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.

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

This week we have three newcomers on the list.

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

The most torrented movies for the week ending on September 14 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.

‘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.

—

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.

—

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.

—

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.

—

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.

—

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.

—

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.

Some of those cases have already produced rulings, with a bittersweet victory for Meta in California for example.

In New York, several other cases were bundled into a single proceeding where Judge Sidney Stein is overseeing claims against OpenAI and Microsoft.

This includes the Authors Guild’s class action, a case filed by a group of nonfiction writers who were the first to name Microsoft as a defendant, and the Tremblay and Silverman lawsuit, which started in California in 2023 and survived a partial dismissal before moving to New York.

This week, these authors filed a motion for summary judgment. Ahead of any trial, they want Judge Stein to rule that OpenAI copied their work without permission, and that this can’t qualify as fair use. The motion covers 194 titles and asks for a finding of liability, not damages.

“OpenAI’s GPT models pose an existential threat to those who write and publish books,” the brief states, while adding that “AI-generated books of all types are already flooding the market.”

Built on Mass Piracy

The authors start by accusing OpenAI of obtaining the book copies through unauthorized sources. While the filing is heavily redacted, OpenAI stands accused of using torrented copies downloaded from LibGen,

“OpenAI did not even buy the books it used. Instead, it began by torrenting [REDACTED] books from the notorious and illegal pirate library Library Genesis, also known as LibGen,” the motion reads.

At the time, LibGen had already been featured in the U.S. Trade Representative’s list of notorious piracy markets. According to the authors, OpenAI was well aware of the controversial nature of the site.

OpenAI “took steps to conceal their piracy from the public,” the motion notes, pointing to the paper that introduced GPT-3. In that paper, OpenAI relabeled book compilations it previously called “Libgen1” and “Libgen 2” as the more “nondescript” “Books1” and “Books2.”

“OpenAI employees understood at the time that they had sourced books from an illegal site,” the filing reads.

The renaming was not the end of it. OpenAI “deleted its LibGen files in the summer of 2022 due to legal concerns,” the motion notes, adding that these are “the only two training corpuses OpenAI has ever deleted.”

Before deleting the books, OpenAI allegedly used them to train the early GPT models. Or as the authors write, the company “built the foundations of its business on mass piracy.”

Replacing George R.R. Martin

The torrenting and piracy angle is one part of the filing. The motion also alleged that OpenAI built its models to replace the human writers it copied, and as evidence it highlights controversial tweets from a key employee.

In 2022, OpenAI hired Tarun Gogineni to lead its work on the writing quality of its models. According to the motion, Gogineni knew the models he was training would displace authors but considered that “acceptable economic disruption.”

This is notable because Gogineni specifically mentioned one of the plaintiffs, author George R.R. Martin, known for writing A Song of Ice and Fire which the HBO series Game of Thrones was based on.

In 2025, nearly two years after Martin sued, Gogineni tweeted that his “research mission” was to have GPT models write the “last two books of [Martin’s] A Song of Ice and Fire.”

Even if Martin “dies early, GPT-5 will autocomplete his series,” he added, suggesting that AI can replace the author.

Not Fair Use

OpenAI and other AI companies argue that training models on books is fair use. Courts have partly agreed with this, but with an important caveat.

The authors cite Bartz v. Anthropic, the 2025 California ruling that classified model training as potentially fair use, while stressing that downloading from a pirate library was not. Pirating books that can be purchased legally is “inherently, irredeemably infringing,” that court found.

The authors also argue that the copying was avoidable for training purposes, as their books were not per se necessary to create a general-purpose model.

Broader Claims

The motion is not limited to OpenAI. It also asks the court to hold that Microsoft is vicariously liable for OpenAI’s copyright infringement, since Microsoft could supervise the conduct and profited from it.

Microsoft invested roughly $13 billion across three agreements signed in 2019, 2021, and 2023, the authors stress.

OpenAI has yet to respond to the authors directly, but it clearly believes that the evidence points in its favor.

In a cross-motion for summary judgment, filed on the same day, the company argues that its use of the books was fair use as a matter of law and that any regurgitation is vanishingly rare.

The filings highlighted here are part of a much broader push. Over the past days, plaintiffs including The New York Times, Daily News, and the Center for Investigative Reporting all submitted a combined summary judgment motion of their own against OpenAI and Microsoft.

With many millions of dollars at stake, as well as the future of AI training, these cases will be fought tooth and nail, so we certainly haven’t heard the last of it.

—

A copy of the authors’ redacted motion for partial summary judgment is available here (pdf), filed at the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York.

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

BeStreamWise, the anti-piracy campaign backed by Sky, the Premier League, FACT, the BBC and the UK Intellectual Property Office, among others, released a new report this week to highlight the ongoing challenge.

The campaign commissioned consultancy WPI Economics to put a number on illegal streaming. This resulted in a report titled “The Price of Piracy,” which estimates that illegal streaming results in £1.35 billion in missed revenue by UK broadcasters every year. That figure is then translated into 10,400 lost jobs and £366 million in missing tax income.

To stress the point, the report highlights that missed taxes could pay for a variety of public services. The £366 million could pay 9,400 qualified NHS nurses, for example, or it could provide 140 million free school meals to children.

A £1.35 Billion Poll

The billion-pound estimate is based on a poll of 2,501 UK adults, conducted in February. In this survey, almost a third (31%) said they had used illegal streaming in the previous three months. Extrapolating this percentage to the entire population suggests that 16.8 million people could be video pirates.

To find out how this then resulted in £1.35 billion missed revenue, we reached out to BeStreamWise, which informed us that it is based on a scenario where piracy is no longer an option.

BeStreamWise explained that the respondents who admitted to pirating were asked which services they would be willing to pay for, if they were no longer able to access pirate services. WPI Economics then multiplied these answers by the average cost of the services, before extrapolating it to the entire population.

The campaign stresses that the report only counted people who said they were willing to pay in this hypothetical scenario.

Put differently, the £1.35 billion does not measure lost sales. It is the extrapolated subscription fee that pirates said they would pay, at full price, if piracy ceased to exist tomorrow. That is then translated to tax revenue, which can pay for the 9,400 nurses.

