The system started as an administrative scheme without judicial oversight. CUII’s own committee issued blocking recommendations, and the Federal Network Agency signed off before providers acted.

This setup changed in mid-2025, when the stakeholders rewrote their code of conduct so that every block now starts with a rightsholder suing one ISP. Once a court confirms the block, the other providers follow.

CUII no longer issues the orders, but it will still communicate the recommendations to all participants. In recent weeks, the clearing body published several new ones based on orders from the Cologne Regional Court, targeting KinoGo and Streamed.

The structural infringement check

The court orders are not available to us, but according to CUII’s paperwork, these targets are classified as structurally copyright infringing websites, making the blocking orders “reasonable and proportionate.”

As is typical in Germany, the requesting rightsholders and the targeted domains are not mentioned. However, based on the brands and data from the independent transparency portal CUIIListe, streamed.pk, streamed.st, and kinogo.ec were all blocked in Germany this month.

CUII’s paperwork does reveal one hard statistic. For each site, a private investigator pulls a random sample of the site’s content, to see how much of it infringes at a 95.5 percent confidence level. This number is used to determine whether the target site is indeed ‘structurally’ infringing.

For example, for Streamed, the investigator put the infringing share somewhere between 96.16 and 100 percent. For KinoGo, meanwhile, between 82.4 and 94.6 percent of the content is pirated.

The 82.4 percent floor is the lowest we have seen so far, below all previous German blocking orders we have seen, including the ones below.

The 81.5% ‘Line’

In a March 2025 order targeting HDFILME, STREAMCLOUD and FILMPALAST, CUII specifically stated when illegal content clearly outweighs the legal content on a site.

“The illegal content on the websites far outweighs the legal content. This is the case in any event when at least 81.5% of the website’s content is illegal,” the order reads, translated from German.

It is the only CUII order we found that puts a number on it. The figure traces back to the Cologne Regional Court, which set it in a January 2025 default judgment against the download portal NOX, a case the operator never contested. That same judgment triggered NOX’s own block.

In KinoGo’s example, the 82.4 percent floor is getting quite close to the 81.5 percent.

This percentage is not a hard benchmark for the court or for CUII to determine whether a site is blockable. However, one can imagine that it’s not a good look when it drops lower than that, especially when legal content would outweigh their pirated counterparts.

This doesn’t mean that KinoGo is a questionable target. The site has been a thorn in the side of rightsholders for many years. It has more than 50 million monthly visits, mostly from Belarus and Ukraine, which it has historically targeted.

Hiding in Plain Content?

The open question is how much of a site’s library has to be pirated before a block can be issued in Germany, and whether 81.5 percent is considered to be a general benchmark or just a figure tied to that one case.

If there is a fixed percentage, there are some obvious exploits that come to mind. In theory, an operator could pad an archive with public domain films or AI generated filler, pushing the investigator’s interval below the line while the pirated library stays intact.

We asked CUII whether the 81.5 percent can be treated as a fixed benchmark.

—

Update, August 20: CUII has responded to our questions. Its comments are added below.

Update August 20: CUII told TorrentFreak that 81.5% is not a fixed quantitative limit. It cited the underlying proportionality test from the Federal Court of Justice, under which a block is proportionate when illegal content so clearly dominates that only a negligible share of legal content is affected. CUII added that the decisive question is not a percentage but whether a site operates an infringement-based business model that is criminal under German copyright law, and said it blocks only domains used for such sites. On that reasoning, padding a library with legal filler would not change a site’s character.

Update August 19: Romsns.com is also blocked. CUII just published the associated recommendation. The Virustotal scan below shows that there are multiple malware warnings for this domain.

—

A copy of the Streamed order can be found here (pdf) and the KinoGo order can be found here (pdf). An archive of all CUII determinations is also available on the clearinghouse’s official website.

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

The streaming portal has been a thorn in the side of Hollywood, with the Motion Picture Association (MPA) listing it as a notorious pirate site in its submission to the USTR last fall.

“Cineby is a fast-growing one-stop-shop piracy site in the ‘hydra site’ category. These are a rapidly expanding category of one-stop piracy sites offering content somewhat comparable to IPTV services, but without the need for subscriptions or dedicated devices,” MPA wrote at the time, linking the operation to Russia.

Enforcement Pressure Builds

In addition to the diplomatic pressure, the movie industry was also the driving force behind several high-profile blocking orders against the site this year.

In May, Cineby was listed as a target in the new UK “omnibus” site blocking order, for example, which also covers the site’s successors preemptively. The same applies to the recent “expanded scope” order from Canada’s federal court, which also covers Cineby and any potential successors.

In July, a Delhi High Court order obtained by HBO and other movie studios went further. This injunction covered four Cineby domains and directed Indian ISPs to block the sites, while domain registrars were ordered to suspend them.

Despite the Indian order, Cineby’s main .at domain name remains online, suggesting that Registrar.eu has not complied with the Indian order. However, according to a recent announcement by the site’s operators, there soon might be no need to take action anymore.

A Voluntary Shutdown?

Visitors to Cineby’s website are currently greeted with a new announcement, suggesting that the site will shut down permanently in a few days.

“Cineby and all related services will cease operations on August 26th. It’s been a good run, but the time has come to stop,” the site announces, adding that “all servers will be shut down, and every user account will be deleted.”

The operators provide no rationale for this surprising decision. However, it is a reasonable assumption to suggest that the mounting enforcement pressure played a role.

What will happen to the domain name when the site shuts down has yet to be seen. With millions of daily visits, the site has a massive audience, which will be looking for an alternative.

The Hydra…

Whether the operators will indeed shut down the site and get out of the business has yet to be seen. In the past, other sites have simply rebranded in an attempt to shake off the legal pressure. This includes the now-defunct HiAnime operation, which started as Zoro and also used the Aniwatch brand.

According to the MPA, Cineby relied heavily on piracy-as-a-service (PaaS) infrastructure, embedding videos from third party sites. These remain online, which means that the underlying piracy problem remains.

In the typical ‘hydra’ fashion, Cineby’s planned shutdown will result in plenty of new sites popping up; whether these are linked to the original site or not.

This problem is one of the key reasons why the UK and Canadian site blocking orders were expanded to cover future Cineby copycats and successors, even if they don’t use the same brand. If everything happens according to plan, this new blocking power can be put to the test later this month.

For now, however, cineby.at remains online, streaming pirated movies and TV shows as usual.

—

Update: Cineby’s sister sites Cineplay and Fmovies+ show the same shutdown message.

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

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

This week we have two newcomers on the list.

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

The most torrented movies for the week ending on August 17 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.

While much of this occurs beyond the company’s purview, pirates appear to be drawn to the platform, sharing links to pirated movies, TV-shows and other content in dedicated channels.

Despite this reputation, the platform’s piracy ecosystem has rarely been mapped in any detail. A new academic paper sets out to fill that gap, while also trying to offer a potential AI-powered solution to the problem.

Researchers from Louisiana State University and the University of Texas at Arlington examined 1,057 channels that shared roughly 209,000 posts between December 2023 and January 2026. They describe it as the first large-scale study of video piracy on the platform.

The results are detailed in the paper titled “Binge, Bot, Repeat: Unpacking the Ecosystem of Video Piracy on Telegram,” which provides some interesting new insights.

The findings reveal that piracy is certainly not a fringe activity on Telegram. On the contrary, it is massively popular.

4.85 billion post views for 19,033 titles

To map the ecosystem, the researchers relied on a locally run large language model to label posts. This helped them to identify 19,033 unique pirated titles across various Telegram channels, including 14,632 movies and 4,401 TV shows produced by 3,941 companies.

As on regular pirate sites, anime is rather popular. The most pirated rightsholder is Japan’s Toei Company, home to One Piece and Dragon Ball, which accounted for 17% of the titles. As shown below, Netflix is in second place with 15%, followed by Warner Bros. at 12.4%.

These numbers get more context when looking at the total views. According to the researchers, the ‘pirate’ posts were found on 983 channels where they amassed 4.85 billion views.

The views are not per title, as a single post can include more titles. Nonetheless, the researchers estimate a total loss of $17.49 billion, with United States content accounting for $8.17 billion and Japanese content $3.72 billion.

This is a loose estimate, assuming that 1% of the views translate into lost sales, based on the cheapest legal option available. Also, the researchers capped lost sales at a single subscription cost when multiple titles from one service were linked.

Built to Survive Takedowns

One of the most noteworthy findings is that piracy channels use a wide variety of distribution techniques, with content scattered across interconnected channels, bots, and backup accounts.

Roughly 94% of the AI-mapped channels were connected to at least one other and many of these were unfindable using traditional searches.

“We also find that this ecosystem is deliberately engineered to be resilient against takedown efforts, frequently redirecting users through chains of intermediary channels and automated bots that collectively handle hosting, access control, monetization, and channel discovery.”

Most pirate links pointed to external hosting platforms such as TeraBox, Terashare, and GoFile. Torrents and magnet links, meanwhile, were a rarity, and the researchers only spotted nine of these links in their research.

In addition to posting links to pirated content, some channels also shared compromised Netflix, Hulu, Disney+, and Crunchyroll logins, and VPN tutorials to help people bypass blocking measures.

