The copyright lawsuit targeting PassThePopcorn, BroadcasTheNet, HDBits, and three other major private trackers has taken a bizarre turn. After a Canadian filmmaker filed a sworn declaration confirming he has nothing to do with the case, the plaintiff argues there are simply two filmmakers with the same name, who coincidentally created movies with the exact same titles.

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Stray Kids is one of the biggest bands in today's music industry. Because of that massive reach, a solo track from member Han went from a YouTube exclusive to bootleg releases on Apple Music and TikTok in days. Label JYP Entertainment now wants to identify the bootlegger. Instead of subpoenaing the platforms, it targets music distributor Symphonic, asking for names, IP addresses, and bank details of the offender.

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Book authors have asked a New York federal judge to rule that OpenAI built its AI models on “mass piracy”. Pointing to internal documents, a summary judgment motion alleges the AI giant downloaded books from LibGen, hid the evidence by renaming datasets, and designed its models to supplant human writers. OpenAI filed the mirror-image motion, stressing that its data harvesting qualifies as fair use.

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A new UK industry report says illegal streaming costs the government the equivalent of 9,400 NHS nurse salaries a year. This missed tax money is linked to a broader £1.35 billion annual hit to the economy. The billion-pound figure is extrapolated from what some pirates say they would pay if piracy disappeared. This hypothetical scenario comes with the necessary caveats, including a mismatch between what people say in surveys, and what they do.

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A routine John Doe lawsuit could become part of Strike 3 Holdings' $446 million AI training case against Meta. The adult film producer wants to link the two lawsuits, arguing that a Reality Labs executive downloaded nearly 20,000 files at his home for work purposes, not for personal use. Meta counters that the alleged home downloads are not linked to the company.

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Internet service provider RCN has asked a New Jersey federal court to reconsider a six-year-old ruling and dismiss the major record labels' piracy liability lawsuit. RCN argues that the Supreme Court's decision in Cox v. Sony wiped out the legal basis for the claims. With other "repeat infringer" cases against other ISPs already dropped, RCN says it is the last major label lawsuit of its kind still alive.

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Anthropic's bulk torrenting of pirated books from shadow libraries LibGen and Pirate Library Mirror continues to generate new lawsuits. A group of major publishers, including Sony Music and Warner Chappell, have sued the AI company and its co-founders, alleging that torrenting activity that resulted in a $1.5 billion settlement, also infringed on their musical works. Meanwhile, the music companies appear to be confused about the history of shadow libraries.

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Take-Two has informed U.S. federal courts that its investigation into the GTA 6 leak is "rapidly evolving." On the heels of its Netflix preview, the gaming company filed a new DMCA subpoena request, asking the court to keep it sealed to prevent tipping off the alleged infringers. Meanwhile, Take-Two dropped its DMCA subpoena against YouTube, as it is no longer needed.

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Through the Motion Picture Association, anti-piracy coalition ACE has requested two DMCA subpoenas at California federal courts. One covers 49 Cloudflare-fronted domains including Miruro.to and Aniworld.to, while the other targets two Discord servers. How effective the requests will be is hard to say, but both Discord servers have already been deleted.

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Over the past two years, Belgium's anti-piracy blocklist has grown past 1,500 domains. This week the government's anti-piracy department expanded its effort, ordering domain registrars and a registry to hand over names, bank accounts, crypto wallets and connection logs linked to pirate site operators. The intermediaries are not allowed to inform their customers about these efforts.

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Cineby has published a step-by-step schedule for shutting itself down in stages. The site started by redirecting its mirror sites Cineplay and Fmovies+, to then cut off its live streams a day later. The shutdown is expected to be completed by the end of next week. Why the operation is shutting down remains a mystery, but the signs don't point to a deal with rightsholders.

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Adult entertainment company FlavaWorks has elevated its legal campaign against the private torrent tracker Gay-Torrents. After the site already closed its doors, it filed a second complaint arguing civil RICO claims against 75 members of the site. The complaint lists a Virginia man as the first named defendant, alleging he ignored a cease-and-desist letter and kept sharing 'marked' content for years.

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When Anna's Archive suffered widespread downtime earlier this month, many users feared a legal crackdown. Instead, the site was reportedly targeted by a coordinated assault on its network infrastructure. Just as it did after facing $340 million in damages and losing several domains earlier this year, the Archive quickly bounced back.

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In response to a high-profile GTA 6 leak, Take-Two has requested broad DMCA subpoenas, targeting thousands of Discord users, as well as Microsoft data. The crackdown doesn't stop there. With two additional DMCA subpoenas, the gaming company expanded its information search to X and YouTube. Some of the named X accounts appear to be impostors, and so far no data has changed hands.

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Nintendo has filed seven DMCA anti-circumvention notices at GitHub in a single day, wiping out more than 400 Switch emulator repositories in one coordinated campaign. The targets include copies of the Suyu emulator, several Yuzu forks, and Skyline, an emulator that shut itself down years ago. The takedown effort was successful as most repositories are offline now, but it also shows how quickly the code can resurface.