Pirate’s Pinky Promise

The calculation is straightforward on paper, but it’s not without caveats. While self-proclaimed pirates may be just as trustworthy as the general population, behavioral research has shown that people generally say they would pay more than they actually do.

There are ways to correct for this gap, which economists refer to as a hypothetical bias, but BeStreamWise’s spokesperson informed TorrentFreak that the WPI study did not apply any correction. The survey answers were taken as given.

The lack of a discount factor is not unique in piracy research, and previous studies have sometimes put pirates in a positive spotlight because of it. However, it definitely signals that the £1.35 billion is far from guaranteed

In fact, the same poll shows that many pirates are still primarily driven by saving costs. The most common justification for pirating was that it’s cheaper than paying (38%), followed by convenience (31%) and a desire to avoid subscriptions (24%). Over half (52%) said they are likely to continue pirating regardless.

Social Media as Primary Piracy Source

One of the most surprising findings of the survey is that social media is the top source to access pirated content. This covers all forms of video piracy, not just streaming.

“[The research] shows that a majority (54%) of active illegal streamers access illegal content via social media platforms, compared to just 26% who access using purchased devices and illegal subscription services, and 28% streaming or downloading via unofficial websites.”

“Less popular methods included downloading content via torrents or cloud sharing services (15%), and illegally buying logins or passwords for legal services (7%),” the report adds.

The survey’s definition of piracy is quite broad. It includes “Watching via social media platforms” as a separate category, next to using a VPN to access content only available in other countries.

This means that someone watching a single (unauthorized) clip of a goal or TV-show on X or Instagram is considered an illegal streamer. How the questions were worded is not known to us, because BeStreamWise has not made the polling data available to us.

An ‘Oven-Ready’ Solution

Putting a price on the piracy problem is only part of the report, as it also offers solutions. The first recommendation is for the UK Government to amplify existing consumer awareness campaigns through its official channels.

The prime candidate for this, according to the BeStreamWise-commissioned report, is BeStreamWise. These awareness campaigns could also focus on the estimated £270m in harms consumers face through malware, fraud and identity theft.

“Amplifying BeStreamWise’s data and insights would be an ‘oven-ready’ move that would be game-changing in signposting the risks of piracy, including the potential fraud and data security risks, and would begin to combat the £270m of financial harms illegal streamers face each year,” the report reads.

The second recommendation calls for a voluntary cross-sector framework, in which online platforms, connectivity providers and content services work together to combat online piracy. These efforts could be overseen by the UK government.

The report does not propose new legislation or blocking powers. Instead, it argues that current enforcement has failed because consumers are not aware of the risks.

While awareness campaigns and voluntary agreements may help to nudge some people in the right direction, rightsholders should not count on getting a significant share of the £1.35 billion pirates promised anytime soon.

—

A copy of The Price of Piracy report, produced by WPI Economics for BeStreamWise, is available here (pdf).

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

Adult film producer Strike 3 Holdings has turned this into an industry of its own, filing thousands of John Doe lawsuits every year.

In most of these “John Doe” cases it subpoenas the Internet provider for the subscriber’s name, offers the alleged pirate a settlement, which effectively ends the case. This process is then repeated over and over.

Last summer, the company took aim at a much larger target. Together with Counterlife Media, Strike 3 sued Meta, accusing the tech giant of downloading thousands of its films via BitTorrent to train AI models. With 2,973 films at stake, the case could be worth up to $446 million.

This multi-million dollar case is now running into one of Strike 3’s routine “John Doe” lawsuits.

According to a motion filed last week, an anonymous pirate behind a residential AT&T connection is an executive at Meta’s Reality Labs division, which develops the Quest VR headsets.

From John Doe to Reality Labs Exec

The John Doe case started in March, when Strike 3 filed a complaint against the subscriber of IP address 162.192.7.34 at the same California federal court. In April, Magistrate Judge Virginia K. DeMarchi granted a subpoena to AT&T, noting that the name should not be publicly disclosed.

After AT&T shared the information, Strike 3 says its investigation revealed that the subscriber is an executive in Meta’s Reality Labs division. Citing his LinkedIn profile, the company notes that he has worked at Facebook and Meta for more than a decade.

The executive’s name and title are redacted, as shown below. Meta has asked the court to keep them under seal, as it did earlier for two other individuals named in the Meta case.

However, Strike 3 argues that this is no ordinary home pirate, using the timing of the downloads as evidence. On March 20, 2025, the porn producer’s general counsel first emailed Meta’s lawyers with forensic evidence of BitTorrent activity on the tech giant’s corporate IP addresses.

“Just hours later, Strike 3 first recorded BitTorrent infringement on John Doe’s residential IP Address,” the motion reads.

“This may suggest that Meta desired to shift infringing activity to this hidden residential IP Address in order to prevent further detection,” Strike 3 adds.

Strike 3 sued the John Doe a year later. Only then, it says, did it find the alleged connection to the Meta case, which brings us back to the present day.

Nearly 20,000 Files

In addition to the timing, Strike 3 uses the number of downloads in the John Doe case as an argument. The company logged all BitTorrent activity detected from the executive’s connection, which was nearly 20,000 files.

This includes VR adult titles made for Meta’s Quest headset. Strike 3 suggests the downloads are consistent with work to make the headset compatible with adult films.

As recently as August 25, Strike 3 says it recorded more than 150 daily downloads, from multi-language “Mega Packs” of TV shows, movies, software and books to what it describes as AI-generated pornography and VR adult films. That included nearly a dozen of its own titles.

“In short, this is a lot for one person to torrent on an average day, particularly one who has a demanding job,” Strike 3 writes. The company believes the pattern makes more sense as AI training data or research.

This is not the first time a Reality Labs employee has surfaced in the case. Earlier this summer, Meta confirmed that a former data engineer at the division was behind a Comcast connection linked to 97 films.

With its latest motion, Strike 3 asks U.S. District Judge Eumi K. Lee to relate the John Doe case to the Meta lawsuit, so that both proceed before the same judge. On paper, the request could streamline the court cases, by avoiding depositions and discovery.

However, the motion goes further than that as it would also turn executive’s home downloads as evidence in the $446 million suit.

