The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit has confirmed that copyright holders can't use a "DMCA subpoena shortcut" to identify internet subscribers suspected of copyright infringement. The Court sides with ISP Cox Communications, which intervened in the matter. The ruling blocks a legal tactic filmmakers have used to bypass the traditional, more expensive "John Doe" lawsuits. At the same time, it's also bad news for the MPA and RIAA.

Republished here, as AI content is in the Public Domain. References are available in the original article.

Frustrated by rising subscription costs and fragmented content availability, viewers worldwide are returning to piracy at unprecedented levels, reversing years of progress made by affordable streaming services. Recent data from London-based monitoring firm MUSO shows piracy visits skyrocketed from 130 billion in 2020 to 216 billion by 2024, with the industry facing projected losses exceeding $113 billion.

Subscription Fatigue Drives Digital Exodus

The streaming landscape has transformed from Netflix's early promise of "everything in one place" into what critics call "Cable 2.0"—a fractured ecosystem requiri

Since September 2023, a national campaign run by Sky and entertainment partners has attempted to convince illegal stream consumers to dump them in favor of platforms operating on the right side of the law. To encourage that important step, the BeStreamWise campaign focuses on the dangers of piracy; malware, credit card fraud, the risk of 'letting criminals in'. Through use of a particular model, the campaign hopes to achieve "the Holy Grail of behavioral change."

this post started out as a rant about the current state of media preservation on the modern internet... but ranting and complaining rarely helps anything.

so instead, i have written a few short guides and notes about ways you can help contribute to media preservation by doing it your damn self. most of the guides lean very technical, but i try to give appropriate explanations and links to the tools and documentation where i can.

Last month Cloudflare began blocking pirate site domains already subject to blocking orders obtained years ago by Hollywood studios at the High Court in London. With no public announcement from any of the parties and no official information to accurately determine the scale, our estimate of a couple of hundred sites/domains was deliberately low. New information indicates one thousand domains is more realistic, but we can't rule out double that amount either.

LaLiga has issued a stark warning to users of pirate sports streaming services. The organization behind Spain’s top football league released a new anti-piracy campaign warning that if "you get pirated football," cybercriminals "get you". An ominous video suggests that pirate services enable criminals to drain bank accounts and steal viewers' identities.

Source.

Update: they have a new repo.

Source.

Launched in July 2023, Yubin Archive's popularity stemmed from its mission to "eliminate educational inequality" by providing copies of educational material to less well-off students in South Korea. Operating via Telegram, Yubin Archive had grown to over 330,000 members when its operator was arrested on Tuesday. The Ministry of Culture and Sport says others involved will be tracked down and given lessons in copyright law.

Sky Sports chief Jonathan Licht has added momentum to what some believe is the beginning of the end for football's 3pm 'blackout'. Speaking at Sky's Premier League launch, Licht said "it's a conversation that's coming" while effectively admitting that the restriction fuels piracy. It actually does something far worse; it provides unrivaled justification for piracy based on logic and common sense.

Just weeks before its world premiere at the Venice Film Festival, Julian Schnabel's star-studded film 'In the Hand of Dante' has suffered a major setback after a high-quality screener copy leaked online. The leak is not an isolated incident as copies of other unreleased movies have also appeared online, some of which also have an Italian connection.

A California man has been ordered to pay $15 million in damages for operating the pirate IPTV service 'Outer Limits'. After the defendant failed to respond to a lawsuit brought by a coalition of Hollywood studios, Netflix, and Amazon, a district court judge in California awarded the maximum statutory damages for willful copyright infringement.

The details of a new procedure for imposing and collecting administrative fines for intellectual property offenses has been published in Greece. At the bottom end of the scale, fines for accessing pirated content such as pirate IPTV streams, start at €750 per violation, increasing to €5,000 if use is commercial. For repeat offenses, fines double to €1,500 and €5,000 respectively.

Major academic publishers, including Elsevier and Springer Nature, are trying to unmask the operators of several shadow libraries including Anna’s Archive, Z-Library and Libgen. They're also targeting SLUM, a third-party uptime monitor for these unofficial libraries. A DMCA subpoena, issued by a D.C. federal court, requires Cloudflare to hand over identifying user data for possible legal action.

Reports that the Nigerian Copyright Commission had recently shut down a pirate site didn't sound especially interesting. Operating under MovieBox branding, currently seen on endless domains, the local site reportedly received over 130 million visits in the previous three months and was actually still in business. Indeed, plans to develop the MovieBox brand began last month, with an application for intellectual property protection underpinning all kinds of business opportunities.