LEGO is protecting its intellectual property by targeting fan-made 3D print designs on Thingiverse, Cults3D, and elsewhere. The company hasn't explained its motivations yet, but many people point out that going after homebrew creations from some of the biggest LEGO fans might not … | Continue reading
File-hosting giant Mega.nz has been blocked by some ISPs in Brazil following a ruling from the São Paulo Court of Justice. The New Zealand-based platform believes that the Court has been misled but it's not the only site affected. Several other domains are listed by the Court, in … | Continue reading
The Pirate Bay has accepted Bitcoin donations for more than six years. More recently, it added other cryptocoins as well. When we add up all the donations since late 2017, the income is relatively modest. But perhaps the site has a long-term strategy in mind? | Continue reading
Switzerland's National Council has passed amendments aimed at modernizing the country's copyright law to make it more fit for the digital age. While services that host pirate sites or distribute content can expect a tougher ride moving forward, users will still be able to downloa … | Continue reading
Police in Italy have announced a huge anti-piracy operation against the company operating popular IPTV service management system Xtream Codes. Searches are reportedly underway in several countries including Italy, the Netherlands, France and Bulgaria, in a claimed effort to disma … | Continue reading
The popular torrent meta-search engine Torrentz2 is the go-to site for many avid BitTorrent users. Aside from indexing classic torrent sites, Torrentz2 recently expanded by adding Google to its index, which apparently has a pretty impressive collection of unique torrent hashes. M … | Continue reading
New amendments to Russian law developed by the largest media and search engines will require the latter to swiftly delete 'pirate' links from their indexes. According to local sources inside the working group, platforms like Yandex will be required to delete links within six hour … | Continue reading
An anti-piracy group representing the rights of authors is calling for the Internet Archive to be blocked by ISPs in Russia forever. A pair of lawsuits concerning two audiobooks, including Metro 2033, led to the request to have the massively popular Archive.org permanently render … | Continue reading
An alleged scammer who tried to extort money from YouTubers by abusing the site's "three strikes" exclusion scheme is about to get his comeuppance. A lawsuit filed by YouTube in a US federal court seeks compensation and an injunction against US-resident Christopher Brady in respo … | Continue reading
Advertising on pirate sites can seriously harm certain brands, a new survey has revealed. The Trustworthy Accountability Group and Brand Safety Institute report states that the majority of people would buy less products from the companies as a result. The question remains, howeve … | Continue reading
Copyright holders would like Google to be more proactive when it comes to piracy. The company should promote legal services in its search results, is an often heard suggestion. A good idea perhaps but, at the moment, some copyright holders are taking things in the opposite direct … | Continue reading
A retired police officer in his 70s, who was falsely accused of sharing several adult films via BitTorrent, wants the copyright holders to pay up. After both parties failed to reach an agreement, the man asked the adult content producer to drop the case. The ex-cop isn't letting … | Continue reading
A few hours ago, BitTorrent Inc. rolled out a new version of uTorrent with the much-heralded BitTorrent Speed integration. Users who installed the software were given 10 BitTorrent Tokens (BTT) to play around with, alongside a promise that downloads would take place more quickly. … | Continue reading
Several stream-ripping sites have been unable to download and convert files from YouTube starting a few hours ago. It appears that the video streaming platform is actively blocking requests from these sites. While the reason for the sudden blocking efforts is unknown, the music i … | Continue reading
An Italian court has ordered Cloudflare to terminate the accounts of several pirate sites. The ruling comes after a complaint from local broadcaster RTI, which successfully argued that Cloudflare can be held liable if it willingly fails to act in response to copyright infringemen … | Continue reading
Traditionally, a major source of high-quality pirate releases has been retail discs, such as Blu-ray or DVD. Today, torrent and streaming sites are regularly fueled by content culled from streaming services such as Netflix and Amazon. Known online as WEB releases, these files are … | Continue reading
High-quality pirated copies of Netflix's new "Stranger Things" season appeared online a few hours ago. The 4K releases are rare and suggest that there may have been some kind of breach. Whether the Widevine DRM has been cracked remains a question for now. | Continue reading
The Pirate Party political movement owes its early success to sticking up for The Pirate Bay, following a raid in Sweden. Since then, it has come a long way. In recent years Pirates have delivered many excellent politicians and Marcel Kolaja, one of the new MEPs, has just been el … | Continue reading
Spanish soccer league La Liga has been fined 250,000 euros by local data protection agency AEPD. The penalty comes after La Liga deployed a controversial feature in its Android app which activated device microphone and location services in an effort to identify establishments air … | Continue reading
Back in March, ten major VPN providers including NordVPN, ExpressVPN, IPVanish and HideMyAss were ordered by Russian authorities to begin blocking sites present in the country's national blacklist. Following almost total non-compliance, the country's telecoms watchdog says that b … | Continue reading
1XBET, a gambling company known for its advertising appearing in 'cam' copies of movies, has become the third most active online advertiser in Russia. Only Google and PepsiCo ads are more prevalent, with movie giant Universal Pictures in a relatively humble seventh place. | Continue reading
A new study conducted by music industry research company MusicWatch has revealed an increase in so-called stream-ripping in the United States. Up from 15 million participants in 2017 to 17 million last year, stream-rippers are likely to be both well-educated and affluent. | Continue reading
BitTorrent Inc., the owner of the popular uTorrent client, says it will launch a decentralized file-storage system across its network. Based on the open source InterPlanetary File System (IPFS), BitTorrent's BTFS has begun testing and is expected to launch in 2020. | Continue reading
Several major labels including Universal, Warner Bros, and Sony, say that there is no need to travel to Russia to sue the operator of the steam-ripping sites FLVTO.biz and 2conv.com. Responding to a recent defense brief at the Court of Appeals, the music companies argue that the … | Continue reading