If the cases are related, Strike 3 plans to amend the John Doe complaint to name Meta directly, argue that the executive is jointly liable, and move to compel Meta to appoint a Reality Labs custodian and hand over its torrenting records.

Meta: ‘Nothing Ties’ Downloads to Company

This week, Meta responded to the motion to link the cases. Officially, the company takes no position yet, as it can’t investigate whether the subscriber is even an employee without knowing his name. However, even if the subscriber is who Strike 3 claims, Meta argues that nothing ties the downloads to the company.

“They simply assume that the Subscriber is responsible for everything done on the IP address, and then leap to the additional, similarly unsupported assumption that he did it for Meta,” Meta writes.

The tech company leans on a common defense in BitTorrent piracy lawsuits, stressing that an IP address doesn’t identify the infringer. Judge DeMarchi flagged the same point when she allowed the subpoena.

Meta also flags a contradiction in Strike 3’s theory that downloads were switched to the home connection hours after the March 2025 warning. Strike 3’s own complaint alleges that Meta’s “off-infra” activity started in 2018, and that downloads on corporate IP addresses continued long after the notice.

“Plaintiffs’ new theory cannot be logically reconciled with those it is already pursuing,” Meta writes.

Meta has used the personal use explanation before. When a different Reality Labs worker, a former contractor, surfaced in the Kadrey case, Meta said its investigation showed his downloads were personal and unrelated to his work.

Whether Judge Lee agrees to link the John Doe case to the $446 million Meta lawsuit has yet to be seen. For now, the Reality Labs executive remains anonymous, even to Meta.

—

A copy of Strike 3’s motion to relate the cases, filed at the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, is available here (pdf). Meta’s response can be found here (pdf).

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

Alleging contributory and vicarious infringement, rightsholders argued that ISPs which failed to disconnect repeat infringers should pay for the consequences.

This theory fell apart in March, when the Supreme Court reversed a billion-dollar verdict against Cox Communications. The court held that an Internet provider is not liable for contributory infringement simply because it keeps serving subscribers it knows have been flagged for piracy.

RCN now wants the New Jersey federal court to apply this precedent and end a case that has been running since 2019.

No Inducement, No Claim

In a motion for reconsideration filed yesterday, RCN argues that Supreme Court’s Cox ruling destroyed the legal foundation of the labels’ amended complaint.

An ISP is no longer contributorily liable simply for selling internet access while knowing that some subscribers will use it to infringe. Failing to cut the connections of those subscribers off does not establish intent either.

After Cox, liability now requires proof that the provider actively encouraged infringement through specific acts, or that its service has no substantial non-infringing uses. Neither applies here, RCN argues, noting that the case is “virtually identical” to the Cox lawsuit.

The labels’ second claim, vicarious infringement, should also be dismissed according to RCN, as it requires proof the ISP profited directly from the piracy itself. The Fourth Circuit ruled in Cox that monthly subscription fees do not count, and the Supreme Court declined to hear the labels’ appeal on that point.

RCN argues that subscribers pay the same price whether they pirate music or browse social media, so the fees are not a “direct financial benefit” from infringement.

The ‘Last’ Case Standing

RCN stresses that the other repeat infringer cases against ISPs have already been dismissed.

“[I]n the wake of Cox, the Labels and other rightsholders dismissed every other secondary copyright infringement case against an ISP—including the movie industry’s virtually identical lawsuit against RCN. The same should have happened here,” they write.

As reported earlier, the labels dropped their cases against Verizon and Altice within weeks of the Cox ruling. The film companies behind titles including The Hitman’s Wife’s Bodyguard dismissed a near-identical lawsuit against RCN with prejudice, and a parallel case against WideOpenWest ended a month later.

The precedent reached RCN’s sister ISP Grande Communications too. Both providers now operate under the Astound Broadband brand. Formally, the labels’ case against Grande is not over yet, however, as Grande still prefers to have a formal win on the books.

By RCN’s account, every other secondary infringement case against a US internet provider is now over, with its own case being the exception.

A Four-Year Standoff

So why is this lawsuit still pending in court after seven years?

According to RCN, the labels never meant to go to trial. The company argues that the case was filed in 2019 as leverage in settlement talks with Grande. After that, it remained pending due to a dispute over internal DMCA records.

In May 2022, Magistrate Judge Tonianne J. Bongiovanni stayed all fact depositions until document discovery was resolved. The stay has not lifted since, despite at least 20 discovery letter briefs. RCN believes the labels are holding on for a reason.

“Instead, it seems that the Labels view the ongoing privilege dispute as a form of leverage. In other words, the Labels seem to believe that RCN might be willing to pay money to avoid a resolution of that issue,” RCN tells the court.

The labels have yet to respond to the motion. RCN asks the court to vacate its 2020 order, dismiss the amended complaint with prejudice, and has requested oral argument.

—

A copy of RCN’s motion for reconsideration and supporting memorandum, filed at the U.S. District Court for the District of New Jersey, are available here (pdf) and here (pdf).

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

That settlement closed one case, but it did not stop other rightsholders from pursuing their own legal claims.

In a complaint filed at the Northern District of California late last Friday, several music publishers including Sony and Warner, argue that the same book data haul included many of their songbooks, sheet music collections, and lyrics.

“Indeed, each pirated work that Defendants torrented was likely shared thousands if not tens of thousands of times, depriving Music Publishers of substantial revenue,” the complaint notes.

The lawsuit alleges direct and contributory infringement through the torrenting activity itself, as well as broader infringement through scraping and AI training, and also mentions DMCA violations for stripping copyright notices. CEO Dario Amodei and co-founder Benjamin Mann are named personally as defendants.

“A Cute Little LibGen Babysitter”

The publishers’ complaint relies largely on fact that were already established in earlier Anthropic litigation. A lot of the quoted material comes from the Bartz v. Anthropic case, where the book authors secured the $1.5 billion settlement.

According to the Bartz case, Mann discussed the LibGen torrenting openly in Anthropic’s internal Slack channels and shared a screenshot of his activity with colleagues. He described a program he wrote to manage the download as “a cute little libgen babysitter,” the complaint states.

