Hollywood's Motion Picture Association has a voluntary agreement with the Indian domain registry NIXI to suspend pirate sites that use false Whois data. This is seen as an effective anti-piracy tool on top of site blocking. In addition, rightsholders also praise India's Cyber Digital Crime Unit, which helped to suspend more than 200 pirate domains.
Downloading and sharing copyrighted content is illegal in the UK but is rarely associated with serious consequences. However, it's now been revealed that 93 students at a single university had their Internet access suspended following allegations of piracy.
Cloudflare has suspended the account of the video streaming service RapidVideo, as well as several similar platforms. Some suspect that piracy allegations have something to do with it, but Cloudflare refutes this. The company explains that it can sometimes suspend sites that are found to cache a "disproportionate" amount of non-HTML files.
On Friday, the EU Commission published a piece on Medium that suggested that Google has taken over the minds of millions of citizens, rendering them incapable of thinking for themselves in their opposition of Article 13. The piece was later deleted with a note implying that people simply aren't capable of understanding the subtle nuances of the English language.
Film distribution company Dutch FilmWorks is continuing its legal battle to identify BitTorrent pirates. The company is appealing the case against Internet provider Ziggo, where it requested the personal details connected to 377 IP-addresses. Even if the account holders themselves are not pirates they do have a responsibility for what happens on their connections, Dutch Filmworks stresses.
The top 10 most downloaded movies on BitTorrent are in again. 'Creed II' tops the chart this week, followed by ‘Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald'. 'Ralph Breaks the Internet' completes the top three.
Several torrent sites have banned the account of the popular software uploader CracksNow. The software and cracks were repeatedly flagged as malicious and some came with the GandCrab ransomware. While malicious torrents are nothing new, it's rare for this to happen via a "trusted" uploader.
Every few weeks, plans for starting new torrent sites, streaming platforms, and apps, appear on Internet discussion platforms. While most have lofty goals, few consider what might happen when they hit the jackpot. Initial intent is crucial so careless actions early on can easily come back to haunt and then undermine successful projects.
Pirate site IGG-Games, which sits among the top 1,500 sites in the world, is under fire for meddling with pirate releases. One particular example involves the DRM-free game The Eternal Castle, which has been modified not to run if people remove IGG-Games' advertising code. The site says it needs to do this to prevent other sites "stealing" its releases but pirates are not impressed. In fact, they've developed a tool to remove this 'DRM'.