The U.S. Department of Justice announced the seizure of nearly 400 pirate streaming domain names that offered access to FIFA World Cup matches. This enforcement action, dubbed "Operation Offsides", targets popular brands including "rojadirecta", "koora", and "futbollibre". TorrentFreak tracked down several dozen domain names, which reveal that some of the largest streaming sites were not directly hit.

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DNS4EU is a relatively young DNS provider that launched last year with European Commission funding. The company is pitched as a privacy-first alternative to Google and Cloudflare, but it also comes with site blocking in mind. DNS4EU has shown an interest in pirate site blocklists, including the one that's maintained by Dutch anti-piracy group BREIN. After looking into it, however, DNS4EU decided not to use them, because BREIN isn't a government authority.

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One of Latin America's most-visited illegal sports streaming networks has been disrupted by ACE, UEFA, and Mexican authorities. The enforcement action targeted 44 domain names that were operating under popular sports streaming brands including PirloTV. While the enforcement effort appears to have disabled these domains, new ones swiftly popped up, perhaps even operated by the same people.

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A new report published by the EU Intellectual Property Office shows that the share of major brand advertising on pirate sites increased 80%. The problem is the worst on court-adjudicated pirate sites, where top brands account for more than half of all ads. The data further shows that anti-piracy blocklists don't always work as intended.

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After 180 days, Comcast can no longer say which customer was linked to a given IP address. This retention limit has kept old piracy accusations out of reach for years, but that's beginning to change. A series of BitTorrent lawsuits from film companies targets alleged pirates whose identities Strike 3 Holdings, an adult-content producer, had already obtained in earlier suits over the same addresses.

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In a series of DMCA takedown requests, "FIFA World Cup" is asking Google to permanently remove various pirate site domain names from its search results. While FIFA certainly is protective of its intellectual property, the seemingly AI-generated notices could be the work of a rival pirate site that's trying to take out some competition during the high-profile tournament.

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For years, WIPO has tried to starve pirate sites of advertising money. Now it wants to cut off their payments too. A new system called "WIPO Alert Pay" lets rightsholders flag pirate and counterfeit sites to payment providers such as PayPal and Mastercard, who can then act under their own rules. In an initial pilot, 71% of flagged sites were removed.

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Less than a month after a New York court issued a default judgment against shadow library Anna's Archive, thirteen major publishers have sued WeLib. The publishers characterize WeLib as a young but popular pirate site that was largely copied from Anna's Archive. The site is allegedly used by tech companies for AI training purposes, but that allegation raises more questions than it answers.

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Elon Musk's X Corp has filed a motion to dismiss the multi-million dollar music piracy lawsuit, which was recently amended following the Cox Supreme Court ruling. X says the new complaint is partly based on a tweet that was pulled out of context. It argues that even the full version falls short of what the Supreme Court's demanding inducement standard requires.

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For the first time in Canada, a site-blocking order has been issued that specifically targets YouTube rippers. The Federal Court has ordered major ISPs to block access to Y2Mate, YTMP3, and Savefrom domains. Interestingly, the order targets copycats, as the original Savefrom site preemptively started blocking Canadians years ago.

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