The complaint also notes that Anthropic’s co-founder was aware of LibGen’s dubious legal status. Internal messages note that he characterized the site as “sketchy AF.”

Anthropic’s own Archive Team went even further and called it a “blatant violation of copyright.” Despite these concerns, Anthropic’s CEO Amodei approved the torrenting.

“Dr. Amodei admitted that Anthropic ‘ha[d] many places from which’ it could have legally purchased these copyrighted works for training, but instead torrented them because doing so was faster and free,” the complaint reads.

“A Popular (and Illegal) Library”

When Mann discovered that Pirate Library Mirror (PiLiMi) was ready for torrenting in the summer of 2022, he shared the link with colleagues and wrote, “[J]ust in time!” Another Anthropic employee responded, “zlibrary my beloved,” the complaint notes.

Anthropic engineers then compared the five million books that they already torrented from LibGen against seven million available on PiLiMi, and downloaded the two million that were new. According to internal records, employees knew what they were dealing with, describing PiLiMi as “a popular (and illegal) library.”

The publishers allege that Anthropic’s torrenting activities included hundreds of songbooks and sheet music collections. Exhibit A lists specific titles, including The Beatles Complete Scores, Best of Taylor Swift Songbook, and Bon Jovi These Days.

Even after Anthropic became “not so gung ho about” training AI models on pirated material “for legal reasons,” it kept the files in its central library anyway, the complaint adds.

Rewriting Pirate Library History

While the torrenting allegations rely on established court records, the complaint’s version of the history of pirate libraries isn’t entirely accurate. It claims the FBI shut down LibGen in late 2021, after which pirates copied its contents to create Z-Library.

In reality, LibGen was never shut down and remains online today, while Z-Library was founded in 2008 as a LibGen mirror, growing into one of the largest pirate ebook libraries in its own right.

In fact, it was Z-Library that lost its domains to the FBI, in November 2022, months after Anthropic wrapped up its downloads.

These errors don’t change the core allegations, but for a complaint built on the details of shadow library piracy, the history is notably shaky.

One Torrenting Spree, Three Lawsuits

The first two counts of the complaint target the torrenting activity itself, not the AI training that followed. Because BitTorrent simultaneously uploads whatever a user downloads, the publishers argue that Anthropic didn’t just reproduce their works, it distributed them to countless others.

This is a theory rightsholders have used against individual torrent users for over two decades. Here it is applied to a company with a reported $2 trillion IPO on the horizon, which allegedly “sustains and normalizes” the BitTorrent piracy ecosystem through its own use.

The lawsuit is the third to arise from the same torrenting activity. Book authors settled for $1.5 billion, and music publishers including Concord, Universal, and BMG filed a similar lawsuit in January. And the latest lawsuit might not be the end of it either.

Anthropic sees things differently and believes that its activities were fair use.

“This is the third lawsuit from the same lawyers, recycling allegations from cases already before the courts,” a spokesperson told Ars Technica, adding that AI training is fair use “as the court held in Bartz” and that the company will defend itself “robustly.”

That fair use ruling applied to the training, however, not the acquisition. The same court previously noted that the downloading itself is “straightforward piracy but at massive scale.”

The publishers demand up to $150,000 in statutory damages per infringed work which, with tens of thousands of works listed, could add up to billions of dollars.

—

A copy of the complaint, filed at the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, is available here (pdf).

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

Take-Two Interactive immediately responded with a wave of takedown notices and a cluster of DMCA subpoenas at a federal court, aiming to hunt down whoever was behind the leak.

DMCA subpoenas are a special legal tool that allows rightsholders to request information from third parties, without first having to sue someone. In this case, the game company used it for a broad sweep, targeting thousands of Discord users.

TorrentFreak previously covered how that net also widened to Microsoft, X, and Google’s YouTube. And in new filings, it appears that the investigation is moving forward.

On Friday, a day after Rockstar streamed its extended look at the game on Netflix, Take-Two went back to court. The company requested another subpoena targeted at Discord, but this time it asked to keep the details out of public view.

A Sealed Second Discord Subpoena

Take-Two’s initial DMCA subpoena request was public. This allowed news outlets to dig through the entire demand and identify the three servers it named, including one tied to content creator DarkViperAU.

That request is still live today. According to Take-Two’s latest statements, it was issued on August 21 and “promptly served on Discord,” although the court’s records don’t list the clerk’s issuance, as would typically be the case.

Notably, Discord’s Ryan Rigney stated on X on August 24 that the company had “not yet been served with a subpoena from Take Two,” adding that Discord intended to “evaluate the validity and scope before responding.”

Whether that evaluation played any role in the second subpoena’s more targeted request is unknown, but the sequence is worth highlighting.

The second subpoena Take-Two requested at the New York federal court is different. Instead of publicly listing the Discord targets, the game company requests the court to file it under seal. This means that the targets are completely blacked out.

What we do know is that this second request is more narrowly targeted, focused on one additional Discord user and a previously identified user.

“Take-Two has identified one additional Discord user and obtained additional identifying information for a previously identified Discord user, as well as additional information concerning the community servers identified in its prior subpoena for which it now seeks more targeted information,” the request reads.

“Rapidly Evolving” Investigation

According to Take-Two, the secrecy is warranted because filing the request in the open would benefit the alleged infringers.

The motion to seal argues that the subpoena attachment “reveals highly sensitive, confidential information about an ongoing investigation into copyright infringement and the misappropriation of Take-Two’s confidential information.”

“Public disclosure of this information could compromise Take-Two’s ongoing investigation and even tip off the alleged infringers as to the nature and progress of Take-Two’s investigation and information Take-Two has gathered about the infringement,” Take-Two writes.

Take-Two fears that the infringers (it uses plural here) could then destroy or conceal important evidence.

The company stresses that its investigation “is rapidly evolving and ongoing,” which is also why the second subpoena seeks “different information” than the first.

For now, the new demands are hidden from view. The court has yet to rule on whether they will stay that way and the subpoena has not been issued yet.

YouTube Subpoena Dropped

The same “rapidly evolving” framing was also mentioned in a follow-up to Take-Two’s YouTube subpoena, with the opposite result.

Take-Two had previously asked Google to identify the people behind three YouTube personas tied to a leaked video: CyberLeeks, Surfer24k, and CyberLeek_ar_io.

