bill covering both ISPs and large DNS resolvers.

Lofgren later confirmed she was negotiating a “four corners agreement” with Issa and Senators Blackburn, Coons, Schiff and Tillis.

A source previously described the two efforts as separate, uncoordinated tracks. Whether that changed since is unknown. If ACPA is the House half of a consensus deal, Lofgren’s name should appear among the cosponsors. If not, the House has two blocking bills, with the Senate version as the third.

Opposition

Interestingly, opposition already responded to the bill’s introduction before the text is published online. Specifically, Public Knowledge warns that the bill turns broadband providers into copyright police.

“More importantly, applying blocking orders to global DNS resolvers causes global blocks. This means that one court can cut off access to a website globally, based on a single individual’s filing and an expedited procedure,” says Meredith Rose, Senior Policy Counsel at Public Knowledge.

“Small businesses and nonprofits face the greatest risks for site blocking but have the fewest protections. In Europe, we’ve seen overblocking bring down digital infrastructure for hotels, car mechanics, retail shops, telehealth programs, and even a nunnery.”

Rightsholders have been quieter. The MPA, which gave Issa its Industry Champion Award last year, had not issued a statement when this article was published. We asked the group for a comment but it did not immediately reply.

—

Breaking story, updates may follow.

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

Defense attorneys had tracked down the Canadian filmmaker whose name appeared on the complaint, who told the court under oath that he had nothing to do with the case.

The plaintiff responded by claiming to be a different Matthew Schneider, a UK filmmaker who had independently made three films with exactly the same titles as his Canadian namesake. This matter was scheduled to be discussed in an in-person hearing at the Illinois federal court last Thursday, but at the eleventh hour the plaintiff filed a notice of voluntary dismissal.

Dismissed, But Not Over

Responding to the notice, Judge Andrea R. Wood acknowledged the dismissal but made clear that the court retained jurisdiction over the pending motion for a rule to show cause. This means that, while the copyright claims against the trackers are dismissed, the alleged impostor still faces possible sanctions.

The hearing was converted to a telephone conference so that no one had to travel to Chicago. At the hearing, the person claiming to be the UK Matthew Schneider confirmed that he no longer wished to pursue the copyright claims.

That does not close the books on this case, as defense Attorney Erin Russell, representing Doe 1, confirmed that they were still seeking sanctions.

However, Russell flagged a practical problem related to the earlier “impostor” allegations. Any sanctions award would be uncollectible unless the court first establishes who the plaintiff actually is. That would also ensure that a judgment isn’t entered against the wrong person.

When asked by the judge to confirm his identity, the plaintiff confirmed that Matthew Schneider is his legal name and that he lives in London. The defense, in turn, said that their investigation pointed in another direction.

A Banned User With a Grudge?

If the plaintiff is indeed an impostor, the new question is why they would file a lawsuit against several prominent private trackers? Judge Wood asked defense counsel whether they had any ideas, calling it an odd situation.

This prompted Russell to propose a potential motive, which surfaced after investigating the matter, presumably with cooperation from a tracker operator. According to her, the person behind the email address that filed the lawsuit was no stranger to the private trackers.

Russell told the court it appeared likely that this person was caught selling or trading invites for these trackers. The person in question was allegedly blacklisted as a result and, in Russell’s words, “bears ill will” over it, which would make the lawsuit an act of revenge.

These allegations are presented as a theory, with no supporting evidence being filed yet, but it would explain the rather odd circumstances and bizarre twists and turns the case has seen so far.

More Evidence Needed

The plaintiff, however, maintains that he’s a UK filmmaker. Previously, he submitted a page with film metadata, but he promised to submit a copy of his own version of “Do Us Part” this week, when Judge Wood asked him at the hearing.

Judge Wood also noted that the plaintiff had not submitted a sworn affidavit with his response to the sanctions motion. Responding to this, the plaintiff offered to provide one.