Anti-RIP: AI Powered Channel Hunting

The researchers went beyond simply mapping the ecosystem. Their findings also motivated the development of “Anti-RIP,” a real-time AI-powered tool that can detect video piracy on Telegram.

To catch channels before they grow, the researchers generated candidate Telegram handles and probed them to see which ones were linked to piracy communities. Between February 3 and April 10, 2026, the tool scanned 249,133 newly discovered channels.

From that sweep, Anti-RIP flagged 802 piracy channels with a median age of less than 5 days, along with 299 connected channels and 108 bots.

Rather than sending bare links, the team compiled the findings into evidence reports that paired each flagged channel with contextual labels describing what it was doing, from hosting and redirecting to monetizing content. These reports were sent to Telegram’s abuse department as well as 17 major U.S. rightsholders.

The research notes that 14 of the 17 US studios acknowledged the reports, and 4 explicitly stated that the contextual labels helped them assess and prioritize the notices.

“Over a 61-day period, the framework facilitated the takedown of 524 previously unknown piracy channels and 71 bots,” the paper reads. Additionally, Telegram removed many flagged posts.

AI Tool Isn’t Flawless

Anti-RIP’s reports produced measurable results. Within two weeks, 524 of the 1,101 reported channels had become inaccessible, and Telegram removed many individual flagged posts on top of that.

The AI tool is far from perfect, and the researchers acknowledge that it produces false positives. When two coders reviewed a random sample of 1,000 posts used to validate the system, they found that the model had wrongly flagged 4 legitimate posts as piracy.

The detection model built for the live tool is reported to be 98% accurate in testing. That figure comes from a controlled test set, however, and the paper does not publish a verified error rate for the channels that were flagged during its real-world run.

The researchers have open-sourced Anti-RIP and released the dataset publicly through GitHub. This means that Telegram and rightsholders can put it to use, if they like. Similarly, pirates will likely use AI tools to evade detection, triggering an AI-driven game of cat-and-mouse.

—

A copy of the paper, “Binge, Bot, Repeat: Unpacking the Ecosystem of Video Piracy on Telegram,” is available here. It is a preprint that hasn’t been peer-reviewed yet.

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

These channels are highly popular and generate many millions of views. While they only use clips from anime shows, often with narration and commentary, the publisher equates it to piracy.

In January, KADOKAWA tried to unmask three YouTubers, each with hundreds of thousands of subscribers, through a U.S. federal court. The company requested a DMCA subpoena, compelling YouTube to expose their identifying information.

These subpoenas are often a mere formality and only need a signature of a court clerk to be issued. However, in this case, YouTube could not simply hand over the requested information as three of the targeted YouTubers filed a motion to quash.

Motion to Quash

The three creators argued that their YouTube channels were not simple piracy operations. Instead, they described their videos as Korean-language commentary, review, and analysis content aimed at a Korean-speaking audience.

“The videos used selected portions of the underlying works in connection with Korean narration, explanation, summary, commentary, and creator-specific presentation. They were not uploaded as full episodes or as raw reproductions of the copyrighted works,” they wrote.

The three channels are certainly not small fish. Bongseop Kim and Woohyuk Yang both have more than half a million subscribers, while Youngyoon Ko is not far behind with nearly 350k followers.

All channels feature hundreds of videos, covering a wide variety of anime content. This includes the contested KADOKAWA titles, as summarized in the table below.

In their defense, the creators argue that, instead of competing with the original content, they are driving traffic to it.

All three included links to Korea’s licensed anime streaming platform Laftel in their video descriptions and pinned comments. According to analytics data shared by Kim, he generated 114,494 click-throughs to Laftel from his channel, with an 82 percent engagement rate.

The creators also pointed out that KADOKAWA had taken down their videos before, but that it failed to take any legal steps when they filed counter-notifications. As a result, the videos were restored by YouTube. This could mean that the current effort is used as a pressure tactic, they argue.

“Such repeated conduct suggests that the present subpoena may not be directed toward a genuine intent to pursue litigation, but rather reflects an overbroad or coercive use of the DMCA process,” the creators note.

Court Orders Fair Use Briefing

In April, the case took an unusual procedural turn when Judge Trina L. Thompson ordered both sides to submit supplemental briefing specifically on fair use. That’s rare in a DMCA subpoena case.

The creators, who filed their response after the deadline, again pointed out that they only used limited content without competing with the official releases.

Bongseop Kim, for example, noted that his video reviewed episode 4 of A Ninja and an Assassin Under One Roof, using roughly 15 percent of that episode, according to his filing.

In response, KADOKAWA’s attorneys pointed out several procedural errors. Since two of the three videos were no longer online, the company argued that the remaining one did little more than summarize the plot.

KADOKAWA’s brief also pointed out that the creators’ ‘pro se’ defense incorrectly argued that DMCA subpoenas should not permit unmasking where the alleged infringement is disputed and the videos have been removed.

That “reads like an AI hallucination, because it is wholly unsupported by the statute or case law,” the company’s attorneys wrote.

Narration and Summary Are Not Fair Use

In an order issued on July 17, Judge Thompson denied the motion to quash. The court found the factual record “sparse,” partly because the videos had been made private, and concluded that the creators’ videos “describe and narrate” the copyrighted work rather than criticize, parody, or alter it.

“Unlike criticizing, parodying, or otherwise altering copyrighted work, Movants’ treatment of Petitioner’s work is not the sort of creative and transformative use of a copyrighted work that the law permits,” the order states.

The ruling concludes that the creators are not protected by the fair use doctrine, as they “reproduce significant portions” of KADOKAWA’s content without being sufficiently transformative.

Thompson pointed to Barnes v. YouTube, a similar ruling from the same court in February, where a channel that narrated chapters of copyrighted books was denied the same fair use protection. Two rulings in a short time span suggest the court is skeptical toward the narration-and-recap video format.

Regarding the broader market effect, Thompson held that even when the financial impact of the YouTube videos is not substantial, the copyright owner’s exclusive right to reproduce the work is enough to weigh against a fair use finding.

YouTubers Appeal

The ruling on the DMCA subpoena is not a full review on the merits, but it shows that YouTube’s popular narration and commentary genre is not considered fair use by definition.

The case is not over yet, as the three YouTubers have filed a notice of appeal at the Ninth Circuit, which has yet to get underway. They also filed a motion to delay the unmasking of their personal information while the appeal is pending. This has yet to be decided.

The U.S. case is not KADOKAWA’s only enforcement action against anime summary content. In April 2026, the Tokyo District Court convicted 39-year-old Wataru Takeuchi for running a monetized website that posted detailed written plot summaries of anime and films, including Godzilla Minus One and the anime Overlord.

The man received a suspended 18-month prison sentence and a 1 million yen fine. His site reportedly earned around 36 million yen (~$225,000) in advertising revenue in 2023 alone.

For the three South Korean creators, there is no federal copyright claim yet. For now, this case is purely about whether YouTube must hand over their personal details or not.

—

A copy of the DMCA subpoena request is available here (pdf). Evidence in support of the motion to quash is here (pdf) and KADOKAWA’s supplemental opposition can be found here (pdf). The order denying the motion to quash is available here (pdf).

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

The “omnibus” order would make it easier and quicker to block new domain names and pirate site brands that pop up in response to blocking efforts.

According to the MPA, it allows Hollywood studios to seek blocking of any “structurally infringing audiovisual piracy services that meet defined criteria, without having to bring a fresh court application for each new domain or site name available in the future.”

Cited but Inaccessible

As we reported at the time, the order itself was nowhere to be found. The judgment was not on BAILII or in the National Archives, and none of the targeted ISPs had mentioned it. The MPA’s summary was the only public account.

The significance of the order was clear though. The MPA prominently featured it at WIPO and the UK ruling was also referenced and used as an example in a Canadian site blocking order that was handed down last month.

Canada’s Federal Court noted that the purpose of the order is to “address increased fragmentation in the Internet piracy landscape” that is the result of people switching from blocked to non-blocked sites and domains.

This “expanded scope” order, as Canada’s Federal Court called it, allows Hollywood studios and broadcasters to add unrelated sites to the blocklist, without having to go back to court. However, the UK order that it was based on remained unpublished, until recently.

This week, we spotted a new transparency filing from Cloudflare, which was added to the Lumen database. This filing references the UK omnibus order and also attaches a copy of it.

Omnibus Order Details Surface

That attachment is, as far as we know, the first public copy of the omnibus order. It is headed a “Public Version,” a copy with a confidential schedule removed, which confirms the broad powers the MPA described as well as other details.

The order, handed down by Mr Justice Mellor on 7 May 2026, was requested by Columbia, Disney, Netflix, Paramount, Universal and Warner Bros. The respondents are the UK’s six largest ISPs: BT, EE, Plusnet, Sky, TalkTalk and Virgin Media.

Like previous UK blocking orders, the ISPs are required to block access to a series of websites. In this case, the first part of schedule 1 specifically lists 345movie.nl and 456movie.nl, cineby.app, movies2watch.watch and streamm4u.com.co. These are the ‘seeds,’ followed by an open-ended category in part 2 of the same schedule.

