Chewy_fox

Under-fire law firm Njord Law pressured a cooperative housing association to settle a proposed lawsuit, despite none of the parties having any idea who the infringer was. In a clear sign that copyright trolls' answer to every response is "pay us", Njord simply kept dropping the settlement amount until paying became the least painful option. When copyright trolls scour BitTorrent swarms looking for IP addresses, they have absolutely no idea who sits behind them. ISPs can eventually be forced to hand over the subscribers’ personal details but even then there’s no solid proof of who car

Brooklyn-based art collective MSCHF 'dropped' a set of exclusive email addresses, featuring The Pirate Bay and Megaupload domains. While these hype domains have nothing to do with the original sites and cost a healthy $250 apiece, they sold like hot cakes. Even the $1,200 box sets, including 4Chan, Heaven's Gate, and Angelfire addresses, are no longer available. There’s a market for pretty much everything today and ‘collectables’ are hot. The non-fungible token (NFT) rage shows that people are willing to pay thousands or even millions of dollars for a digital gimmick, which may or ma

Via the MPA, global anti-piracy coalition Alliance For Creativity and Entertainment is investigating several major streaming platforms. The sites, which offer mainstream movies and TV shows, are good for more than half a billion visits per year. With the help of a US court, the rightsholders are hoping to identify their operators, with disruption or even closure the ultimate aim. The world’s major movie and TV show studios are in fierce competition, aiming to release the next blockbuster or series to capture the imaginations of the public and generate much needed revenue. Industry co

No quarter for pirates! This is the message conveyed by article 10 of the bill "aimed at democratizing sport in France". The latter will be examined in public session in the National Assembly for three days, starting this Wednesday, March 17. The deputies have been working on this law for three years and added at the last moment article 10, which aims to fight more effectively against illegal broadcasts of sports competitions. Initially included in the government's audiovisual bill, it was finally dropped due to the health crisis. The deputies therefore added it in a timely manner to the propo

For 19 antiviruses, uTorrent, the most used BitTorrent client in the world, is unwanted software, even for some a "severe threat" Computer virus illustration. - DURAND FLORENCE / SIPA His bad reputation sticks to the bits. Seventeen years after its creation, uTorrent, the popular BitTorrent software, is still identified by at least 19 antivirus software as a potential threat, according to data from the specialist site Virustotal. These usually send an alert message when installing the file download software (legal or illegal). But some of them even remove uTorrent without it being po

A group of independent movie companies, including the makers of "The Hitman’s Bodyguard" and "London Has Fallen," has filed a lawsuit against a widely used Popcorn Time app and several of its users. The companies don't stop there either. The complaint also accuses VPN service VPN.ht and hosting provider Voxility of copyright infringement. Hawaiian attorney Kerry Culpepper has built quite a track record in recent years, putting pressure on various pirate sites and services. The biggest score came a little over a year ago when he convinced the operator of YTS, one of the largest torren

LONDON—The cost of sports piracy has been revealed via a new report from Synamedia and Ampere Analysis, with as much as $28.3 billion in new revenue being available to service providers and rights holders each year if they are able to reduce sports piracy. The report, “Pricing Piracy: The Value of Action,” uses a model that evaluates how different illegal viewers respond to anti-piracy measures and identifies the demographics and characteristics of those illegal users who are most likely to convert to legal services. By understanding the motivations of those who access pirated stream

After it was recently announced that film funding groups were suing a VPN provider for advertising illegal content, production companies have now set their sights on yet another service. In addition to "VPN.ht", they are also suing a hosting provider and Popcorn Time. We recently reported a lawsuit against VPN provider Liquid VPN for allegedly advertising illegal torrents and streaming portals. With "VPN.ht" another of these providers is now in the crossfire. Smaller production companies are suing the service for massive copyright violations. In the complaint that attorney Timothy Hyland

In what is said to be the first calculation of the true cost of sports piracy, a report from Synamedia has revealed that service providers and rights holders can unlock up to $28.3 billion in new revenue each year by reducing the phenomenon. The online quantitative study of over 6,000 sports fans aged 18-64 in Brazil, Egypt, Germany, India, Italy, Jordan, Malaysia, Saudi Arabia, the UK and the US was undertaken by data and analytics firm Ampere Analysis, the third in a series carrried out on behalf of Synamedia. Consumers were pre-filtered and chosen based on their experience of watch

Digital piracy is not all about movies and music—pretty much anything that people feel is unfairly priced will find its way online in large numbers. Even academic papers. In October 2015, a New York district court ruled in favor of the academic publisher Elsevier, which had accused Sci-Hub, a website that offers pirated versions of academic papers, of copyright violation. That decision allowed authorities to take down the site’s domain name, sci-hub.org. Suspending a domain name does not delete a website forever, though, it just prevents visitors from knowing where exactly to find it

Being dissatisfied with YouTube’s actions on handling the infringing content, a copyright holder has now demanded YouTube to share all the copyright notices served since 2015! As this amounts to a huge trove of data, YouTube declined to share, so calling it unduly burdensome. Instead, it agrees to share only a month-long data with her. YouTube Fails in Handling Copyright Takedown Notices Like others, YouTube has become one of the common places for posting copyrighted material without permission and being slammed with actions like account termination if flags are raised. But, Maria Sc

An adult star from OnlyFans, a platform that lets content creators earn money from their paid subscribers, has filed DMCA notices with Reddit to takedown her infringing content. Her lawyer complained that some users share the images and videos of her commercial content from OnlyFans on Reddit for free and seek details of those users. DMCA Notices to Reddit Though content piracy is becoming normal these days, copyright holders are trying their best to stop at least a few of them through various means. One such copyright holder named Natasha Noel, an adult performer, is now taking on i

Reporting about piracy can get sites and blogs accused of copyright violations and potentially removed from Google’s be-all and end-all search results, as a new bogus DMCA claim shows. These false notices regularly crop up in the ocean of takedowns that Google regularly receives from the entertainment industry to remove links from search results for real or fake copyright infringement. Now the website TorrentFreak once again became the target of one such takedown notice, being falsely accused of “piracy” for publishing a news article about – piracy. The article was about Disney’

"We were happy and we didn't know it." Surely many feel identified with that phrase when remembering the times when Messenger was our WhatsApp and YouTube videos were rated with stars. It was also the time when the Ares and eMule programs were used to download movies that, on more than one occasion, turned out to be something else. These were P2P programs that revolutionized the internet at the time, although P2P continues to lead the digital forefront, in a sense, considering that the Bitcoin system is based on it. Piracy was in its golden age to gradually atrophy in a path that Apple le

A Sega representative has reached out regarding the below story involving Yakuza: Like a Dragon and SteamDB. Here is the message from Sega: “Earlier this week, one of our games was incorrectly flagged on SteamDB. We utilize anti-piracy software to protect our games at a large scale, but sometimes it makes mistakes. SEGA will continue to fine-tune these systems to avoid this in the future and we appreciate SteamDB cooperating with us to resolve the issue quickly.” Original story is as follows. It has been a good few months since Sega and Ryu Ga Gotoku Studio unleashed the amazing Yakuza: L