If people want to watch the latest blockbusters on the small screen, the easiest option is to download a 'cammed' copy from the Internet. While these have never been perfect replicas, the latest trend is to release 'cams' daubed with promo codes and advertising for online gamblin … | Continue reading
The final episode of Game of Thrones marked the end of one of the biggest piracy topics in history. The show made dozens of piracy headlines over the years, ranging from prominent leaks, to a mind boggling record that's unlikely to ever be broken. | Continue reading
Copyright-trolling outfit Strike 3 has suffered a severe blow in a New York federal court. U.S. Magistrate Judge James Orenstein has thrown out over a dozen cases, signaling a variety of problems. Among other things, the Judge noted that the frequency of improperly accused pirate … | Continue reading
A Github user who archived documents detailing every HDMI specification since its inception has been hit with a DMCA takedown notice. According to Consumer Technology Association member HDMI Licensing Administrator LLC, the documents are both copyrighted and confidential. A secon … | Continue reading
WatchMojo, one of the most viewed channels on YouTube, is striking back at Content-ID abusers. The channel is fed up with the numerous claims it has received against fair use content. Rightsholders can profit from this scheme but WatchMojo points out that they also expose themsel … | Continue reading
Strike 3 Holdings has identified hundreds of alleged copyright infringers through US courts. This often happens without much hassle, but this week the company suffered a major setback. Florida District Court Judge Ursula Ungaro refused to issue a subpoena, stating that IP-address … | Continue reading
People interested in whether a particular Denuvo-protected game has been cracked or not can no longer quickly visit the relevant Wikipedia page and view the information easily. Controversial edits to the official Denuvo page have removed an easy-to-read column, in part due to the … | Continue reading
After admitting to several criminal acts, Prenda Law attorneys John Steele and Paul Hansmeier will be sentenced a few weeks from now. In addition to prison sentences, the court may order the two to pay restitution. To facilitate this process, the U.S. Attorney’s Office of the Dis … | Continue reading
Dutch anti-piracy group BREIN has tracked down a Plex user who offered access to a library of 5,700 movies and 10,000 TV-shows. The user, who admitted to downloading the files through torrents and Usenet, agreed to pay a €750 settlement. BREIN says it keeps an eye on all kinds of … | Continue reading
The latest episode of Game of Thrones has leaked online several hours before its official premiere. The leak comes from the German version of Amazon Prime, where it was put online early. Since then it's been widely shared on various pirate sites. | Continue reading
The latest episode of Game of Thrones has leaked online several hours before its official premiere. The leak comes from the German version of Amazon Prime, where it was put online early. Since then it's been widely shared on various pirate sites. | Continue reading
Twitter has informed TorrentFreak that another tweet from us has been removed. Apparently, a link to a news article was somehow making pirated software available. Strange, since the request was sent on behalf of movie studio Warner Bros. Apparently, there's still room to improve … | Continue reading
People who are in need of a VPN service have plenty of options to choose from. Most services offer decent encryption options nowadays, but what more does your VPN provider do to keep you anonymous? We take a look at the logging policies plus other privacy and security features of … | Continue reading
The founder of Demonoid, one of the most iconic torrent trackers in history, is believed to have passed away. Deimos suddenly disappeared without a trace last summer. According to information reviewed by Demonoid's staff, he was likely the victim of a tragic accident. | Continue reading
American entertainment giant Starz is continuing to remove tweets that link to a TorrentFreak news report about leaked TV-shows. Even worse, it's also targeting our follow-up article that discusses the overbroad takedown effort. These notices are having the opposite effect, howev … | Continue reading
American entertainment giant Starz is continuing to remove tweets that link to a TorrentFreak news report about leaked TV-shows. Even worse, it's also targeting our follow-up article that discusses the overbroad takedown effort. These notices are having the opposite effect, howev … | Continue reading
The EU Council of Ministers has approved the Copyright Directive, which includes the controversial Article 17 (formerly 13). The legislation was voted through by a majority of EU ministers just a few minutes ago, despite opposition from Italy, Luxembourg, Netherlands, Poland, Fin … | Continue reading
A few days ago we reported on several major leaks of unreleased TV-shows. This included several episodes from the Starz original show "American Gods". Apparently, however, Starz didn't like our news reporting. To stop it from spreading any further, a representative asked Twitter … | Continue reading
Yesterday evening President Trump tweeted a video, made by a supporter, which used music from 'The Dark Knight' soundtrack. Warner Bros. wasn't pleased with this unauthorized reproduction and asked Twitter to take it down, which it did. While this may seem like an isolated incide … | Continue reading
German publisher Alex Springer is suing the company behind Adblock Plus for copyright infringement. According to the company, which owns Bild and Die Welt, among others, ad blockers endanger digital journalism and "change the programming code of websites." | Continue reading
Under pressure from Reddit's administrators over copyright issues, the site's largest forum dedicated to piracy discussion has opted for "The Nuclear Option". After voting by its contributors, all posts older than six months are now being deleted. That's almost 10 years of data, … | Continue reading
For mainly legal reasons, it's prudent for ISPs to describe themselves as dumb pipes, with no control over or responsibility for the content that traverses their networks. The reality is, however, that is not only an untruth but a stance that can be undone in an instant, should e … | Continue reading
The number of leaked screeners of Oscar-nominated movies has dropped to a new low. Just seven films made have their way to pirate sites thus far. There's no single reason for this decline but, despite the screener dip, there is no shortage of high quality leaks from other channel … | Continue reading
The Kenyan Department of Justice has aired its displeasure after a video on YouTube featuring the country's national anthem was hit by a copyright complaint. UK-based De Wolfe Music is claiming to be the owner of the track, which is actually in the public domain. | Continue reading