Since 2022, UK court orders also support subsequent blockades of similarly branded websites. The latest order expands this power to a much broader list of pirate sites, regardless of the brand used, as long as these are similar in functionality.

“[E]ach Part 2 Target Website has essentially the same mode of operation as one or more of the Part 1 Target Websites in so far as it enables users to stream film/audiovisual content by indexing and aggregating links to unauthorised copies of such content,” the order reads.

There is a clear set of boxes newly added sites have to tick, so future expansions are not unlimited. In this case, all pirate movie streaming sites that are available in the UK and unresponsive to complaints, should be fair game.

The order does not come with a transparency clause that requires the list of blocked domains to be made public, which makes it impossible for the public and journalists to review the blocking efforts.

Voluntary Expansion

Importantly, adding new sites to the blocklist does not involve a judge. When the studios flag a new Part 2 site, they notify the ISPs that the conditions are met, and it is added. There is no court hearing or independent review.

The order states that the ISPs are “wholly reliant on the Applicants accurately identifying” the URLs to block, and that they “have no obligation to verify whether the Applicants’ or their agents’ determination is correct.” The studios are in charge of expanding the blockades.

These expansions are not limited to the ISPs either. As mentioned earlier, Cloudflare published the order without being a party. This is because the American company voluntarily blocks targeted sites if these use its CDN services. These blocks are limited to the UK, as we documented before.

As shown above, Cloudflare shows an Error HTTP 451 to UK visitors that try to access movies2watch.watch, explaining that the site is unavailable for legal reasons.

Guardrails and Limitations

The order is not without safeguards. In addition to the earlier mentioned expansion requirements, site operators or other people caught up in these blocking efforts have the right to object.

Importantly, rightsholders are also strictly prohibited from asking ISPs to block an IP address if the underlying server also hosts legitimate, non-infringing websites. This should prevent overblocking incidents.

Finally, there is also a relatively short time limit on the order, which expires after six months.

“This Order shall cease to have effect at 23:59pm on the date 6 months from the date of this Order, unless the Court orders otherwise,” it reads.

This doesn’t mean that the blocking order will cease to exist after that. In practice, it means that the Hollywood studios will return to court to request an extension. While there is no formal blocklist review, if there are any concerns they can be brought up then as well.

As far as we know, the judgment linked to the order has yet to be added to BAILII or the National Archives. Ironically, we only know of it because of the transparency efforts of Cloudflare, which isn’t even a formal party in the case.

—

Here is a copy of the public “omnibus” blocking order is available here (pdf). The Cloudflare blocking notice, published at the Lumen Database, can be found here.

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

Ahead of each new football season, broadcaster Canal+ goes to the Paris Judicial Court, requesting site blocking orders to stop pirate streaming sites and services.

Over several years, these blocking requests have grown from simple ISP blocks to cover DNS resolvers, CDN providers, VPN services, and search engines. Initially these orders were scattered, but a batch signed last month reveals a clear pattern.

On July 17, Vice-President Irène Benac signed the latest batch. The fourteen orders are split evenly between the 2026/2027 Champions League and Premier League seasons. These two batches cover every type of intermediary Canal+ has pursued since 2022, all in one coordinated action.

ISPs, DNS, CDN, VPNs, and Search Engines

The Premier League orders target 47 domain names and the Champions League orders cover 26 domain names. This includes ones using popular brands such as Totalsportek, LiveTV, Kevinsport, as well as various IPTV gateways. An overview of all domain names is available below.

The ISP orders will have the most direct impact. They cover France’s largest providers, including Orange, SFR, Free, and Bouygues Telecom, who all have to block access to the listed domain names. The other orders aim to cover potential bypasses.

If subscribers try to get around these ISP blocks by switching to an alternative DNS resolver, the orders against Google DNS, Cloudflare DNS, Quad9 and DNS4EU prevent this. The latter two did not present a defense in court.

The Cloudflare orders are not limited to the 1.1.1.1 DNS resolver either. The Internet infrastructure company must also block the domains across its CDN, and its reverse proxy service under the same rulings, by whatever technical means it chooses.

The orders add search engines in the same sweep. Google and Microsoft Bing are ordered to de-index the domains, so they no longer surface in results for users in France.

Finally, VPN services are covered as well. Canal+ secured orders against Proton, CyberGhost, and ExpressVPN, to shut down another bypass. That part of the blocking batch was also the most heavily contested, as covered below.

All the blocks are dynamic. This means that domains can be added throughout the season once ARCOM, France’s audiovisual regulator, approves them. The Premier League measures run from August 22, 2026 to May 30, 2027, while the Champions League blocks expire on June 5, 2027.

VPN Defense Fails

Canal+ previously named five VPN providers in previous seasons. This round it pursued only three, dropping NordVPN and Surfshark without explanation.

The most detailed defense came from CyberGhost and ExpressVPN. They first asked the court to pause the case pending a referral to the EU Court of Justice. This is the Anne Frank Stichting case, which was decided shortly before the Paris ruling and shielded VPNs from liability in a copyright dispute.

The Paris court already refused to pause the case, explaining that the Anne Frank case concerns a different directive and a publication that was itself lawful, which is different from the pirate streaming sites that are at stake here.

The VPN providers further argued that Article L. 333-10 of the Sports Code conflicts with the EU E-Commerce Directive and should be set aside. The court disagreed, stressing that this is a dispute between private companies. Since an EU directive has no “horizontal direct effect,” a national law can’t be disapplied on that basis.

The court also spelled out why a neutral intermediary can be required to take action, as it enables the transmission of infringing content. The “mere act of serving as a bridge enabling access to the infringing sites fulfills the transmission function,” the ruling states (translated).

The court stressed that, even though an intermediary may act passively and neutrally, it can still be an essential link in transferring infringing data.

Google also pushed back in response to the DNS and search orders. It questioned whether Canal+ had enforceable exclusive rights in France, and argued that the Canal+ companies had not proven repeated infringements per channel for every disputed domain. The court rejected both these points.

Up Next: Automated Real-Time Blocking

The orders were issued on July 17 but haven’t been picked up in the press, as far as we know. With hindsight, the timing is notable, as they were handed down just four days before the French Parliament adopted a new sports law that rewrites the blocking process.

As we reported previously, the law replaces the current manual system, where ARCOM agents verify each domain before a block, with an automated process that can add new targets in real time during a live broadcast. ARCOM’s agents keep a review role, but after the fact rather than before.

The law has not yet been implemented; that’s expected later this year. For now, these orders still run under the old framework. However, if the new law is implemented, Canal+ and other rightsholders will likely switch as soon as they can.

—

1. empire-sport.live
2. empire-sports.store
3. kevinsport.org
4. kzontop.site
5. sports24.cc
6. sportsonline.vc
7. streamonsport.art
8. witv.team
9. kevinsport.lat
10. kevinsport.quest
11. lovetier.bz
12. kevinsport.homes
13. kzontop.space
14. wilderness.click
15. v3.sportssonline.click
16. 7y306yg5flk3x4.dynmaspect.net
17. j7x31108tgeg77x.dynmaspect.net
18. woundsilk.net
19. swopglow.net
20. iptv-abonnement.tv
21. tv.business-cloud-8k.ru
22. cf.orion-2026.xyz
23. ott-premium.tv
24. smartippon.com
25. iptvpremium-europe.com
26. line.snssmarters.store

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

The EU heard these calls and in 2023 it published a targeted recommendation, “encouraging” member states to introduce measures to facilitate prompt takedowns of live streams.

This advice was largely seen as a disappointment by rightsholders, since it was not binding. While some EU member states have increased their enforcement efforts since, with Italy’s “Piracy Shield” as the prime example, others took no notable action.

EU Study Proposes 30-minute Takedown Timer

A new study commissioned by the European Parliament’s Committee on Legal Affairs (JURI) argues that the EU-wide response, as it stands, is not strong enough.

The report, titled “Countering online piracy of sports and broadcast in the EU”, is written by Professor Giovanni Maria Riccio of the University of Salerno. It recommends that the EU move from voluntary guidance to a binding Regulation that’s aimed specifically at combating live-streaming piracy.

“The current EU response to live-content piracy remains fragmented and not fully adapted to the speed and technical complexity of live broadcasts. Existing rules provide useful tools, but they do not yet ensure consistent and timely enforcement across Member States,” the study concludes.

The study recommends a swift takedown obligation for streaming intermediaries, requiring these to take action within a certain time limit. As an example, it mentions 30 minutes, following the example of Italy’s Piracy Shield.

This takedown requirement should not only apply to Internet providers. Other intermediaries including third-party DNS resolvers such as Google and OpenDNS, VPN providers, and CDNs such as Cloudflare, should also take action.

“It would likewise be desirable for the personal scope of application to extend to the entire chain of intermediaries technically involved in the distribution of unauthorised content – including providers of content delivery networks, VPN services, dedicated servers and DNS resolution systems,” the study recommends.

The report notes that courts in Europe have already started to issue broader injunctions. This includes the Paris Judicial Court, which required DNS resolvers and VPN providers to block pirate sites.

