In August, City of London Police and anti-piracy group FACT announced a six and a half year prison sentence for a 68-year-old pirate IPTV operator. Without dates or a service name in the release, some outlets reported it as a recent bust. Records obtained by TorrentFreak show the operation was raided in 2016, the operator pleaded guilty, and the service was called Ex Pat TV.

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A fresh academic paper on Z-Library cites a TorrentFreak article that doesn’t exist, and several other sources in the paper are also unfindable. The authors disclose that they used AI tools, which may explain what is going on. The use of AI in an academic paper on shadow libraries is also somewhat ironic, as rightsholders are suing AI companies for using these sites to train AI models.

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Quad9 is leaving France over pirate site blocking orders, which makes it the second DNS resolver to leave the country. Quad9 will stop serving French users on November 24, after a Paris court set a €1,000 daily penalty for not blocking pirate tennis streams. Faced with this order and roughly 20 other pending French cases, Quad9 says that it has no other viable option left.

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A new report published by the Internet Infrastructure Coalition (i2Coalition) warns that poorly targeted VPN regulation can weaken the security infrastructure everyone depends on. The group, whose members include VPN providers, points to piracy blocking orders against VPNs in France, while U.S. lawmakers also consider similar blocking requirements. The report is released on Global Encryption Day.

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Meta will have to name the people who greenlit its torrenting of pirated books. A federal magistrate judge has ordered the company to identify everyone who approved sourcing books from LibGen and Anna’s Archive. This goes beyond the employees who ran the downloads and includes whoever decided whether to seed the books to others.

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Denuvo can subpoena Discord, Valve and Reddit to identify the anonymous game cracker ‘voices38’. After a California federal judge raised privacy concerns, the DRM company dropped its demands for payment data, comments and other data, reducing 46 requests to nine. What remains are identity and contact details, including IP addresses, which Denuvo says may be the only reliable path to identify the defendant.

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A Shanghai court confirmed the criminal conviction of Wang Jianyang, one of the operators of pirate streaming platform Aiyifan. In a parallel case, a Florida federal judge awarded Chinese streaming service iQIYI $1.96 million in damages, roughly 1% of what it initially requested. The court also refused to transfer Aiyifan’s domains, noting that the sites carry content from other rightsholders too.

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VPN providers and Cloudflare only have to make a reasonable effort to block pirate sports streams in France. That's the conclusion of two Paris court rulings that refused beIN Sports' request for penalties of €10,000 per day, per domain. Meanwhile, the Paris Court of Appeal put a separate VPN blocking appeal on hold until France's Supreme Court rules on DNS blocking.

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The RIAA has submitted its latest overview of "notorious markets" to the U.S. Government. It lists familiar names such as The Pirate Bay and Rapidgator, but the music group also flags shadow library Anna's Archive and AI voice-cloning service Lalals. The RIAA presents both as "additional" areas of concern, not as official watchlist candidates.

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A group of major publishers has asked a New York federal court to issue a $19.5 million default judgment against pirate library WeLib. The site allegedly copied its code and most of its collection from Anna's Archive, which lost a nearly identical case in May. Ironically, the publishers' brief appears to 'copy' from Anna's Archive as well, or at least from their own lawsuit against the shadow library.

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When pirate streaming giant Cineby shut down at the end of August, its operators blamed the loss of their main video providers. Now, the MPA informs the U.S. Trade Representative that the site stopped operating following "MPA and ACE actions," adding that the same applies to anime piracy portal AnimeFLV. At the same time, the MPA flags several persistent piracy threats, including Telegram, Kisskh, and MagisTV.

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The Entertainment Software Association has asked the U.S. Government to label the Denuvo cracker ‘voices38’ as a notorious piracy market. The game industry group argues that the cracker is an essential source in the game piracy ecosystem, feeding repackers and torrent sites. A notorious market flag is no guarantee of success, however, as FitGirl's previous listings show.

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In recent years, AI has made it much easier to create new websites and tools. That also applies to pirate sites, including TorrentClaw, a torrent search engine that’s largely built with AI. The site's TrueSpec feature, for example, checks what’s inside torrents. The results reveal a recurring malware trick, where a genuine VLC player is used as a decoy to load a malicious file.

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The .ly domain of Spanish pirate streaming portal Series.ly was suspended by its Libyan registrar this week, more than a week after a Madrid court approved a broad anti-piracy order against the site. Soon after the domain was lost the Telegram and Discord were rebranded to Cinubo. The Spanish order also covers future mirrors, however, so whether this will apply to Cinubo has yet to be seen.

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Cloudflare doesn't block pirate sports streaming sites through its 1.1.1.1 DNS resolver in France, only through its CDN. The Paris Judicial Court has now accepted that stance, rejecting Canal+'s request for penalties of €50,000 per site, per day. Interestingly, the court's conclusion relies on statistics provided by Canal+ itself.