Looking further ahead, Judge Wood said she expects a hearing at which the two Canadian declarants, including the ‘other’ Matthew Schneider, would testify by video. That video hearing would also require the plaintiff to appear on camera. The next status hearing is set for October 2.

For now, the private tracker operators can be relieved that the copyright claims against them are gone. However, the question of who filed this case is not resolved yet.

—

The court’s order on the voluntary dismissal is available here (pdf). TorrentFreak attended the hearing via telephone and the coverage is based on our notes.

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

Meta is among a long list of companies now being sued for this allegedly infringing activity. This includes a class action lawsuit filed by authors including Richard Kadrey and Sarah Silverman, which accused Meta of training its Llama models on pirated books, and of sharing those books with other BitTorrent users in the process.

Last summer, Judge Vince Chhabria ruled that the AI training itself was fair use, leaving the BitTorrent distribution claims as the last live part of the case. Earlier this year, Meta added a new line of defense to those claims. In a supplemental interrogatory response, the company argued that any uploading of pirated books during its torrent downloads was “part-and-parcel” of a fair use purpose.

Meta stated that BitTorrent was “a more efficient and reliable means of obtaining the datasets,” and in the case of Anna’s Archive the only way to get them in bulk. Since torrent users upload to each other by design, any sharing was simply “an inherent characteristic of the BitTorrent protocol.”

Both of Meta’s torrenting claims are now being tested in three related lawsuits, filed by Chicken Soup for the Soul, academic publisher Cognella, and John Carreyrou’s Cambronne Inc. These three cases are all assigned to Judge Chhabria and target the same shadow library torrenting activity.

Ask Torrenting AI Rivals

Instead of waiting for Meta to document the technical details of its torrent client setup, the publishers went to the two AI rivals that could potentially disprove the seeding requirement.

In August, they subpoenaed OpenAI and Anthropic for the identity, versions and configurations of every torrent client the companies have used since 2019. This specifically includes any records of efforts to prevent seeding.

In similar lawsuits, both companies have admitted that they used books from shadow libraries. If they configured a torrent client not to upload, Meta’s “necessity” argument would be in trouble.

“If OpenAI torrented but configured its clients to suppress uploading, then the redistribution Meta calls an ‘inherent characteristic’ of the protocol was a setting Meta declined to change,” the publishers told the court.

That argument builds on an earlier finding in the legal battle, which revealed that a Meta engineer wrote a script to prevent seeding, but apparently not leeching.

OpenAI and Anthropic Won’t Talk

Instead of insisting on all requested documents, the publishers also offered an alternative. If OpenAI or Anthropic would simply explain how they acquired the shadow-library data and whether they tried to prevent uploading, the torrent document demands would be dropped.

The AI companies didn’t take the offer, however, and they pushed back instead. Both companies informed the court that examining the technical features of the relevant torrent client directly would be better, adding that their own practices say nothing about Meta’s.

“Clients are not interchangeable, they differ in their default upload settings, in whether those defaults can be reconfigured, and in their capacity to suppress uploading during and after a download,” Anthropic’s lawyers wrote.

“What Anthropic’s client allowed shows nothing about what Meta’s did.”

OpenAI made the same point, noting that there is no evidence that it used the same torrent clients or “built ‘comparable corpora’ to Meta.”

Judge Sides With AI Rivals

In a new order released last week, Magistrate Judge Thomas Hixson sided with the two AI companies. Without deciding on Meta’s seeding arguments, the court concluded that the torrent logs of AI rivals are not the best place to gather evidence.

“To the extent Meta’s fair use defense hinges on the assertion that its use of BitTorrent was the only way BitTorrent can be used, that assertion can be tested by examining the BitTorrent client itself,” Judge Hixson writes.

Asking OpenAI or Anthropic for their logs says little about Meta’s technical setup or the technical capabilities of torrent clients.