An AGCOM in Every EU Member State

The report models a lot of its suggestions after the Italian “Piracy Shield” legislation, which has been widely criticized by opponents. This applies to the 30-minute clock and the broad range of intermediaries it covers, as well as the oversight body.

In Italy, the administrative AGCOM agency handles pirate site blocking procedures and the report suggests that all EU member states should have their own version of AGCOM.

“[I]t is advisable for each EU Member State to establish an independent administrative authority – or, where appropriate, to confer the necessary powers upon an existing one (again on the example of AGCOM) – to ensure consistent oversight, effective enforcement, and regulatory coordination,” it suggests.

Blunt Tools

While the study leans heavily on the Italian model, it doesn’t pretend that blocking is a perfect fix. It openly admits that these often-used anti-piracy tools have their shortcomings.

“IP and DNS blocking remain inherently blunt instruments,” the report warns, noting that they can’t reliably separate unlawful streams from legitimate services that share the same infrastructure.

That’s the overblocking problem that has plagued Piracy Shield from the start, where blocks aimed at pirate streams have taken down access to unrelated sites and services.

Curiously, the study makes part of its case using research that points the other way. For example, it cites an empirical study published by the Open Observatory of Network Interference (OONI) which found that following a LaLiga blocking order in Spain, more than 554,000 domains were blocked at least once during football match broadcasts. This included websites from Amnesty International and the ACLU, UNICEF, UNHCR, the Australian Senate, and Amazon S3 endpoints.

It also cites a report from the Centre for European Policy Studies (CEPS), which TorrentFreak covered earlier this year, that called for banning IP-based blocking, while also making rightsholders liable for collateral damage.

The report references those warnings, but recommends rolling out the Piracy Shield approach across the entire Union anyway. To keep it in check, it proposes safeguards such as limiting blocks to the duration of the live event, keeping judicial or administrative oversight in place, and sticking to the proportionality standards set by the EU Court of Justice.

Fragmented and Expensive Options

Finally, the report recognizes that no amount of blocking will kill piracy if watching sports legally is an expensive hassle.

It notes that fragmented and expensive legal offerings are a key piracy driver. This often means that fans are forced to sign up for multiple subscriptions, run into geo-blocking barriers, or face other artificial hurdles just to enjoy their favorite sports.

To improve the demand side, the study calls for more attractive and accessible legal options.

For now, this all remains a wishlist. The study is third-party advice, not law, and it arrives while the Commission’s review of the Copyright in the Digital Single Market Directive is still ongoing. That includes input from both pro- and anti-blocking advocates.

—

A copy of the study, “Countering online piracy of sports and broadcast in the EU”, is available here (pdf).

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

The site was launched more than two decades ago and the brand is still going strong today, as it’s traditionally one of the most visited torrent sites.

NYAA’s popularity hasn’t gone unnoticed by rightsholders. The MPA previously targeted the site’s GitHub repo, although that was later restored. Additionally, Japan’s Content Overseas Distribution Association (CODA) has been trying to disrupt its activities for many years.

Among other enforcement efforts, CODA teamed up with Japan’s Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry (METI) in a Cross-Border Enforcement Project to identify NYAA uploaders. This effort recently resulted in a high-profile arrest.

Police Arrest NYAA Seeder

Last week, the Cyber Investigation Division of the Kyoto Prefectural Police, working with Fushimi Police Station, arrested a 56-year-old unemployed man from Sagamihara, Kanagawa Prefecture. Kyodo News named the suspect as Masakazu Ono.

CODA announced that the man allegedly was the “first uploader” or initial seeder for the NHK drama ‘Midnight Taxi.’ The series is copyrighted by NHK and WOWOW, both connected to CODA member companies.

According to the police, the man allegedly uploaded roughly a thousand NHK recordings over some five years. He reportedly admitted the offense, noting that he wanted people around the world to see NHK’s work.

As the initial NYAA seeder, the suspect allegedly had a full copy of the file, suggesting that he might be the original source for the leak. CODA notes that the arrest is part of a landmark case.

“CODA regards the arrest of this first uploader as a landmark case in addressing copyright infringement involving torrent sites,” the group announced, noting that more actions may follow.

“While closely monitoring the details of the case as they are revealed through future investigations and criminal proceedings, CODA will continue to work toward the proper protection of copyright and implement effective measures against similar acts of infringement.”

Sankei previously reported that Kyoto police opened the investigation around April 2024, which also suggests that this case isn’t just about tracking an IP-address.

Hacker Tool Didn’t Touch the Swarm

CODA partially credits the successful enforcement action to an analysis tool developed by the Japan Hacker Association, a cooperating organization in its Cross-Border Enforcement Project.

The mention of this tool triggered immediate speculation in the anime community that it simply logged IP addresses inside a BitTorrent swarm, the same technique copyright holders have used against file-sharers for close to two decades, and that the suspect had failed to use a VPN.

However, CODA says that isn’t what happened.

“The tool does not analyse activity within the BitTorrent swarm itself. Instead, it analyses how data moves through torrent sites, such as index sites and tracker sites,” CODA informed TorrentFreak.

While this answer rules out a simple torrent-logging tool, it raises many new questions. What is this tool tracking exactly, how did it identify the suspect? After all, analysis at the index and tracker layer does not ordinarily produce the address of a broadband subscriber.

CODA notes it is unable to disclose the specific analytical or investigative techniques, as that could negatively impact future investigations and enforcement activities. It stressed that the suspect was ultimately identified through an investigation conducted by the Kyoto Prefectural Police.

Three Leechers Were Caught

While the arrest of the seeder is the lead angle, CODA informs us that it wasn’t the only enforcement action.

“While the primary objective of this case was to identify and apprehend the first uploader, three secondary uploaders (i.e., leechers) were also apprehended as part of the investigation,” CODA said.

The group later clarified that these three were handled by a different police force, in a subsequent action connected to the same site.

Local reports say that three men, in their forties and sixties, were referred to prosecutors on the same charge, rather than arrested. They allegedly downloaded the files, which BitTorrent shares back to other users by default.

That last detail is important, as this suggests that anyone who shared the torrent could have been caught. After all, BitTorrent clients share back by default, including the qBittorrent software the main suspect reportedly used.

CODA made the same point in its public announcement, warning that many torrent clients upload automatically, so simply using them can result in criminal liability under Japanese law. This type of messaging also helps increase the deterrent effect of the enforcement action.

Not Over Yet

CODA declined to say whether it’s also pursuing NYAA’s operators, whether more uploaders have been reported to police, and whether further arrests are expected this year, citing the ongoing investigation.

In April, CODA signed memorandums of understanding with French media regulator ARCOM and the Alliance for Manga and Webtoon, and it also renewed its agreement with the MPA two weeks later. We asked whether these deals cover the sharing of data that identifies individual uploaders, but that question remained unanswered.

CODA pointed to “the confidentiality clause contained in the MOUs” and said it couldn’t disclose the level of intelligence that it shares with other organizations.

For now, NYAA remains online. Based on SimilarWeb data, the site was good for more than 22 million visits last month, with more than a third of these originating from Japan. This means that plenty of potential targets are still out there.

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

The operators threw in the towel, and in July the French Gendarmerie arrested twelve people it accused of running the operation.

However, someone apparently still sees value in the brand.

Until recently, visitors to yggtorrent.org landed on a domain sale pitch. The domain name, bundled with 59 others into what the listing called a “comprehensive portfolio” and an “established brand with millions of users,” had a substantial $700,000 asking price. That’s just for the domains.

The twelve arrests came after the domain went up for sale, which might suggest the deal would fall through. We can’t confirm this either way, but new messaging on the official domain shows ‘someone’ is attempting to make a comeback.

‘Grand Return’

The yggtorrent.org domain currently redirects to yggtorrent.to, where a countdown clock ticks toward a relaunch on September 1 at midnight Paris time. An accompanying message explains that a ‘new team’ has taken over.

“YggTorrent rises from the ashes,” the (translated) page reads. “The largest French-language sharing platform is making its grand return. The catalogue, the community, the Ygg spirit: nothing has changed, everything is ready.”

The comeback announcement notes that the YggTorrent community still comprises 6 million members, who have access to over a million torrents. How many of the former users plan to return after the hack and the police arrests has yet to be seen, but the tracker suggests that YggTorrent’s remnants are still going.

‘Nothing Has Changed’

The comeback teaser notes that ‘nothing has changed’ and it points to a tracker status page which shows that many YggTorrent torrents are still being actively shared.

At the time of writing, it reported 455,300 torrents and more than 1.5 million connected peers, roughly 94% of them seeders. This suggests that the ‘new team’ that controls the domain also has a working tracker, or access to the old one.

Who’s in charge of the new team remains a mystery. The domain name WHOIS data shows no recent changes. This doesn’t mean that it didn’t change owners, as the registrar accounts might have been sold in full, but there are no public traces of that.

Whether the teased comeback is a true revival, a potential scam, or anything in between remains unclear. For now, the clock is ticking, and with the French police not ruling out further arrests, they might be keeping an eye on the comeback too.

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

A recent federal lawsuit filed in a Florida federal court, shows that this can result in a sweeping piracy blocking that does real damage to the targeted platforms.

