Last week an Indian court issued one of the broadest site-blocking injunctions to date. To prevent the film "2.0" from being pirated by the masses, the Madras High Court ordered local ISPs to preemptively block 12,564 domain names. TorrentFreak can now reveal that this order only targets 16 websites and that most of the listed domains are not even registered.
Rockstar Games' parent company Take-Two Interactive has filed a motion for default judgment against the alleged creator of the "Elusive" GTA V cheat. The company estimates that the cheat has caused severe harm, and requests $150,000 compensation, the maximum statutory damages for copyright infringement.
Leechers Paradise, one of the world's longest-standing and most important BitTorrent trackers, has shut down for good. Launched 12 years ago, the site was recently coordinating the transfers of 132 million peers but now, with the EU's Article 13 legislation looming, its operator says its time to close before the platform is rendered illegal.
The much-anticipated action-adventure game Just Cause 4 was released on December 4, protected by Denuvo. On December 5, cracking group CPY posted the game online, Denuvo defeated. While this is yet another hammer blow to the anti-tamper system, the game is currently 'enjoying' a review average of just 5/10 on Steam, which could exacerbate the problems.
Several prominent representatives of the audiovisual and sports sectors, including the MPA and the Premier League, are not pleased with the current Article 13 proposals. Their objections don't concern the possibility of upload filters, but with potential new liability shields for large Internet services, which they say will only gain power at the detriment of copyright holders.
Three employees of an agency that placed adverts on pirate sites have been handed suspended prison sentences in Germany. After brokering ad space on popular piracy portals including kino.to and iload.to, generating profits of more than 350,000 euros in the process, the individuals were found guilty of aiding and abetting copyright infringement.
The semi-private BitTorrent tracker Demonoid was once one of the largest torrent sites on the Internet. In recent months, however, things have gone from bad to worse. The site has been offline for weeks and a few days ago its main domain name expired. In the absence of assurances from Demonoid's operator, staffers have now launched a backup community, to keep the spirit going.
While Banksy prefers to operate in the shadows, he does have a YouTube account where he uploads some background info. This is what he did after a stunt at Sotheby's in October. Today, this video has disappeared. Assuming that it's not another 'prank,' the French media outfit Canal+ is responsible.