“Any user of a torrent client would be relevant in that sense. Why can’t Plaintiffs’ expert use the torrent clients to show how torrent clients can be used?” the order adds.

Similarly, the claim that shadow library data could only be downloaded in bulk through torrents, would be something the publishers can check with the libraries directly, instead of trying to get that information through other AI companies.

Meta’s Own Server Data

In these three cases, the court decided that getting data from AI rivals is off limits. However, the same doesn’t apply to data from Meta’s own servers.

On September 11, Judge Hixson granted a motion in the related class action case filed by Kadrey and other authors. This order covers the command history files for every server Meta used to torrent, including its virtual machines and AWS instances.

Command histories are the logs a server keeps of every command an operator types. For a torrenting machine, that presumably includes how the torrent client was installed and any changes made to its upload settings.

The order goes back to early 2025, when Meta admitted that it had held back relevant documents until after the discovery deadline had passed. To make up for that, Judge Chhabria gave the authors extra discovery, including records showing how Meta’s torrent clients were set up and used.

Meta argued that the log files it had already handed over were enough. Judge Hixson disagreed, however, ordering Meta to hand over the command histories as well.

The authors hope these command histories will also reveal exactly which copyrighted works Meta torrented. Whether the data will show any of that has yet to be seen.

For now, whether Meta could have downloaded the books without seeding is a question for the plaintiffs’ experts, who will have Meta’s own server records to work with. Their opening reports in the Meta cases are due later this month.

—

A copy of Judge Hixson’s order on the OpenAI and Anthropic subpoenas is available here (pdf). The joint letter briefs can be found here (pdf) and here (pdf). The command history order in Kadrey v. Meta is available here (pdf).

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

‘Xoi Lac TV’ and its sister sites offered pirated streams featuring all major leagues, switching to new domains each time a blocking order caught up with the last one.

For the operators involved, these free streams became serious business. Betting banners were shown with every match and generated substantial revenue. That lucrative business model also drew Vietnam’s cybercrime police, who raided the operation in February and charged 30 people a month later.

However, that was only the opening chapter in a story that carries international weight today. Last week, police in Hung Yen province closed their investigation and asked prosecutors to charge 74 people.

Massive Piracy Operation with its Own Commentators

The investigation’s conclusion, as reported by Dan Tri and VnExpress, describes two linked piracy operations.

The first pirate site, ’90 Phut’, was founded in late 2018. Investigators say Hanoi technology entrepreneur Pham Nguyen Dung put up the money, programmer Nguyen Cong Dinh wrote the code, and the two split the profits.

When the operation was shut down in February, it ran XoilacTV, 90PhutTV, VeboTV, ThapcamTV, BanhkhucTV and CakeoTV, while Dinh also ran the ‘Cakhia’ network with another defendant.

The 74 suspects are allegedly part of the operation’s staff. This includes more than 30 Vietnamese commentators who were paid 200,000 to 500,000 dong per match, roughly $8 to $20. The other defendants managed servers, streams and the financial side.

The commentary was the brand, and its best-known voices used names such as ‘Batman’ and ‘Scarecrow’. ‘Batman’, it turned out, was Dinh himself, who investigators say made more than 12 billion dong, roughly $470,000, from the operation.

The investigation also found that the sites streamed 1,529 matches without permission, infringing the rights of the Premier League and local broadcasters, while generating revenue from betting brands including 8XBET, LU88, Man88 and HBET.

Police estimate that these ads brought in more than 130 billion dong, roughly $5 million, between April 2025 and January 2026. Rightsholders, meanwhile, claim losses that are much higher.

Vietnam’s pay TV service K+ preliminarily estimates its losses at more than $83 million, and the Premier League, which licenses its rights to K+ for Vietnam, at more than $4.6 million. The figures have yet to be confirmed at an eventual trial.

Gambling Charges Carry the Weight

The 74 defendants face a variety of charges, including copyright infringement, organizing gambling, gambling, and distributing obscene material. Fifty-one, including Dung and Dinh, are recommended for prosecution on both the copyright and organizing gambling counts.