The case was originally filed by the Mexican broadcaster TelevisaUnivision (TU) in early June. The case was relatively targeted, naming the IPTV services Thunder TV, Sunset TV, Pop TV, Kaelus TV, and Tele Latino, as well as their alleged operators.

The broadcaster argued that these pirate IPTV services threatened its business. TU holds the World Cup rights for sixteen Latin American territories, and its license with FIFA requires it to keep the Mexican broadcast signal from reaching the United States. The pirate services, it argued, put it in breach of that contract, exposing it to “termination and forfeiture of hundreds of millions of dollars in payments.”

To stop this immediate threat, the company requested a temporary restraining order, hoping to shut down the IPTV services effective immediately.

Judge Kathleen Williams granted the temporary restraining order on June 5, one day after the case was filed, without hearing from any of the defendants. The initial order prohibited the defendants from infringing TU’s own copyrighted works, which include telenovelas and other programming, and from using its trademarks, including all content linked to its licensed World Cup broadcast.

Importantly, the order also targeted third parties acting “in active concert,” including ISPs, hosts, CDNs, domain registrars, registries, app stores, ad networks, social platforms, search engines, and payment processors. These were ordered, on TU’s request and with notice, to disable the listed domains and IP addresses and unmask whoever was behind them.

The order specifically names various intermediaries such as Cloudflare, Namecheap, and GoDaddy, and directed financial players to take action. Mexican bank BBVA Bancomer and the payment channel Spin by OXXO were ordered to freeze funds and disclose the identities behind the accounts.

On July 24, Judge Williams converted the TRO into a preliminary injunction. By then the order had grown into something far larger than the case that started it, and that could only be the beginning, as the injunction appears to be self-expanding by nature, in multiple ways.

Injunction Covers Future Targets

While the injunction is noteworthy for many reasons, the most striking feature is that it’s specifically written to include things that don’t yet exist.

That starts with the content it protects. The order isn’t limited to TU’s current catalog or the World Cup rights, it covers the infringement of “any copyrighted works or broadcasts that Plaintiffs may in the future produce, license, or acquire rights to transmit.”

In other words, it covers future copyrights that did not exist when the order was signed.

The same applies to the pirate services themselves. The injunction defines its target as the named IPTV operations “and any comparable system,” whether “currently in existence or developed in the future,” and it applies “regardless of the branding, domain name, or technical configuration used.”

This effectively covers a pirate site or service that hasn’t launched, under a brand that is currently unknown, on a domain name that hasn’t been registered yet. As long as TU says it carries its pirated content, it can be targeted.

The injunction goes beyond pirate streaming targets too and specifically notes that the BitTorrent protocol and other content devivery categories are also included.

Self-Expanding Without a Judge

The injunction does have more novel characteristics. For example, one of the clauses allows TU’s lawyers to add these additional targets by filing a sworn declaration, without needing approval from a judge.

“Plaintiffs may supplement Schedule A by filing a verified declaration identifying additional infringing services, IP addresses, domains, applications, or platforms, which supplementation shall take effect immediately upon filing and service,” the injunction reads.

This effectively makes it a dynamic injunction, instead of a fixed one. Rightsholders have obtained dynamic blocking orders for years in the UK, Spain, and elsewhere in the EU, but for the United States this is new.

The broadcaster has already used the power twice. A first supplementation was filed on June 12. A second, filed on July 10, added an entire tier of piracy brands that were never named as defendants: XuperTV, Tarjeta Roja, Pirlo TV, Roja Directa, RBTV, Strikeout, and StudioMax.

Domain Registrars Suspend Domains

While the injunction covers a wide range of intermediaries, including Internet providers, it has not been used as a typical ISP site blocking order. Instead, it appears to be used mostly to target domain registrars and Cloudflare.

To get an idea of the effect this had, TorrentFreak ran a WHOIS check on many of the targeted domains this week.

Of 474 domains queried, 203 have a clientHold status, indicating that the registrars suspended these. One domain was suspended by the registry and the rest of the domains were not suspended.

Which registrars complied is largely explained by the location of the registrars. U.S.-facing registrars acted on nearly everything, with NameCheap and GoDaddy taking action on most domains.

Meanwhile, the domains that were left untouched are linked to foreign registrars, including Russia’s REGTIME-SU and the Dutch company Registrar.eu, which both hadn’t suspended a single listed domain according to our information.

This is the expected shape of the result rather than a failure of it. An order that binds “all persons in active concert” still depends, in practice, on whether the party served answers to a U.S. court. Where the registrar does, the domain goes dark. Where it doesn’t, it stays up.

The timing of the suspensions makes sense too. More than 90% of the suspended domains were updated during either the days around the June 5 restraining order, or the days after the July 24 injunction.

It is worth stressing that in addition to domain suspensions, the services may have also gone offline because other parts of their infrastructure were hit. That includes the hosting services that are listed in the injunction, as well as Cloudflare.

A Dedicated Cloudflare Section

Cloudflare stands out as the only intermediary to receive its own tailored rules, detailed in several pages of the order.

The company is directed to disable its CDN, reverse-proxy, and DNS service for a long list of domains within 24 hours. It must also hand over origin-server IP addresses, DNS records, account holder names, payment details, and 14 days of request logs for the targeted domains.

In addition, Cloudflare must check whether any other account in its system shares an email address or billing name with a flagged account, and to unmask those accounts too.

Cloudflare did secure some limits. It only has to produce data it already holds, it has no duty to monitor content, and its compliance is not an admission of liability. This is similar to the “no fault” injunctions we see in Europe.

Dropped Hosting Companies and More Intermediaries

When the complaint was filed early June, it also named the hosting companies Enzu, Dash Networks, DigitalOcean, and HostGator as defendants. All four were targeted by the restraining order, but they were voluntarily dismissed after less than two weeks.

Beyond these, the injunction named dozens of other intermediaries, from registrars and hosts in Russia, Bulgaria, Romania, Iceland, and Iran, to mainstream services such as GitHub, Akamai, and Linode. They are all named because they allegedly provided services to the pirate operations.

As far as we can see, none of the defendants, operators or intermediaries, ever appeared in court to object.

The broad injunction remains valid until the case is decided, and TU can keep adding names, brands, and domains to it for at least two years. Whether there will be any transparency regarding these seemingly unlimited expansions is not immediately clear from the legal paperwork.

—

A copy of the preliminary injunction, issued by the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Florida, is available here (pdf). Magistrate Judge Enjoliqué Lett’s Report and Recommendation can be found here (pdf), and the original June 5 temporary restraining order here (pdf).

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

Run by ESA’s Science Program, it hosts mission-support pages and public data archives for Gaia, Euclid, XMM-Newton, and dozens of other missions, backed by a science archive that now runs to more than a petabyte of data.

European Space IPTV Recommendations

This valuable archive provides key information for researchers and, more recently, it also started to appeal to people who are looking for a cheap pirate IPTV subscription. This clearly isn’t official ESA material, but an exploit by scammers who uploaded hundreds of scammy PDF files to the site’s repository.

A simple site:cosmos.esa.int search shows the scope of the problem. In addition to genuine results, such as a notice that the Gaia satellite was switched off in March 2025, Google returns a series of documents with titles including “Top 10 IPTV Providers Right Now: The Definitive 2026 Rankings” and “Best IPTV Service Provider in the USA 2026…”

Because ESA’s .int domain has a good reputation and high authority, these scammy PDF files also rank well in regular search results. Those who search for the best premium IPTV subscriptions for Android will get the ESA domain as the first result through a featured Google snippet.

Google’s AI Overview is also picking up ESA’s recommendations for the top IPTV services, with information that comes straight from the scammers’ PDFs.

IPTV, Instagram Followers, and Free Robux

There are hundreds of these results, with many new ones being added while we write this article. The PDFs we checked don’t appear to be malicious. They function as advertisements for pirate IPTV services. Whether these indeed offer what they promise is unknown, but visiting these hyperlinked URLs is not advised.

The IPTV ads are only part of the problem. The same corner of ESA’s portal also hosts unrelated scam content, including a “Free Coin Master Spins Guide” aimed at mobile-game players, “Free Instagram Followers,” and “Free Robux codes.” These free offerings undoubtedly come at a cost and should be avoided too.

The broad mix of scammy offers shows that ESA’s website is being exploited more broadly. How these people gained access to the server is unknown. According to ESA’s documentation, uploading requires site-editor access to the Cosmos portal, but there might be a weakness in the system.

Known SEO Exploit

The goal of these PDFs is to rank high in Google search results for popular terms. This is a known SEO hack that we have seen numerous times before.

Last year, for example, the European Commission’s Eurostat portal was exploited in the same way, with scam PDFs climbing to the top spot for terms like “best IPTV providers of 2025.”

To find out more, TorrentFreak reached out to ESA yesterday, asking whether it was aware of the documents, how they were uploaded, and how long they had been online. We will update this article if we hear back.

At the time of writing, the IPTV documents remain live on the Cosmos portal. If history is any guide, cleaning them up won’t be the end of it. They will either come back, or they will resurface on another website, repeating the same trick.