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Pirate streaming app MovieBox has been downloaded more than 300 million times from Palm Store, the app store that's preinstalled on Tecno, Infinix and itel phones. This is a thorn in the side of rightsholders, which have flagged the app to the European Commission. French pay-TV group Canal+ goes a step further, linking the operation to smartphone maker Transsion.

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Denuvo has asked a California federal court for permission to subpoena Discord, Valve and Reddit, hoping to unmask the anonymous game cracker 'voices38.' The anti-piracy company wants account details, IP addresses and Steam transaction histories tied to a Discord ID, a Reddit account and seven Steam profiles. The filing also reveals that Denuvo uncovered cryptocurrency transactions by the cracker on the exchange FixedFloat.

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DNS resolver Quad9 is considering pulling out of France after broadcaster beIN Sports asked a Paris court to impose non-compliance penalties that could go up to €580,000 per day. The Swiss non-profit is not blocking the pirate tennis streams covered by a May site-blocking order, arguing that it can't reliably limit the blocks to French users. A decision is expected later this month.

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The two competing pirate site-blocking bills that were introduced in Congress recently take different approached. While Rep. Darrell Issa's ACPA targets VPNs and provides broad liability protections to Internet service providers, the bipartisan and bicameral DEFEND IP Act explicitly excludes VPNs, while covering more smaller ISPs.

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An alleged operator of pirate IPTV services Kemo IPTV and Lemo TV faces criminal prosecution in Dubai, following a complaint from anti-piracy coalition ACE. The case surprisingly surfaced in a Florida federal court, where DISH Network's request for a $28.65 million default judgment against the same defendants was just denied. According to the judge, DISH failed to show that they were properly served.

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Months after a Spanish court refused to fine NordVPN over IP blocking, LaLiga is now raising its concerns with the European Commission. The football league has asked the EU to add four major VPN providers to its Piracy Watch List, arguing that third-party affiliate marketing guides on how to bypass blockades or circumvent geo-blocking restrictions turn the providers into more than "neutral technical intermediaries."

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Music industry group IFPI has asked the European Commission to add the popular open source YouTube download tool yt-dlp to its Counterfeit and Piracy Watch List. The submission names four of the project's developers by their GitHub handles and describes the software as a major problem for the music industry. What IFPI wants done about the software, however, isn't mentioned.

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Senator Thom Tillis and Rep. Zoe Lofgren have introduced their joint site blocking bill, the DEFEND IP Act. The proposal comes less than two weeks after Rep. Darrell Issa's competing proposal, and both bills allow rightsholders to obtain court orders requiring ISPs and large DNS resolvers to block foreign pirate sites. A crucial difference is that the unified bill explicitly leaves VPN providers out.

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A Washington federal court has ordered former r/SwitchPirates moderator James 'Archbox' Williams to pay Nintendo $4.5 million in damages. The default judgment includes a permanent injunction that prohibits Williams from distributing pirated games and circumvention tools, or encouraging others to use them. Whether Nintendo will be able to recoup the damages is unclear, as Williams never answered the allegations.

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China's biggest streaming companies are using U.S. courts to take down pirate sites, and a Florida judge just made that path easier. Overruling a magistrate's recommendation, the court ruled that the Chinese-language pirate site Olevod, which is run by a Spanish company, must answer Tencent's lawsuit in Florida.

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ACE has announced the shutdown of LiveNetTV, a free IPTV app that survived for a decade despite legal pressure from multiple sides. Two Turkey-based operators settled with ACE. They handed over ten domain names and issued a public mea culpa. The app itself had been dead since Istanbul police raided its operators in February.

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VPN providers with over 100,000 American users could be ordered to block pirate sites under the bill Rep. Darrell Issa introduced last week. The full text shows that VPNs were added after last year's discussion draft, which only mentioned ISPs and DNS resolvers. How a VPN should block access "from the United States" remains an open question, as the technical implementation is not defined.

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At a global film summit in France, regulators and rightsholders praised site-blocking successes, but they also faced unexpected pushback from one of the panelists. South Africa's culture minister accused the film industry of a double standard on piracy, demanding a partnership of equals rather than external mandates.

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Google, Cloudflare, and Cisco lost a key challenge against a Belgian DNS blocking order. The revised injunction, obtained by sports rightsholder DAZN, requires alternative resolvers to block pirate sports streaming domains on match days. Cisco says it will suspend OpenDNS in Belgium rather than comply, and intends to appeal.

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Anti-piracy outfit Denuvo has filed a DMCA anti-circumvention lawsuit in a U.S. federal court, targeting the anonymous game cracker known as 'voices38.' The defendant stands accused of bypassing Denuvo's digital locks on more than two dozen games, including Hogwarts Legacy and Black Myth: Wukong. As the case moves forward, the company will likely subpoena Reddit, Discord, and Valve for the cracker's identifying information.

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