The sites are known for piracy, but the gambling charges carry more weight. Vietnam’s Penal Code caps copyright infringement at three years in prison, no matter how profitable it is. Meanwhile, organizing gambling as a professional operation carries up to ten years in prison.

This means that the betting ads, which are illegal in Vietnam, could make up the bulk of the sentences. For now, however, nothing is final yet.

In Vietnam, police close an investigation with a written conclusion and a proposal to prosecute, which is the stage this case is at now. The prosecution now has up to 30 days to indict, send the file back for more work, or drop the case.

Thanks From London, Pressure From Washington

The ‘Xoi Lac’ crackdown has not gone unnoticed outside of the country’s borders. In May, Vietnam’s Ministry of Public Security announced that the British Embassy in Hanoi had sent a letter thanking it for the takedown. According to the ministry, the letter praised the enforcement effort that protected copyright holders.

Washington was not immediately convinced. At the end of April, the U.S. Trade Representative designated Vietnam a ‘Priority Foreign Country’ over its failure to tackle online piracy, the first country to receive that label in thirteen years.

A month later, USTR opened a formal Section 301 investigation into Vietnam’s intellectual property enforcement, a process that can end in widely feared tariffs. USTR said that Vietnam has taken some steps, but added that infringement “continues to impair the competitive position of U.S. innovators and creators.”

While the original Xoi Lac raids came weeks before the USTR’s decision, Vietnam is now using it as a defense, mentioning it in tandem with the takedowns of Rophim and Y2Mate in its July response to the investigation, asking to be taken off the priority list.

Vietnam’s response also cited the HiAnime case. The Ministry of Public Security only announced criminal proceedings against seven HiAnime suspects on July 2, the same day Vietnam filed its rebuttal in Washington.

Whether the 74-defendant recommendation is in any way influenced by the international pressure is unknown. It is now up to the prosecutor to decide what steps to take next. Meanwhile, a search for ‘xoi lac’ and its related brands still returns a long list of copycats, whose operators are unknown.

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

The framing first emerged in the late 1990s, when IFPI raised concerns about criminal networks smuggling pirated CDs across borders.

The terrorism angle was added in 2003, when the U.S. House held a hearing on piracy’s “links to organized crime and terrorism.” Around the same time, Interpol chief Ronald Noble told Congress that IP crime had become “the preferred method of funding for a number of terrorist groups.”

The most cited connection appeared in 2009, when a movie industry-funded RAND report linked film piracy, organized crime, and terrorism. This report blurred the line between counterfeiting and piracy, but it has been widely referenced ever since.

“Never Forget”

More recently, the Digital Citizens Alliance, with support from the creative industries, has kept the tradition alive. In 2017, it bundled piracy with ISIS recruiting videos, malware and fake news. As recently as May this year, it linked pirate IPTV to drugs, weapons and the mafia.

Yesterday, the Washington group expanded the terrorist connection with a new angle. Titled “Hostile Signals,” the report argues that piracy does not only provide income, it can also act as a sanction-circumventing broadcasting channel.

To add extra weight, the report notes that the 25th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks “is days away” and closes with “Never Forget.” With the press release coming out yesterday, the timing is notable.

Pirate IPTV Services Carry Terrorist Channels

Researchers from Atlanta security firm risk3sixty signed up for 25 pirate IPTV services from U.S. connections between May and August. Seventeen of these carried at least one channel tied to a designated terrorist organization or a sanctioned state broadcaster.

Hezbollah’s television station, Al-Manar, was available on all seventeen. The Houthi-run Al-Masirah channel appeared on nine, Iran’s Al-Alam on seven, and Hamas’ Al-Aqsa TV on two.

“Al-Manar, the broadcast outlet of Hezbollah, which has a long history of attacking American targets and is responsible for at least 291 U.S. deaths over decades, is carried by all 17 piracy platforms identified to allowing carriage,” the report reads.