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

A Texas federal jury found the Internet provider liable for willful contributory copyright infringement and ordered it to pay $46.8 million in damages, after Grande failed to disconnect pirating subscribers.

The verdict was a milestone in the recording industry’s campaign to hold ISPs responsible for their subscribers’ piracy. The ruling was later affirmed on appeal by the Fifth Circuit, which also vacated the damages award, sending that question back for a new trial.

That new trial might not come after Cox v. Sony changed the playing field. In March, the Supreme Court reversed a billion-dollar verdict against Cox Communications, holding that an Internet provider is not liable for contributory infringement simply because it keeps serving subscribers it knows have been flagged for piracy.

A few weeks later, the Supreme Court also wiped out the Grande verdict, ordering the Fifth Circuit to reconsider the case in light of the new standard.

Labels Offer to Walk Away

That reconsideration process was set in motion but, according to new filings submitted by both parties last week, it appears that the record labels are ready to throw in the towel.

In their supplemental letter brief, filed on Wednesday, the record labels effectively inform the court they are done.

“The Cox decision represents a material intervening change in law governing contributory copyright infringement by internet service providers. Plaintiffs do not
intend to litigate the merits of this case further in light of the new standard,” the labels write.

This offer to retreat is in line with earlier decisions in ISP liability cases. Since the Cox ruling, the labels have already dropped similar lawsuits against Altice and Verizon, for example.

The music companies say they informed Grande of their “willingness to dismiss the case voluntarily”. That would be with prejudice and with both parties paying their own bills. However, Grande does not agree.

Grande Wants More

Instead of simply dismissing the matter, Grande prefers to end the case with a clear win. In their own letter, the ISP asks the Fifth Circuit to “render judgment in favor of Grande” and declare that the labels cannot win under the new standard.

“The Court should render judgment for Grande. Because the Labels cannot prove contributory infringement under Cox, there is ‘no clear benefit to remanding
this case to the district court’,” the ISP argues.

This isn’t just a matter of principle, there’s a significant amount of money at stake too. To postpone that payment of the $46.8 million judgment during the appeal, the company had to post a bond, and it says the premiums added up.

According to the labels, Grande previously communicated that it incurred roughly $4 million in bond premium costs.

The record labels are pushing back hard against this potential multi-million dollar bill. They accuse the ISP of needlessly inflating its own costs by waiting over nine months to discharge the bond after the initial damages award was vacated.

In addition, the labels argue that any potential payout should be offset by $191,618 in unpaid sanctions that Grande still owes them for filing a “meritless” motion earlier in the litigation.

It’s worth stressing that Grande has not mentioned an exact cost figure in its letter. The exact amount will likely be detailed later, if it gets that far.

It is now up to the Fifth Circuit to decide whether this case should end quietly, by simply vacating the earlier judgment and splitting the costs. Alternatively, it can grant Grande a formal win on the merits, with potential compensation for the costs it made.

—

The record labels’ supplemental letter brief, filed last week, at the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, is available here (pdf). Grande’s supplemental letter brief can be found here (pdf).

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

From the start of the FIFA World Cup through the final, U.S. authorities and their partners seized more than 1,000 domains, while close to 2,000 more were blocked across Latin America.

The Motion Picture Association, which coordinated the effort through its Alliance for Creativity and Entertainment (ACE), previously praised the operation as a massive success. However, in an op-ed published by RealClearMarkets yesterday, MPA’s leadership admits that domain seizures have their limitations.

“It Does Not Dismantle the Business”

The op-ed, titled “Blowing the Whistle on World Cup Piracy,” is written by MPA Chairman and CEO Charles Rivkin and IPR Center Director Ivan Arvelo. It celebrates the operation as a clear success, noting that the seized sites racked up more than 156 million visits in July alone before they were taken offline.

Indeed, disrupting millions of potential visits has an impact. However, the crackdown also had its limitations, as it does not take out the operations running these sites. These limitations are also recognized in the op-ed.

“A takedown is essential, and it can interrupt access for a moment. But it does not dismantle the business behind it,” Rivkin and Arvelo write.

This is not the type of admission you expect from the MPA or the IPR Center, who just completed the largest piracy domain seizure round in U.S. history. However, the framing does nicely set up the policy argument that follows. At the same time, it corroborates our earlier coverage.

The Russian and Iranian Domains That Survived

Two weeks before the op-ed appeared, we reported that several major pirate streaming brands had switched to fallback domains on Iran’s .ir country-code TLD, in an apparent effort to move to infrastructure that is harder for U.S. law enforcement to reach.

Iranian domains have significant drawbacks of their own, especially for those operations who want to run ads, so there is no mass exodus. However, many that migrated to the .ir TLD remain online today.

A check this week shows that Buffstreams, Footybite, Totalsportek, and Nflbite brands all remain reachable on their .ir fallbacks. None have been suspended or seized, which is no surprise since Iranian authorities are not eager to cooperate with the U.S.

Meanwhile, the largest sites were never dependent on U.S.-controlled infrastructure to begin with. A popular Futbol-libres domain, for example, operating on the Russian-run .su registry, was not among the seized domains and reportedly drew more than 200 million visits in July, according to Similarweb data. That is more than the 156 million visits the MPA counted across all seized domains.

MPA Sees More Attack Vectors

While domains are just part of a site’s infrastructure, it is clear that domain seizures have their limitations. This is not news to the MPA and ACE, who are constantly tracking these domain name migrations.

Speaking with TorrentFreak, MPA’s Executive Vice President and Chief Content Protection Officer Larissa Knapp notes that these familiar tactics are not without weaknesses.

“Piracy operators regularly move domains and infrastructure in an effort to evade enforcement. The migration to .ir domains is another example of that tactic, but changing a domain does not put an illegal operation beyond reach,” Knapp says.

“These services still depend on identifiable operators, hosting, distribution, payment systems, and other technical and commercial infrastructure. That is why ACE works closely with law enforcement and industry partners around the world to identify and disrupt the people and infrastructure that keep these criminal networks operating.”

Knapp suggests that pirate sites rely on a broader infrastructure than domain names alone, so MPA and ACE try to find other weak spots to bring them down. And that’s not all.

Pirate Site Blocking as Solution

This brings us back to the op-ed, which ends with a clear policy ask. Rivkin and Arvelo argue that domain seizures alone cannot solve live sports piracy, and that the U.S. needs “every tool” available to fortify its anti-piracy work.

“Chief among them would be judicial site blocking in the U.S.,” they write, describing it as an anti-piracy tool that’s already used in nearly 60 countries.

The MPA and IPR Center heads see domain seizures as part of a broader enforcement toolbox, which should be complemented with site blocking. While Iranian and ‘Soviet Union’ domains are not mentioned, these could be key site blocking targets.

The site blocking call comes at a time when U.S. site blocking legislation is high on the political agenda again. On June 30, the House IP subcommittee held a hearing on online copyright enforcement, where Chairman Rep. Darrell Issa signaled that bipartisan, bicameral agreement was near.

Thus far, such a unified U.S. site blocking bill has yet to be introduced, but it seems to be only a matter of time. That also applies to the overblocking concerns, which will undoubtedly come, as will the eventual evasive tactics of pirates.

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

These orders gradually expanded from basic site blocking orders that targeted just ISPs, to dynamic and updating blocklists, which also require global domain registrars to take action.

A new order, obtained this week by HBO and associated studios, follows the familiar template. It targets 30 “rogue website” operations as defendants, covering more than 120 pirate site domains. In addition to Indian ISPs, it also demands action from domain registrars including Namecheap, Porkbun, Tucows, and others.

This strategy is in line with previous court orders which have successfully taken down some of the largest pirate site domains. This latest order is no exception.

Pirate Streaming Giants

The order lists a wide range of pirate brands, including some heavy hitters. For example, it targets the popular streaming portal Streamzy.to, as well as other well-known pirate brands such as LordFlix, Watchseries, FMovies, YTS, KissKH, VegaMovies, MoviesMod, BollyFlix, MovieRulz, and FilmyZilla.

Justice Anup Jairam Bhambhani concluded that the 30 pirate operations appear to be “flagrantly infringing online locations.” Their registrant details are masked, no traceable contact information is available, and the content is overwhelmingly unlicensed.

“This is, therefore, not a case of incidental infringement, but one where the primary purpose of the websites appears to be to facilitate infringement of the plaintiffs’ copyright,” the order reads.

Based on these arguments, the court granted an ad-interim injunction restraining all 30 sites from streaming or making available the studios’ copyrighted works, and directed ISPs and registrars to block and suspend the listed domain names.

Suspended Within a Day

The order was handed down on Monday, and a day later it already had a global effect. For example, lead defendant, streamzy.to, was placed on both clientHold and serverHold, suggesting that action was taken at the registrar and registry level.

Streamzy’s registrar on record is the Government of the Kingdom of Tonga, which recently began suspending pirate site domains following an earlier Delhi High Court order, after years of .to being considered a safe haven for pirates.

This change coincided with a restructuring where the Canadian domain name company Tucows took over the technical registry backend for .to domains. This takeover made it possible to suspend domain names through EPP status codes such as clientHold and serverHold.