Judge John P. Cronan declined to sign off on the request without further information on how the targets are linked to the video. Take-Two did provide some additional details, but ultimately dropped the request, citing the evolving investigation and stating that it no longer needs the YouTube data.

“Take-Two has determined it no longer needs the particular information requested. Thus, Take-Two respectfully withdraws its subpoena request,” it informs the court.

Take-Two reserves the right to return to Google with a new request later. For now, however, the YouTube subpoena is off the table, while the Discord demands become the focal point. Whether those will lead Take-Two to the infringers has yet to be seen.

—

A copy of Take-Two’s second Discord subpoena request and its motion to seal can be found here (pdf) and here (pdf). Take-Two’s withdrawal of the Google subpoena is available here (pdf). Judge Cronan’s memo endorsement is available here (pdf).

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

Instead, they can request a DMCA subpoena. These documents are typically signed by a court clerk and don’t require any judicial oversight.

These DMCA subpoenas allow rightsholders to obtain the personal details of anonymous alleged infringers through third-party service providers. In recent years, this legal shortcut has shown to be a capable OSINT tool, with the Alliance for Creativity and Entertainment (ACE) as the most avid user.

This week, the Motion Picture Association, representing ACE, filed two new subpoena requests at federal courts in California. The first subpoena targets Internet infrastructure company Cloudflare and the second targets Discord users who allegedly operate pirate servers.

Miruro.to, Aniworld.to, and 47 Other Domains

The first request, filed at the Central District of California, lists 49 domain names. On behalf of ACE members including Disney, Netflix, Warner Bros., Universal, Paramount, and UEFA, the MPA asks Cloudflare to identify the people who run the associated accounts.

Three domains clearly stand out. The anime network Miruro is in the lead per Similarweb’s data, with 45 million monthly visits for the .to domain, and 37 million for the .tv variant. The German-language anime and television site Aniworld.to draws an estimated 23 million visits a month, most of them from Germany.

The rest reads like an international tour of well known streaming piracy brands. There are clones trading on the 123movies, Fmovies, and SolarMovie names, Spanish-language Pelisflix mirrors, the Chinese-language Gimy network, Hindi download portals, and some StreamEast-branded sports streaming portals that show matches from ACE member UEFA’s competitions.

A full list of all domain names is available below. These include many mirror and copycat sites that only have minimal traffic.

For every domain, ACE wants Cloudflare to hand over names, physical addresses, IP addresses, phone numbers, email addresses, payment details, and account histories. Whether this will yield any usable intel has yet to be seen, as pirate site operators tend to register false information. However, ACE hopes it points to at least some of the people involved.

Two Discord Servers

The second subpoena targets Discord and is filed at the Northern District of California. On behalf of ACE members, the MPA is requesting information linked to two servers and two accounts. These servers allegedly posted links to pirated copies of films including Wreck-It Ralph and Shutter Island, as well as episodes of Invincible and The Pitt.

The legal paperwork isn’t very informative as it only lists numeric server, account, and channel IDs, without any server or usernames attached. We could not link this information to any server names, but we do know when they were created.

Every Discord ID is stamped with the moment it was created. For one of the servers, the user, channel and server were all created in September 2025, in the span of roughly half an hour. After that, it remained active until earlier this month.

The second server is much older. It was created in September 2020, while the account flagged alongside it was created last November. This means that the account that allegedly posts the content isn’t the one that created the server.

The Servers are Gone

At the time of writing, both servers have already been deleted. Whether Discord pulled the servers or the operators deleted them first is not clear, but MPA specifically asked Discord to take action in a separate takedown notice.

MPA informed Discord that the sole purpose of these servers is to “link Discord users to an online service” that provides access to pirated movies and series. This suggests that the Discord server was linked to a pirate streaming portal.

“We request that Discord remove or otherwise disable access to the server,” MPA’s notice reads.

Notably, the subpoena request is much more targeted than the DMCA subpoena Take-Two requested in its search of the GTA 6 leaker. That subpoena requested information of thousands of users connected to three servers. Here, it only seeks identifying information on the operators of the two servers and two specific accounts.

The DMCA subpoena requests have yet to be signed off by a court clerk, which means that the subpoenas have yet to be issued.

—

Aniworld.to, miruro.tv, flixbaba.mov, flixbaba.is, flixmomo.tv, encontrei.info, fastflix.top, seeflix.to, empire-streaming.us, fmoviess.org, yesmovies.ag, tinyzone.org, solarmovie2.com, streamzy.org, watchnest.to, watchnest.org, indexflix.to, indexflix.org, imdb.su, streamimdb.ru, miruro.ru, pelisflix200.work, pelisflix200.club, pelisflix200.best, pelisflix1.cc, pelisflix1.bio, pelisflix1.de, coflix.esq, gimy.tv, gimy.now, gimyv.com, 94580.net, movieffm.net, gimytv.biz, gimytube.com, miruro.to, miruro.bz, repelisplus.my, 94itv.app, 99itv.net, solarmovies.co, 123moviesfun.is, moviesmod.at, moviesmod.zone, nupload.top, thestreameast.fun, direttecommunity.online, livetv903.me, streameasti.is.

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

These blocking efforts yield some results but pirate sites often switch domain names quickly, frustrating the enforcement efforts.

With a series of new decisions issued this week, Belgium’s anti-piracy department is trying to tackle the piracy problem more directly. Instead of blocking the sites, they compel domain name registrars to identify the associated operators.

Domain Registrars and a Registry

As with the blocking effort, the five decisions are linked to an order from the French-speaking Business Court of Brussels. Four decisions are addressed to domain registrars, while the fifth targets a domain name registry that holds registrant records directly.

The order and the decisions are redacted and don’t mention the rightsholder or the targeted websites.

That said, the court’s reasoning refers to the need to preserve “the sports economy and the European solidarity model”, which clearly points at sports piracy. And there are more tells that allow us to name several of the targeted intermediaries.

BAPO told TorrentFreak the secrecy is not its own choice but the court’s. The judge “ordered the disclosure of information to enable the plaintiff to identify the infringer and conduct further investigations,” it said, and separately “ordered that the identity of the targeted content and intermediary may not be disclosed.”