The report names several allegedly problematic services, including Lion OTT, Sansat VIP, OTTOcean, Belitvision and Wish IPTV, which could all be accessed from U.S. internet connections.

The U.S. banned Al-Manar’s satellite feed in 2004, and a Brooklyn man was later sentenced to 69 months in prison for providing material support to a terrorist organization after selling the channel to New York customers. Despite these crackdowns, pirate IPTV offers a “back door”.

“A piracy subscription has restored what two decades of federal action removed,” the report concludes.

Concerns & Nuance

The report’s conclusions are alarming, suggesting that pirate IPTV services could be used to radicalize people.

“National security officials, policymakers and citizens alike should be concerned,” it warns.

“Piracy platforms have created a new avenue for terrorist organizations and state adversaries to distribute recruitment messaging to U.S. audiences, including content intended to inspire acts of violence.”

At the same time, however, the report also recognizes that the findings say nothing about the viewership of these channels. Not just that, these channels are in Arabic and likely without subtitles. They are part of a much broader offering which can include thousands of channels.

Additionally, it is worth pointing out that many of these streams, including Hezbollah’s, are freely accessible through the broadcasters’ own websites. This includes Al-Manar.

The Justice Department seized 13 Hezbollah-linked domains in 2023, including seven that carried the channel’s name, but the station’s main site sits under Lebanon’s .lb domain. This domain falls outside of the U.S. jurisdiction and still streams to American visitors today.

The availability on the regular web may take away some of the report’s punch, but it actually sets up the payoff that follows.

Solution: Site-Blocking

The Digital Citizens Alliance report does not only signal the problem, it also offers a potential solution. It argues that site-blocking measures that are used against pirate sites can also be used to block terrorist content.

“These findings reinforce the need for the United States to adopt measures to prevent overseas piracy networks from operating in the country,” the report notes.

The timing for this request fits, as U.S. site blocking bills are on the agenda again. Rep. Darrell Issa’s American Copyright Protection Act (ACPA) and Rep. Zoe Lofgren’s Foreign Anti-Digital Piracy Act (FADPA) are both on the table, and Issa has signaled that a bipartisan, bicameral bill is close.

In August, MPA chief Charles Rivkin and the head of the IPR Center used the World Cup domain seizures to make the same site blocking request.

The site blocking discussions are ongoing in Washington and it is expected that stakeholders on the content-owner side will use the “Hostile Signals” report as further evidence that stopping piracy can potentially have a broader effect.

“‘Never Forget’ became the enduring rallying cry for those who experienced the 9/11 attacks. It’s also a reminder to never let the terrorists back in, in any form,” the report concludes.

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A copy of the Digital Citizens Alliance / risk3sixty report “Hostile Signals” is available here (pdf).

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

In July, Spanish-language broadcaster TelevisaUnivision (TU) obtained a similar order from a federal court in Florida.

This preliminary injunction, which started with five pirate IPTV services, expanded to cover hundreds of domains and dozens of intermediaries within weeks. After all defendants failed to show up in court, the broadcaster now seeks a permanent and even broader injunction.

In a motion filed September 4, TU asked Judge Kathleen Williams to enter default judgment against the six named defendants behind Thunder TV, Sunset TV, and Tele Latino. The operators of Pop TV and Kaelus TV, the other two services named in the complaint, remain unidentified John Does.

Self Expanding Blocking Injunction

The request for a default judgment comes with a headline figure seeking $32.7 million in damages. However, it is the breadth of the associated permanent injunction that really stands out.

The preliminary injunction obtained this summer allowed TU to add new domains, IP addresses, and pirate services to the order, without requiring judicial approval. TU already used that power twice before the injunction was a month old.

The proposed permanent order keeps that mechanism but also extends it, shaping it into a broad and self-expanding order with several new powers. For example, it can add new defendants, not just domains.