These suspensions also apply to the other .to domain names that were targeted, including f-moviesz.to, cinespot.to, cineplay.to, and bollyflix.to. Notably, several of these are only put on clientHold (not serverHold), suggesting the registrar acted alone, without registry-level action.

In addition to the .to domain names, all Namecheap-linked domains have also been suspended. These were put on clientHold on July 28th, a day after the Delhi High Court order was issued.

Registrars Pushed Back on ‘Carte Blanche’

The order also brings something new to the table. Domain registrars Namecheap and Porkbun said they had no problem blocking the listed sites, but pushed back against a blanket order requiring them to block any future domain name that rightsholders send in.

These follow-up suspensions are part of the dynamic blocking structure, but the registrars are not comfortable with additional blocks without the court’s supervision.

Justice Bhambhani agreed with this reservation. He ruled that rightsholders who discover a new mirror domain must submit an affidavit to the registrar with supporting evidence. The registrar then technically verifies whether it is in fact a variant of an already-blocked site, and if so, suspends it as a temporary measure. At the same time, the rightsholders must file with the court to formally add the domain to the case.

“Any mechanism that requires an ISP or DNR to satisfy itself, upon its own assessment, that a subsequently identified website is a ‘rogue website’ engaged in infringement of the plaintiffs’ rights, would effectively cast upon such intermediary an adjudicatory responsibility that it is neither equipped nor authorised in law to discharge,” the order reads.

This effectively adds a new oversight layer to the blocking and suspension process.

Mixed Results

At the time of writing, most of the targeted domain names remain accessible outside of India. This includes domains using the popular YTS and KissKH brands. Interestingly, the main domains for these brands, which have over 100 million monthly visits, are not listed in the order.

Since the order was only issued a few days ago, it is possible that other domain registrars still have to take action. However, previous orders have shown that some registrars do not comply with Indian court orders at all.

Taking out domains with millions of monthly visits is still a notable result, with Streamzy.to as the main trophy.

However, the operators are not sitting still. Soon after the order was issued, they started to point their visitors to streamzy.org, as seen below.

At the same time, other .to domains from the same operation were all pointed to .org alternatives as well. And so, the game of whac-a-mole continues.

—

A copy of the order in Home Box Office Inc & Ors. v. Streamzy.to & Ors. (2026:DHC:5967) is available here (pdf). Via Livelawbiz. An overview of the defendants, domains, and registrars can be found below. There are 132 domain entries, including 10 subdomkains, excluding #116–121 which are skipped in the order.

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

That designation, applied for the first time in over a decade, triggered a Section 301 investigation, opening the door to potential trade sanctions.

As part of this process, stakeholders were requested to provide input on Vietnam’s alleged shortcomings. This includes the piracy challenges and concerns, which were highlighted as the primary concern.

One of the key submissions came from the Motion Picture Association (MPA). As we reported earlier, Hollywood’s trade group called for tougher prison sentences and action against copycat pirate sites that swiftly take the place of ones that are shut down.

In total, there were more than 170 submissions from stakeholders. These include a massive 3,500+ page response filed on behalf of the Government of Vietnam, which we initially missed. It is worth highlighting separately, however, as the timing ties into the broader enforcement picture.

Vietnam Responds

Vietnam filed its response on July 2, before the USTR deadline. As expected, the country argues that it doesn’t belong on the priority watchlist, because its practices are not “unreasonable or discriminatory,” and they do not “burden or restrict U.S. commerce,” the two tests that matter under Section 301.

Instead, the country argues that any remaining problems are mostly capacity limitations, not policy shortcomings.

The submission closes by asking USTR to reconsider its stance, and remove Vietnam from the Priority Foreign Country List, without issuing any sanctions or imposing trade tariffs.

Piracy Crackdowns and Site Blocking as Defense

To back up its request, Vietnam cites a variety of anti-piracy efforts. The submission notes that more than 1,200 pirated websites were blocked in 2025, which is notable as the U.S. itself is still mulling its own site blocking legislation.

The report also cites other prominent enforcement actions. This includes the shutdown and prosecution of the Fmovies piracy ring, which was once the largest online piracy operation. This operation was dismantled in 2024 with intelligence from ACE, the MPA’s anti-piracy arm.

Meanwhile, Vietnam also mentions the shutdowns of Xoilac TV, Rophim, and Y2Mate. The latter operation was taken down in collaboration with music group IFPI, which should signal to Washington that it is cooperating on intellectual property matters.

The HiAnime Card

What stands out most in the submission is the timely mention of the HiAnime prosecution. This was publicly announced by the Vietnamese authorities on July 2, the same day that it submitted its USTR rebuttal.

The submission tells USTR that “on 1 July 2026, the Ministry of Public Security initiated criminal proceedings […] against 07 suspects” under Article 225 of the Criminal Code. It references more than 100 websites offering over 26,000 unauthorized films and roughly USD 12.85 million in advertising revenue.

While HiAnime isn’t mentioned in this description, we were able to pinpoint it as the key target in this prosecution, which was also confirmed by ACE.

Vietnam’s USTR submission does mention HiAnime.to by name elsewhere, among the sites and services that were “shut down or forced to terminate their operations.”

Crucially, the HiAnime operation already closed its doors in March, months before the prosecution was announced on July 2. This coincides with the USTR submission deadline, where that same prosecution is used in Vietnam’s defense.

Whether the timing is coincidence or tied to the deadline is unknown.

All Eyes on the Sentences

The enforcement actions highlighted by Vietnam are not news. The MPA and USTR have acknowledged the same takedowns, but complained that the resulting sentences carry no deterrent. For example, the Fmovies operators previously dodged prison, which allegedly does little to tackle the country’s piracy image.

Vietnam does not dispute this. Its submission restates the U.S. view that enforcement has been “light, mainly suspended sentences and low fines,” and answers by asking Washington to “recognize the efforts undertaken” rather than defending the outcomes.

What it offers instead is to update the current legislation. The MPA previously noted that Vietnam’s Ministry of Public Security is drafting amendments to the Penal Code to better address high-tech crimes and cyber offenses.

Whether that will indeed result in harsher sentences and a deterrent effect that will make it less appealing for locals to run pirate sites has yet to be seen.

The HiAnime defendants are the next test. Four remain in custody awaiting trial, while the other three were placed under travel restrictions. At the time of writing, USTR has not issued a determination in the Section 301 investigation.

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A copy of Vietnam’s submission, filed through the Ministry of Science and Technology, is available here (pdf).

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

More recently, it has been one of the pirate site blocking pioneers. In addition to demanding action from ISPs, their orders also targeted DNS resolvers and VPN providers.

While the expansion of the blocking measures is still contested, French lawmakers have already prepared the next one.

The French Parliament has handed ARCOM, the country’s audiovisual and digital regulator, the power to block pirate sports streams in real time without checking each targeted piracy source manually. The change is part of a broader professional sports law that both chambers formally adopted on July 21.

Article 10 of the new law rewrites the section of the previous sports law, Article L. 333-10, which rights holders have used to block pirate streaming sites in recent years.

From Manual Checks…

Under the old system, a rightsholder would obtain a blocking order in court, targeting specific domain names. These orders would require ISPs, DNS resolvers, or VPN services to block access on their systems.

If new domains were spotted later, rightsholders would send these to ARCOM, whose sworn agents would confirm that each one is streaming matches illegally before ISPs are ordered to block these.

One of these older orders was issued on July 8 by the Court of Paris. In that case, the French football league (LFP) won a block against nine Internet providers, covering the full 2026/2027 season, with ARCOM having to approve each new site that’s added along the way.

The order lists 30 domains and their associated subdomains, including kzontop.com, ligue1live.xyz, iptvfrancai.com, euroiptv.fr and sportsurge100.is.

…To Automated Blocks

Under the old system, it can take days before a new target is added. That’s a problem when dealing with live-streaming piracy, one that the new law aims to fix.

The new law strips out the pre-check of domain names (or IP addresses) that are added after the initial order is issued. It lets ARCOM run an automated system that pushes freshly identified targets straight to providers during a live broadcast. The providers then have to take action “without delay”.

ARCOM’s agents no longer approve each block in advance, but they keep an oversight role. They will now audit the new additions afterward, and a blocked party can appeal to ARCOM’s president, even while the targeted sports event is ongoing.

The new law is expected to significantly increase the volume of blocked sites and services, with the goal to further deter live-streaming piracy.

The judicial process leading up to the blocks barely changes, with one significant exception. Foreign entities that organize or hold rights to competitions abroad can now bring these actions in French courts themselves, opening the door for Spain’s LaLiga and England’s Premier League.

The groundwork for the blocking scheme was already laid. Under a private 2025 agreement between rights holders and ISPs, first revealed by L’Informé, the parties tested real-time IP address blocking during the 2026 World Cup, with ARCOM involved.

Italy’s “Piracy Shield” as Inspiration

French officials have not hidden the inspiration for the new law. In a study delivered to the Assemblée nationale in December 2025, the regulator recommended this automated real-time system, citing foreign precedents including Italy’s “Piracy Shield”.