BAPO did not say whether the domain names would be identified later, but three intermediaries are accidentally mentioned by name. One decision instructs Hosting Concepts to send the requested information to BAPO, another sets a deadline for Hostinger, while a third does the same for Key Systems. Every other mention in those documents is replaced with placeholders.

These are all EU-based domain registrars. The fourth registrar and the domain name registry are not named. The same is true for the domain names that are targeted.

Bank Details, Crypto Wallets, and Server Logs

The four registrar decisions each demand the same seven categories of information. This includes a long list of data that should be handed over, including the customer’s name, every postal address, email address and phone number ever attached to the account.

The intermediaries are also compelled to disclose “the full IBANs and the exact names of the holder(s) of the relevant bank accounts”, and card details down to the issuing bank, country of issue and card type.

Payments in cryptocurrency are covered too. The orders cover any “means of payment in crypto-assets, where applicable, including in particular the wallet addresses used, the type of crypto-asset concerned, and the transaction identifiers (hash IDs)”.

The registrars also have to check their logs for the target’s IP address, device type, operating system and browser used to create the account, followed by “all logs and connection data retained by the relevant intermediary relating to the use of the customer account over the last twelve (12) months”.

The domain registry decision is more narrow, requesting registrant details, the identity of the registrar, the nameservers in use, and the history of changes. The Brussels Business court concluded that these demands are proportionate and BAPO has relayed these to the intermediaries.

Gag Order

The decisions come with a gag order. The domain registrars and registry are not allowed to disclose the information-seeking request to their customers or any third parties, including the press.

That order covers “any information concerning the very existence of these proceedings or of the order, or of any matter connected with the proceedings”.

The EU’s Digital Services Act (DSA) normally requires a provider to inform affected users that their data has been handed over. However, BAPO notes that there is an exception when criminal investigation and prosecution are at stake, which it believes applies here.

What the criminal allegations are isn’t immediately clear. However, the order effectively means that the pirate site operators can have their identity, banking history and connection logs handed over to rightsholders without their knowledge.

Can it be Enforced?

The decisions rely on Article 10 of the DSA, which covers how an information order applies to a provider elsewhere in the EU. BAPO’s actual powers come from Belgian law, and all the named intermediaries sit outside Belgium, so whether it can enforce the measures against them has yet to be seen.

BAPO went further, telling TorrentFreak the orders aren’t even limited to the EU. Under the Belgian civil procedure and the DSA, it said, “every intermediary whose service is being used to give access to illegal content within the Belgian territory can be ordered to disclose information regarding its customer.”

That is a broad claim and has to be tested in practice.

Unfortunately, the press and the public at large are left in the dark, as it remains a mystery who requested the order, who it targets, and which other intermediaries it applies to.

Whether any of the intermediaries have complied yet is unknown and, given the gag order, they are not likely to let anyone know.

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Copies of BAPO’s five decisions are available here (pdf), here (pdf), here (pdf), here (pdf) and here (pdf).

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

A new announcement on the site lays out a staged process that runs for more than a week, taking the operation offline one service at a time.

“We’ve decided to wind things down in stages,” the operators write, without explaining why they are throwing in the towel.

With more than 160 million estimated visits last month, Cineby is one of the most popular pirate sites online. The same operation also includes Fmovies+ and Cineplay, each with millions of monthly visits on their own.

September 5: The End

The shutdown started by redirecting these companion sites to the main domain, followed by seven additional stages, listed below.

Aug 25: Mirror sites Fmovies+ and Cineplay redirect to Cineby.
Aug 26: Anime and sports streams switched off.
Aug 27: File downloads switched off.
Aug 28: Account system taken down, user accounts deleted.
Aug 30: Last day to watch films and series.
Aug 31: Film and series streaming switched off.
Sept 1: Cineby says goodbye.
Sept 5: Every remaining domain taken down for good.

Earlier today the second step was completed on schedule with the livestream page going dark. The initial announcement suggested the whole operation would disappear on August 26, but the plans have changed.

The operators now say the last films and series will play on August 30. The final domain names are now being taken offline on September 5, with Cineby noting that this step is irreversible.

TorrentFreak reached out to Cineby earlier this week, hoping to find out more about the reason for the shutdown. The official email address bounced, however, so we don’t expect to get a response anytime soon.

Legal Pressure

The shutdown follows a year of steady legal pressure. For example, last fall the Motion Picture Association (MPA) named Cineby as a notorious piracy operation in its submission to the US Trade Representative, linking the operation to Russia.

The Cineby brand was also targeted in several site-blocking orders this year. The site was listed in the UK “omnibus” order and Canada’s “expanded scope” order, which both covered Cineby and its future successors.

In July a Delhi High Court order obtained by HBO targeted four Cineby domains. The main .at domain stayed online, however, suggesting its registrar had not acted on the Indian order.

Staged

Given this backdrop, it would not be a stretch to think that Cineby’s operators caved to the legal pressure, but history also leaves room for other options.

Previously, we have seen popular pirate sites staging their own demise, to continue operating under a new brand. There is no evidence that this is happening here. If that’s the case, visitors will likely be redirected to a new site at some point.

Cineby currently refers users to legal services including Apple TV and Amazon Prime. However, it also points to the FMHY subreddit, which provides an overview of pirate streaming alternatives. For now, the first thing to keep an eye on is whether the site sticks to its own schedule, or if plans change again.

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Update August 31, 2026: Cineby posted the following statement.

As planned, today, August 31st, we’re shutting down all of Cineby’s streaming.

There really aren’t words for how grateful we are.

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

The company has targeted both individual pirates and private torrent trackers through U.S. federal courts.

Earlier this year, the Illinois-based company filed a high-profile lawsuit against Gay-Torrents.org, targeting the site’s operators, administrators, a Bulgarian shell company, and hundreds of individual members. That lawsuit prompted the operators to shut the site down, but that did not end their legal worries.

The tracker’s users also remain on the radar and are at the center of a new legal campaign. A new complaint filed last week at an Illinois federal court targets a fresh batch of 75 members, including one named defendant and 74 John Does who are identified only by their site usernames. Notably, Flava filed it as a RICO case.