“Plaintiffs may, without further leave of Court, supplement the caption of this action to add as John Doe Defendants any person or entity discovered to be engaged in any of the conduct prohibited by this Order,” the proposed order reads.

The second expansion is a “colorable similarity” carveout. Any service that provides unauthorized access to the broadcaster’s content, uses substantially similar technology, or targets the same subscriber base can be required to comply. This also applies to alter-ego and successor services.

That provision has a concrete target. According to a supplemental declaration, Thunder TV itself no longer carries TelevisaUnivision content, but its operators have launched a mirror application called “Black Eye” that does. Access to Black Eye “is obtained using the same credentials used for Thunder TV,” the declaration states.

Nearly 600 Domains, 121 Intermediaries

The legal paperwork lists nearly 600 unique domain names, covering the five original services and the seven brands that were added later, including XuperTV, Tarjeta Roja, Pirlo TV, and Roja Directa.

Thunder TV and Tele Latino alone account for more than 90 domains each. XuperTV, which TU describes as a white label built on the same Magis TV infrastructure as Tele Latino, adds more than 110 to the mix.

The intermediary list is also as broad as we have ever seen in this type of injunction. It lists 121 intermediaries, including 51 domain registrars, 58 hosting and CDN providers, five payment channels, and five app distribution platforms.

The intermediaries include U.S. companies such as NameCheap and GoDaddy, as well as Russia’s REGTIME-SU, Vietnam’s Mat Bao, Peru’s NIC.PE, and the Dutch Registrar.eu, Iran’s Aria Shatel and a Romanian state research institute, ICI Bucuresti.

Other platforms are also listed, including GitHub, Vercel, Canva, Wix, Squarespace, and Automattic, the company behind WordPress.com, with each linked to one or more pirate domains or services.

The proposed injunction also includes RIPE NCC and APNIC, the regional Internet registries for Europe and the Asia-Pacific. These are inaccurately described as a “web host / hosting provider,” as they allocate IP address space. These can’t block access to IP-addresses.

Cloudflare again gets its own dedicated section. For each of roughly 90 IP addresses tied to the pirate domains, it must produce the origin server behind its proxy and the account holder’s name and email.

Finally, Roku and the AFTVnews Downloader app are ordered to remove the pirate apps and block the numerical short codes used to install them.

$32.7 Million, On Paper

The requested permanent injunction comes in addition to the damages, which are made up of both copyright and trademark infringement claims.

The broadcaster seeks $26.7 million for willful copyright infringement, at the statutory maximum of $150,000 per registered work, and $6 million for willful trademark counterfeiting, at $2 million per defendant group.

When dealing with foreign defendants who are not responsive, it is unlikely that this money will ever be recouped. TU is well aware of this, using it as another argument why a permanent injunction is needed. That would help to block or shut down the domains and the associated infrastructure.

The multi-million damages demand is not new. Amazon and Netflix won $18.75 million against a Dallas IPTV operator in March, and Hollywood studios secured $9 million in Pennsylvania in June.

For now, the motion is pending before Judge Williams. Whether the proposed order’s most expansive provisions survive as written has yet to be seen.

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A copy of the motion for default judgment is available here (pdf). The proposed default judgment order can be found here (pdf), and the proposed permanent injunction with updated Schedule A here (pdf).

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

After they revealed their findings, Judge Andrea R. Wood put the case on a sanctions track and scheduled an in-person hearing. Since then, the case has taken some surprising turns yet again.

First, defense attorneys Erin Russell and Haley Finch asked the court to hold the plaintiff in contempt for misrepresenting his identity, falsely claiming copyright ownership, and filing under a mail-drop address.

The ‘Real’ Matthew Schneider Appears

Representing “John Doe” tracker operators, they submitted a declaration from Matthew A. Schneider of Ottawa, Ontario. He is the filmmaker on the IMDb credits for the three films cited in the complaint: “Split: A Film Anthology,” “Do Us Part,” and “Orlando Gloom, Always the Same.”