The head of Italy’s own regulator AGCOM, Massimiliano Capitanio, publicly welcomed the vote on Instagram, describing it as France adopting a version of its “Piracy Shield” model.

That comparison is sensitive. Italy’s system has been heavily criticized for overblocking, at one point knocking Cloudflare and countless unrelated sites offline. European ISPs have since demanded that rightsholders be held liable for overblocking damage.

This critique is one of the reasons why ARCOM keeps a human supervision element in the takedown process. This is to avoid overblocking, which the regulator considered as being potentially unconstitutional in France.

Not Live Yet

With the new French law, yet another country moved to a more automated site blocking process. This follows the example of Italy and other countries, with support from rightsholders including the Motion Picture Association.

The updates to the French sports law still have to be implemented formally, which isn’t expected to happen until later this year.

Whether existing orders like the LFP’s will migrate to the automated system once it goes live, or whether only future orders will, is not yet clear. For now, however, France’s pirate sports blocking still runs the old, manual way.

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The Sports Law, adopted on July 21, can be found via the Assemblée nationale dossier here. A copy of the Court of Paris ruling in the LFP blocking case, issued on July 8, is available here (pdf).

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

To facilitate this process, the company has rolled out several anti-piracy initiatives in recent years.

Both Facebook and Instagram use a “Rights Manager” tool, which is an automated system that runs copyright checks. After rightsholders upload reference files, the system detects infringing material and allows owners to take down or monetize this content.

Rights Manager has been working without much noise for close to a decade. According to Meta’s latest transparency report, Rights Manager is part of a broader enforcement system that proactively removes millions of infringing posts from Facebook and Instagram every month.

Rights Manager’s Backdating Lawsuits

The automated copyright enforcement system is not without flaws. In India, for example, several lawsuits filed at the Delhi High Court alleged that the same copyright enforcement system can be turned against the creators it is meant to protect.

The Rights Manager exploit relies on Facebook’s desktop “Edit Post” feature. When a user edits an existing Facebook post and replaces its attached image or video, the platform keeps the original publication date. This means that users and Meta’s enforcement systems will see the content as older than it really is.

Scammers can allegedly exploit this weakness, Bar and Bench first reported. They can edit their older Facebook pages to add videos, reels, or photos they copied from other creators. To Instagram and Facebook it will appear that their content is older, so they can use it to claim ownership through Rights Manager.

As a result, the scammers can reportedly monetize videos of the original creators, while adding strikes to their accounts too.

Financial educator and entrepreneur Pushkar Raj Thakur says at least 36 of his videos were taken down worldwide this way. His suit argues Meta acted on the claims without checking the rightsholder, metadata or edit history of the posts.

Meta Rights Manager Lawsuit

Thakur took the matter to the Delhi High Court in May as part of a broader lawsuit about false claims. Early on, Meta’s counsel said the company needed to investigate, but the false claims did not stop right away.

In a follow-up hearing, Meta offered the court a series of assurances. It agreed not to remove Thakur’s videos over copyright strikes, not to close his account over repeat strikes, and to restore the deleted content.

Thakur is not backing down, seeking roughly 2 crore rupees (about $210,000) in damages. He also wants the court to order Meta to build safeguards into Rights Manager, including KYC checks, timestamp protections, and metadata verification.

Interestingly, Thakur says Meta denied him access to Rights Manager to protect his own brand, even as the scammers used the very same tool against him.

Meta Must Hand Over the Data

Thakur’s lawsuit is not the only one. Another creator, Neeraj Joshi, filed a similar complaint over the same backdating trick, and this case already resulted in a more actionable order.

On July 9, Justice Jyoti Singh required Meta to preserve Joshi’s verified Instagram account and to hand over the basic subscriber information and IP logs tied to the fraudulent claims within three weeks.

Those records could reveal who is behind the scheme and Joshi’s request for an interim injunction will be heard on August 5.

A Third Case Targets the Rules

The two lawsuits are not the only pressure on Meta. On July 15, another creator, Nitin Joshi, filed a public interest litigation (PIL) that goes after the legal framework itself.

The petition asks the court to set up a Special Investigation Team to probe what Joshi describes as an organized extortion racket, where syndicates file bogus strikes through bot accounts and then demand payment to withdraw them.

It also challenges Rules 3(1)(c) and 4 of India’s IT Rules, arguing they let platforms disable accounts without notice, without naming the complainant, and without checking whether the claimant owns the content.

Joshi wants a forensic audit of Instagram’s copyright strike system, as well as regular transparency reports on repeat complainants. This case remains in its early stages, and it has yet to be heard.

Patching An Exploitable Loophole

For now, the three cases leave Meta with an unusual problem. The same automated system that’s used to remove millions of infringing posts is allegedly being used by scammers to monetize copyright infringement.

Whether Meta has already addressed the loophole, and whether the scammers will be unmasked, remains to be seen. The company has yet to respond to the allegations in court, and it hasn’t commented publicly on the claims.

In any case, it appears that Meta has some work to do on the transparency side as well. At the time of writing, its most recent copyright transparency report is more than two years old, covering 2023.

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A copy of the order in the Neeraj Joshi case is available here (pdf). The July 1 order in the Pushkar Raj Thakur case can be found here (pdf), and the earlier May 29 order is here (pdf).

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

After Meta’s motion to dismiss was denied last month by U.S. District Judge Eumi K. Lee, Strike 3 filed an amended complaint expanding its claims to 2,973 films, up from the original 2,396.

With that many works at stake, potential statutory damages could reach a massive $446 million.

This week, Meta filed its answer to the amended complaint at the California federal court, denying all allegations while raising several affirmative defenses. At the same time, the company also gave further insight into the piracy allegations.

Meta’s Data Engineer

The original complaint identified a then-unnamed Facebook employee who allegedly used a residential Comcast IP address to download content, while also sharing files through Meta corporate IPs and what Strike 3 described as “stealth” IP addresses.

According to the amended complaint, that single address was linked to the infringement of 97 of Strike 3’s works.

Meta’s answer offers a straightforward explanation that has nothing to do with an organized data collection effort. The company admits that “the subscriber’s adult son was a Contingent Worker at Meta from October 2022 to October 2024.” It further confirms that the same person became “an employee at Meta with the title Data Engineer from April 2025 to May 2026.”

This phrasing is careful. By referring to “the subscriber’s adult son,” Meta positions the alleged torrenting as personal activity on a family member’s home Internet connection, unrelated to Meta.

Strike 3 apparently identified this person through their LinkedIn profile, which Meta says “speaks for itself”. In any case, Meta flatly denies that any employee’s BitTorrent activity was connected to its AI research or data collection.

The amended complaint, however, alleges that the infringement from the subscriber’s account stopped when the son’s contract with Meta ended.

Denials and a Fair Use Fallback

The broader answer follows a standard pattern of denials, which is common at this stage of a lawsuit. Meta denies downloading or uploading any of Strike 3’s adult films.

The tech company does admit downloading “portions of certain publicly available text datasets through direct download and by torrenting for purposes of developing and training some of its LLaMA models,” but insists these did not include adult films.

The company also acknowledges that it tried to prevent distributing any of the text files it had downloaded via BitTorrent for developing and training its language models. This shows that Meta admits sharing other content via BitTorrent, while explicitly denying Strike 3’s torrenting allegations.

In its affirmative defenses, Meta explicitly reserves fair use without asserting it. The company denies sharing any adult content, so fair use is not relevant, but it keeps it as an option just in case.

In the related Kadrey v. Meta lawsuit, where Meta admitted torrenting books for AI-training, fair use is the central defense, and Meta wants to keep that option open here as well.

Seeding Was “De Minimis”

As America’s most prolific copyright litigant, Strike 3 has built tens of thousands of lawsuits on the premise that sharing files via BitTorrent is copyright infringement. In those cases against individual defendants, a typical defense is that an IP address doesn’t identify a person.

Meta takes a different route. The company’s ninth affirmative defense doesn’t deny that data was uploaded from its IP addresses. Instead, it argues that any uploads during the torrenting process were “de minimis and did not result in the creation of an identifiable or usable copy of any copyrighted work.”

In other words, the fragments exchanged during BitTorrent transfers don’t amount to a meaningful copy. As far as we know, this argument has not been tested in court before, so it will be interesting to see how this will fare.

Meta also takes aim at Strike 3’s copyrights themselves. The tenth affirmative defense alleges that the adult films may incorporate others’ works without permission and may be “derivative of or copy preexisting works, including works undisclosed in Plaintiffs’ copyright filings with the U.S. Copyright Office.” Strike 3, Meta suggests, may have overstated its own copyright claims.

The remaining defenses include a statute of limitations argument, uncertainty about Strike 3’s copyrights, and a constitutional challenge arguing that the statutory damages would violate the Fifth Amendment’s Due Process Clause.

With potentially hundreds of millions of dollars at stake, it is clear that Meta will fight the matter tooth and nail. Alternatively, an early settlement is also an option. The case now moves forward, with mediation due by early August and a jury trial set for February 2028.

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A copy of Meta’s answer to the amended complaint, filed at the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, is available here (pdf). For full context, Strike 3’s amended complaint is available here (pdf).

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