RICO Complaint Against Torrent Users

The complaint describes Gay-Torrents.org as an “association-in-fact enterprise” with the goal to profit from the unauthorized distribution of copyrighted works. The RICO complaint, referring to the federal racketeering statute, alleges that the tracker’s members contributed to the racketeering operation. This claim comes in addition to a copyright infringement allegation.

Members who uploaded and downloaded infringing content are characterized as “lower-rung participants” who supplied the site’s infringing inventory, participating in Gay-Torrents’ sharing-ratio system. Those members who paid for VIP access are seen as “funders” and face an additional allegation of wire fraud.

FlavaWorks argues that every VIP payment was a fraudulent act. Members were sent to sham web-hosting fronts and ordered ‘VPS plans’ they knew did not exist. The goal of these disguised payments was to conceal the true nature of the transaction from banks and payment processors.

“On information and belief, the enterprise generated in excess of €7,000,000 since 2009 across more than 15,000 documented VIP payment events, each invoiced as a sham “web-hosting” fee,” the complaint reads.

This €7 million figure is an estimation based on Flava’s calculations, covering all revenue that was generated in 17 years. This same number was also cited in the April lawsuit, where Flava requested an asset freezing order targeting the tracker’s alleged payment providers, including PayPal.

Unique Forensic Identifier

The sole named defendant is Jason A. S., a Virginia man who, according to the complaint, was a paying subscriber to FlavaWorks’ legal websites from March 2020 to July 2021. During that period, he allegedly downloaded more than 200 of the company’s works.

FlavaWorks uses a forensic watermarking system that embeds a unique identifier into every file it delivered to subscribers. So when pirated copies of the videos with his identifier appeared on Gay-Torrents, Flava knew where they originated.

These copies were first spotted in 2022 and Flava writes that it sent a cease-and-desist notice to the defendant at the time. However, the man allegedly continued to use the site and copies of the content kept circulating up until 2025.

In addition to distributing pirated content, Jason A. S. allegedly paid for a VIP membership too. That means he is both an uploader and a funder under the complaint’s RICO theory. This makes him the “anchor defendant” whose connection to Illinois gives the court jurisdiction over the remaining defendants through RICO’s provisions.

The Case for RICO

The first lawsuit also targeted members, but relied on copyright and state-law claims. That legal approach ran into a common problem: the amended complaint had to drop hundreds of defendants, apparently because they would not fall under the jurisdiction of an Illinois court.

RICO solves that problem. The statute authorizes nationwide service of process, so Flava only needs one “anchor defendant” with ties to Illinois. After that, all co-conspirator defendants can be added to the case, as long as they live in the United States.

It also raises the legal stakes. RICO provides higher damages and introduces conspiracy liability, which effectively means that a member who only paid VIP fees and never uploaded a single file could still face liability for the enterprise’s copyright infringement.

To make the RICO theory work, Gay-Torrents’ operators should remain out of the case. Indeed, the complaint identified the operators as non-party co-conspirators instead of defendants.

74 Does & the Evidence Trail

The complaint lists 74 John Does, who are all identified by their Gay-Torrents.org username and internal user-ID number. Flava will try to identify these defendants as the case moves forward.

Some of the evidence trail is straightforward. Usernames and user IDs are presumably visible to any member of a private tracker, and FlavaWorks clearly had at least one account on the site. After all, the forensic identifier matches come from FlavaWorks’ own system, comparing copies downloaded from the tracker against its subscriber records.

In addition, the evidence shows that a Flava investigator purchased a VIP subscription at the tracker.

The VIP payment data can also come from a different source. The complaint notes that subpoenas were issued to Skrill and PayPal in the first lawsuit, and those records would show which users paid for VIP memberships.

How Flava identified the user download activity and other internal records is not immediately clear to us. The complaint refers broadly to “the Site’s own per-member records” without explaining how they were obtained.

RICO Raises the Bar

The RICO complaint accuses the defendants of direct and contributory copyright infringement, a RICO violation, and RICO conspiracy. It lists 85 copyrighted works, with statutory damages of up to $150,000 per work on the copyright claims. The RICO counts could add treble damages on top of that.

However, RICO comes with a higher evidence bar. The criminal copyright infringement allegations, for example, need to show willfulness and commercial advantage or financial gain. On top of proving that, Flava must show a pattern of racketeering activity, how each defendant is involved, and more.

The wire-fraud count also requires detailed evidence, to document the who, what, when, and how of each alleged fraudulent transaction.

Whether Flava will litigate these claims in a trial has yet to be seen. Filing a RICO case raises the pressure on the defendants, but actually proving these claims against individual users at trial is much harder than pursuing a standard copyright infringement claim.

For now, however, Flava has already reached its key goal by shutting the tracker down. In a way, this means that everything it gets out of the RICO complaint is a bonus. For the users, however, the stakes have been raised and the concerns are real.

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copy of the complaint, filed by FlavaWorks Entertainment, Inc. at the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Illinois, is available here (pdf).

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

These worries didn’t come out of nowhere as the site has been under quite a bit of legal pressure in recent months.

Lawsuit Takes Domains Offline

In January, the site lost its flagship .org domain. Initially it wasn’t clear what was behind this action but unsealed court records eventually connected it to a lawsuit filed by music companies. This case was a direct response to a Spotify scrape Anna’s Archive announced a few weeks earlier.

The music companies obtained an injunction from a U.S. federal court to go after the site’s domain names. This took out not only the .ORG domain but also the .SE domain, as well as the .PM and .VG domains that were put in place as backups.

Anna’s Archive eventually landed on .GL, .PK, and .GD domains, which remain active today. These are connected to registrars and registries based outside the United States that, apparently, do not comply with U.S. court orders.

Two Lawsuits, $340 Million

The music industry injunction also came with a substantial default judgment that was handed down in April. This includes a $322 million default judgment against the unknown operators of Anna’s Archive, who failed to show up in court.

This judgment was soon followed by a similar request from a group of major book publishers, including Penguin Random House, Elsevier, and HarperCollins, who sued the shadow library at a New York federal court.