Under oath, the Canadian clarifies that he indeed created these films with school friends, but that he is not the person that appeared in the lawsuit.

“I am not involved in, nor have I ever appeared in, this case. Furthermore, I do not know and am not associated with the person purporting to be “Matthew Schneider” in this case,” the declaration reads.

The films were created under the high-school filmmaking group “Dirtbag Films,” which also included Solmund MacPherson. He also filed a sworn declaration, confirming that they never sold the rights to the films, and that he didn’t recognize the “matthew.schneider94” email that was on every filing in the federal lawsuit.

MacPherson also tracked down a copy of “Do Us Part.” The real Schneider appears on screen in a speaking role. This should help the judge to compare his voice to the defendant’s. The same is true for an Instagram post, with a photo of the Canadian Schneider, who has since left filmmaking.

A Different Matthew Schneider

Presented with the new evidence, the plaintiff did not give up. On the contrary, in a response filed in court late last week he argued there are two Matthew Schneiders.

The plaintiff writes that he “consistently identified himself in this action as Matthew Schneider, an independent filmmaker and creative professional from the United Kingdom.” He never claimed to be the Canadian and never mentioned Dirtbag Films.

“The existence of another person with the same or similar name is not evidence of impersonation,” he wrote.

The identical names are not the only coincidence, it appears. The self-described UK filmmaker claims to have independently created films with the exact same titles as the Canadian Dirtbag Films productions.

Identical Film Titles

As evidence, he filed an exhibit with metadata for his own alleged versions of the three films, all created in the UK. The dates he lists are 2011 for “Split: A Film Anthology,” 2012 for “Do Us Part,” and 2012 for “Orlando Gloom, Always the Same.”

That puts his versions five to six years before the Dirtbag films, which were created in Canada in 2017. He argues he could not have copied works that “did not yet exist.”

The exhibit lists the films’ filenames, resolutions, and frame rates. However, there are no copyright office registration numbers, no cast members, no crew, no stills, and no IMDb listings.

The chances of two filmmakers with the same name creating three movies with exactly the same titles are slim. Particularly since one title includes “Orlando Gloom,” the name of the musician for whom Dirtbag made the associated music video.

A Procedural Counterattack

The person litigating as Matthew Schneider also went on the offensive. In his response, he accuses defense attorneys Russell and Finch of improper ex parte contact with Judge Wood, pointing to the call defense counsel made to chambers before the August hearing.

Russell described that call as an extraordinary step at the time. The plaintiff now argues that it violated the ban on one-sided communications with a judge, citing the ABA’s professional conduct rules and a Seventh Circuit ruling that allows courts to sanction such contact.

The plaintiff wants the court to disclose the dates and substance of the communications, and to disregard anything that was said outside his presence. He also asks the court to consider sanctions against defense counsel.

In addition, he notes that both declarants and attorney Finch have ties to the same Winnipeg high school, suggesting that the declarations should not be treated as independent corroboration without further explanation.

Whether the pre-hearing call was improper, or a legitimate and justified alert to a potential fraud on the court, is a question Judge Wood will have to answer.

Questions Remain

The response also defends only three of the ten works listed in the complaint. The five other short films and two literary works, which the defense says have no verified creator, are not mentioned.

Later this week all parties are scheduled to attend the first in-person hearing in this case. This is expected to shed further light on the case.

For now, the attorneys representing the torrent tracker operators don’t believe the plaintiff is who he claims to be. If true, that raises the question what this person’s motivation is.

The alleged impostor is clearly interested in uncovering the identities of the tracker operators, but none of the subpoenaed companies, including Reddit, GoDaddy, Cloudflare, PayPal, Stripe, Namecheap, and X Corp, have produced any records. All productions were placed on hold by the court in May and remain frozen.