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A federal copyright lawsuit targeting six of the most prominent private BitTorrent trackers, including PassThePopcorn, BroadcasTheNet, and HDBits, may be the work of an impostor. Attorneys representing two of the alleged operators told a federal judge they tracked down the real person behind the films cited in the complaint. Responding to the revelation, Illinois Judge Andrea Wood slammed the brakes on pending motions, scheduling an in-person hearing to get to the bottom of it.

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Germany doesn't have a hard benchmark for when a site is structurally infringing. However, the site-blocking clearinghouse CUII stated that illegal content clearly outweighs legal content when at least 81.5 percent of a site is infringing. After KinoGO was recently blocked with a floor of 82.4 percent, that line is closing in, raising the question of whether sites could simply pad their libraries with legal fillers.

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Cineby, one of the biggest pirate streaming sites on the web, says it will shut its doors on August 26. The site was previously flagged as a notorious piracy operation by Hollywood and has been blocked by court order in several countries. If history is any guide, successors and copycats will line up soon to fill the gap.

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A new academic study offers a detailed look inside Telegram's video piracy ecosystem, spotting more than 19,000 pirated titles linked in posts that were viewed more than 4 billion times. The researchers built an AI-powered tool that can spot pirate channels and bots, which were reported to Telegram and shared with major rightsholders. The takedown effort produced results but was far from flawless.

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A California federal court has ordered YouTube to unmask three popular South Korean creators of anime recap channels. The creators filed a motion to quash the DMCA subpoena, requested by Japanese publisher KADOKAWA, but the court rejected the fair use claim, which is now under appeal.

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In May, the UK High Court granted several Hollywood studios a broad "omnibus" site blocking order, allowing them to block rotating networks of pirate sites, without the need to link them to known pirate brands. This breakthrough order was recently cited in a Canadian court order, but remained unavailable to the public, until now.

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Europe's football seasons kick off again this month, with the Champions League to follow in September. In preparation, Canal+ has secured fourteen site-blocking orders spanning ISPs, DNS resolvers, VPNs, and search engines. It's a broad, coordinated effort — and one of the last that France will run by hand before an automated system takes over.

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Three years ago the European Commission rejected calls for binding anti-piracy legislation, issuing a 'recommendation' instead. A new study commissioned by the European Parliament concludes that this soft approach has fallen short. It calls for a binding EU Regulation built around the 30-minute blocking clock popularized by Italy's Piracy Shield.

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Japanese police have arrested an alleged seeder who's connected to the widely popular anime torrent site NYAA. Anti-piracy group CODA tells TorrentFreak that the tool which helped find the suspect didn't monitor the torrent swarms, but analyzed traffic at the index and tracker level. How that identified the seeder, and how three other NYAA targets, caught in a separate action, were identified, remains unknown.

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YggTorrent was France's largest torrent site until a hacker gutted it in March. In July, the police arrested twelve suspected operators. That was not the end of it, however. Following a purported takeover, YggTorrent's domains are back online and counting down to a "grand return" on September 1 under a new team.

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Mexican broadcaster TelevisaUnivision has obtained one of the broadest anti-piracy injunctions ever issued by a U.S. federal court. After initially targeting five pirate IPTV streaming operations, the case expanded to cover well over 500 domain names, requiring intermediaries including Cloudflare, GitHub, and a Mexican bank to comply. In addition, the injunction also covers pirate services and content that hasn't been created yet.

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The European Space Agency's Cosmos portal is dedicated to space exploration. While the organization scans stars and galaxies far away, its own infrastructure is quietly hosting hundreds of PDFs promoting shady IPTV services, ranking them in Google right beside official Gaia mission updates. The SEO 'hack' is reminiscent of an exploit that previously hit the European Commission's Eurostat website.

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After the Supreme Court's Cox ruling reshaped ISPs piracy liability, the record labels behind a $46.8 million verdict against Grande Communications are ready to walk away from the case entirely. Grande won't let them, however. The Internet provider is holding out for a formal win and the millions in bond costs it says the appeal ran up.

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Operation Offsides seized more than 1,000 pirate streaming domains during the FIFA World Cup. While the enforcement efforts were broadly praised, domain seizures are no silver bullet. In an op-ed, leaders of the MPA and the IPR Center suggest that more is needed to tackle piracy effectively, supporting a renewed push for U.S. site blocking legislation that comes with an Iranian twist.

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Popular pirate streaming sites, including Streamzy and Lordflix, are key targets in a new Indian site-blocking order obtained by HBO and other major studios. The order, which lists over 120 domain names, refines how India deals with new mirror domains that surface after the initial block. The order also demands action from domain registrars and, as a result, several domains, including Streamzy.to, were suspended within a day.

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