That case also resulted in a default judgment, with a damages award that is smaller, but still substantial at $19.5 million. In addition, the court also issued an injunction targeting Anna’s Archive’s domain registrars and registries.

‘Coordinated Attack’

With this backdrop, it is no surprise that legal troubles came to mind when the site became unreachable earlier this month. However, this time around, the threat appears to have come from elsewhere.

After the site came back online, the official AnnaArchivist account attributed it to a coordinated attack by an unnamed party.

“Apologies for the issues. We suspect a coordinated attack. We’ve mitigated the attack vectors…” the message read, while noting that memberships already include one to two extra days per month to account for downtime.

Theoretically, an attack can also come from a rogue anti-piracy group, but there’s no evidence for that. A scam or phishing operation, which tries to cash in on Anna’s Archive search traffic, is another option. Neither is confirmed.

What Options Are Left?

Looking more broadly at the enforcement action that has taken place over the past months, we see that U.S. courts have run into their jurisdictional borders on the Internet.

This likely comes as a disappointment for rightsholders, but it also offers a clear takeaway.

U.S. courts can’t reach domains registered beyond their jurisdiction. That’s likely to increase calls for site-blocking legislation, a measure the industry has long favored and that remains high on the political agenda in the United States.

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

Rockstar Games and its parent company, Take-Two Interactive, have kept the game’s marketing under tight control, with a planned “Extended Look” at the gameplay premiering on Netflix later this month.

However, a few days ago, millions of fans already got a sneak peek. On August 18, someone identifying as “Cyberleek” started posting unreleased gameplay footage online. These clips went viral on social media, despite Take-Two issuing a barrage of takedown notices.

The leak came with a manifesto, criticizing the move away from physical discs, among other things. In addition, the leaked gameplay was branded with a Solana token advert.

The Discord and Microsoft ‘Dragnet’ Subpoenas

Take-Two did not take this leak lightly. As widely reported in the media, the game company requested two DMCA subpoenas at the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, directed at Discord servers and at Microsoft’s internal cyberleek investigation, device identifiers, IP logs, and OneDrive content tied to GTA.

The Discord subpoena is particularly broad. As highlighted by Tom’s Hardware, Kotaku, and others, the subpoena sought identifying details for every account that communicated in three named Discord servers since June 1, not only those tied to the leaks.

Take-Two also seeks “all identifying information associated with all user accounts that are/were members of the Discord community servers and channels listed below.”

The Discord and Microsoft DMCA subpoena requests were filed by law firm Kirkland & Ellis. While some media reports suggest they have been issued, that’s not the case yet. A judge signed an order directing the clerk to issue, but the clerk hasn’t issued them.

The docket does include a proposed subpoena, requiring Discord and Microsoft to disclose the requested information, as shown above. But there’s more.

Take-Two Targets X

A day after the initial subpoenas were requested, Take-Two applied for DMCA subpoenas against X Corp. and Google, again at the Southern District of New York. These filings came from a different law firm, Ruttenberg IP Law, and are more narrowly targeted.

The proposed X subpoena lists three usernames: @cyberleek_ar_io, @cyberleekario, and @MrCyberLeek. For each, it demands the account ID, registration email, IP access logs, phone numbers, connected accounts, and any associated device identifiers, again covering June 1 to the present.

Notably, the GTA fan community had flagged these accounts as impostors before the subpoena was filed. Cyberleek also watermarked “CYBERLEEK DOES NOT HAVE TWITTER” onto later leaked videos. The named X accounts are now all suspended.

Whether Take-Two treats these X accounts as impostors who copied the leaks, or as the source, is not mentioned in the filing.

The YouTube Channel Subpoena

The Google/YouTube subpoena is a lot narrower than the Discord sweep. It names a single YouTube video and three channels that are believed to be associated with it: CyberLeeks, Surfer24k, and Cyberleek_ar_io.

Surfer24k also appears in the Discord subpoena, as it is linked to one of the named servers. Obtaining personal records for this user from both Google and Discord allows Take-Two to compare the information of both platforms.

An exhibit filed with the petition lists Rockstar’s takedown request on YouTube. The company logged a reference file as “UNAUTH_2026AUG_VIDEO2,” and YouTube’s Content ID system flagged and claimed the matching upload shortly after it went live.

The same exhibit shows a “BUY $CYBERLEEK ON SOLANA” watermark on the footage, as shown above.

Not Disclosed, Yet?

None of the four filings is a lawsuit. They are subpoenas issued under Section 512(h) of the DMCA, which lets a copyright holder compel a service provider to identify an alleged infringer without first suing anyone.

These subpoenas do not require a ruling on the merits and a signature from the court clerk is sufficient, as long as all other conditions are met.

As it stands, none of the four subpoenas has been issued. Judge Andrew L. Carter Jr. and Judge Jennifer L. Rochon each signed an order directing the clerk to act, but as far as we can see the clerk has not yet done so. That would mean that, for now, no user data has changed hands as a result.

Update, August 31, 2026: The picture has since shifted. In a later filing at the same court, Take-Two states that the first Discord subpoena was issued on August 21 and “promptly served on Discord.” The docket does not separately record the clerk’s issuance or any proof of service, so that’s Take-Two’s word. However, DMCA subpoenas can be issued and served without a docket entry. Notably, this also conflicts with a statement from Discord’s marketing director, who said around August 24 that they has not been served.

Notably, DMCA subpoenas are restricted to targeting alleged infringers that are tied to specific material. Whether that covers thousands of Discord users, many of whom may have posted nothing at all, is up for debate.

Take-Two’s counsel declared that the purpose of the subpoenas is “to obtain the identity of an alleged infringer or infringers, and that such information will only be used for the purpose of protecting Take-Two’s rights.” This means that a lawsuit could eventually follow.

Before that happens, however, it is possible that the targeted intermediaries or their users will file an objection. Service providers regularly resist DMCA subpoenas which they see as being overbroad, and targeted users can move to quash.

It’s clear that Take-Two is determined to get the leaker’s identity, but how broad its DMCA dragnet can reach has yet to be seen.

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A copy of the request for a DMCA subpoena directed at Google/YouTube is available here (pdf, pdf, pdf) and the X Corp variant is here (pdf, pdf, pdf).

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