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Update: The person litigating as Matthew Schneider has filed a notice of voluntary dismissal. The pending motion for a rule to show cause remains unresolved, however, and the planned hearing remains on the calendar.

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The defense motion for a rule to show cause is available here (pdf). The plaintiff’s response can be found here (pdf).

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

This popularity also has its downsides. When the group or one of its members releases a new track, unofficial copies typically circulate within hours, and not only on the usual pirate sites.

Independent music distributors have made it surprisingly easy to get a song into legitimate stores. For a modest yearly fee, people can get access to services such as DistroKid, TuneCore, or Symphonic.

Uploading a file through these distributors gets it listed on official music platforms such as Apple Music, where it appears among the music industry’s biggest stars, complete with an ISRC code, a UPC barcode, and an auto-generated YouTube “art track.”

This system has democratized music distribution, but it also opens the door to potential abuse, as it can be used to distribute bootlegs or pirated tracks. Earlier this year, that is what happened to Stray Kids member Han.

Bootleg Shows Up on Music Platforms

On May 9, label JYP Entertainment published Han’s track “back to life” as a video on Stray Kids’ YouTube channel, as part of the group’s SKZ-PLAYER series. The song wasn’t available on streaming platforms at the time, which is typical for the series.

Despite the limited availability, the new track quickly gained traction. That was also the case for unofficial ripped releases, which started to spread on social media and various pirate sites. And it didn’t stop there.

JYP also noticed that the track appeared through official channels on YouTube, Instagram, TikTok, and Apple Music. The track appeared under the artist name “New Vibs,” published through distributor Symphonic.

From DMCA Takedown to DMCA Subpoena

Back in May, Stray Kids’ label already sent a DMCA takedown notice to the Tampa-based independent distributor Symphonic Distribution, urging it to take down the content. Similar notices were likely sent to the platforms as well.

The notice identified a release titled “Back to life” under the artist name “New Vibs,” delivered through Symphonic to YouTube, Instagram, TikTok, and Apple Music.

“If the infringing content is not taken down promptly, we will have no choice but to pursue legal action to protect our copyrighted material,” the label wrote.

Symphonic’s legal team acknowledged the notice and said that it would investigate the matter. Meanwhile, with demand for the track still growing, JYP eventually released “back to life” on streaming platforms itself, weeks after the bootleg.

While that official release could have ended the matter, the label is not willing to let “New Vibs” off the hook just yet.

Names, IP Addresses, and Bank Details

Last week, JYP’s lawyers at Arnold & Porter filed a DMCA subpoena application at a federal court in California, asking Symphonic to identify whoever is behind the “New Vibs” account.

These types of DMCA subpoenas are typically targeted at online intermediaries. They allow copyright holders to request information on alleged infringers from online platforms, without filing a lawsuit. A signature from the court clerk is sufficient.

JYP’s proposed subpoena seeks any and all information that can help to identify the New Vibs bootlegger.

Specifically, the label wants “the identities, including names, physical addresses, IP addresses, telephone numbers, e-mail addresses, payment information, account updates and account histories” of the Symphonic user or users involved.

This includes detailed payment records for the alleged copyright infringer, including bank routing and account numbers, and any associated addresses. The label hopes that this money trail will help to lead it to the culprit.

Whether Symphonic will simply comply, or whether the “New Vibs” account holder will appear in court to object, has yet to be seen. According to the information available to us, the clerk has yet to issue the subpoena.

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Update: Symphonic Distribution responded to the article through a representative. The company says it acted on JYP’s notice immediately and has heard nothing from the label since.

“As soon as we received the claim in May, the content was taken down from all DSPs, and the account that distributed the link was terminated. We have not received any further correspondence on this issue from JYP Entertainment since the initial notice,” Symphonic says.

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A copy of JYP Entertainment’s DMCA subpoena application is available here (pdf) and the proposed subpoena and additional details can be found here (pdf).

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