Over the past two years, AI developments have progressed at a rapid pace.

This includes large language models, which are typically trained on a broad datasets of texts; the more, the better.

When AI hit the mainstream, it became apparent that rightsholders are not always pleased that their works were used to train AI. This applies to photographers, artists, music companies, journalists, and authors, some of whom formed groups to file copyright infringement lawsuits to protect their rights.

Book authors, in particular, complained about the use of pirated books as training material. In various lawsuits, companies including OpenAI, Microsoft, Meta, and NVIDIA are accused of using the ‘Books3’ dataset, which was scraped from the library of ‘pirate’ site Bibliotik.

After the Books3 accusations hit mainstream news, many AI companies stopped using this source. Meanwhile, anti-piracy companies helped publishers to take the alleged rogue libraries offline to prevent further damage.

These enforcement efforts aren’t limited to Books3 either, or the English language for that matter; earlier this week anti-piracy group BREIN reported that it helped to remove a Dutch language dataset.

Authors sued NVIDIA

Earlier this year, several authors sued NVIDIA over alleged copyright infringement. The class action lawsuit alleged that the company’s AI models were trained on copyrighted works and specifically mentioned Books3 data. Since this happened without permission, the rightsholders demand compensation.

The lawsuit was followed up by a near-identical case a few weeks later, and NVIDIA plans to challenge both in court by denying the copyright infringement allegations.

In its initial response, filed a few weeks ago , NVIDIA did not deny that it used the Books3 dataset. Like many other AI companies, it believes that the use of copyrighted data for AI training is a prime example of fair use; especially when the output of the model doesn’t reproduce copyrighted works.

The authors clearly have a different take. They allege that NVIDIA willingly copied an archive of pirated books to train its commercial AI model, and are demanding damages for direct copyright infringement.

Trial in Two years…?

This week, the authors and NVIDIA filed a joint case management statement at a California court, laying out a preliminary timeline. This shows that both parties intend to take their time to properly litigate the matter.

The authors expect that the parties need until October next year to gather facts and evidence during the discovery phase. An eventual jury trial is penciled in a full year later, November 2026.

NVIDIA doesn’t have a hard trial deadline in mind but stresses that the fair use issue is key, and should be addressed early and efficiently. For starters, the company intends to file a motion for summary judgment within a year, after which both parties should have more clarity.

Facts, Figures, and Statistical Correlations

Aside from the timeline, NVIDIA also shared its early outlook on the case. The company believes that AI companies should be allowed to use copyrighted books to train their AI models, as these books are made up of “uncopyrightable facts and ideas” that are already in the public domain.

The argument may seem surprising at first; the authors own copyrights and as far they’re concerned, use of pirated copies leads to liability as a direct infringer. However, NVIDIA goes on to explain that their AI models don’t see these works that way.

AI training doesn’t involve any book reading skills, or even a basic understanding of a storyline. Instead, it simply measures statistical correlations and adds these to the model.

“Training measures statistical correlations in the aggregate, across a vast body of data, and encodes them into the parameters of a model. Plaintiffs do not try to claim a copyright over those statistical correlations, asserting instead that the training data itself is ‘copied’ for the purposes of infringement,” NVIDIA writes.

Put differently, NVIDIA argues that its AI models don’t use the books the way humans do; neither do they reproduce them. It’s simply examining the ‘facts and ideas’ in the books, ‘transforming’ their original purpose to build a complex AI model. That qualifies as fair use, they state.

“Plaintiffs cannot use copyright to preclude access to facts and ideas, and the highly transformative training process is protected entirely by the well-established fair-use doctrine.

“Indeed, to accept Plaintiffs’ theory would mean that an author could copyright the rules of grammar or basic facts about the world. That has never been the law, for good reason,” NVIDIA adds.

Fair Use Battle

According to NVIDIA, the lawsuit boils down to two related questions. First, whether the authors’ direct infringement claim is essentially an attempt to claim copyright on facts and grammar. Second, whether making copies of the books is fair use.

The chip company believes that it didn’t do anything wrong and cites several cases that will likely appear in its future filings. They include the Authors Guild v. Google lawsuit, where the court of appeals concluded that copying books to create a searchable database was fair use. As a result, Google Books still exists today.

NVIDIA is not the only company that will rely on a fair use defense in response to AI-related copyright infringement claims. Many other companies are taking the same approach so whether it succeeds will prove key for the future of AI model development.

What makes these matters more complex is that AI models and technologies have different applications; so what may be fair use in one case, could be copyright infringing in another.

For example, earlier this week, a California federal court ruled that a copyright lawsuit filed by visual artists against DeviantArt, Midjourney, Runway AI, and Stability AI, can move forward . These defendants are also accused of copyright infringement, but the lawsuit deals with images, and image outputs instead.

Given the parties involved and the potential damages at stake, these lawsuits will keep the courts busy for years to come. Even after the first ‘final’ verdicts come in, there will be appeals, and some questions may eventually end up at the Supreme Court.

Meanwhile, the actions of NVIDIA and other AI companies will be closely monitored by copyright watchers. This includes recent press reports accusing NVIDIA, among others, of scraping both videos and transcripts from YouTube, to train their respective models.

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A copy of the joint case management statement in Nazemian vs. Nvidia is available here (pdf)

From: TF , for the latest news on copyright battles, piracy and more.

After filing copyright lawsuits against early peer-to-peer file sharing services and emerging mostly victorious, the global music industry found that any depressant effect, on pirate content availability and consumption, was insufficient.

Content was soon being consumed by an expanding pool of internet users, and relentless demand was met being met by increased availability and supply. Since robust peer-to-peer networks had few issues taking care of mass distribution, music industry lawyers switched to suing tens of thousands of music pirates instead. That eventually became unpleasant for everyone and as an anti-piracy strategy, also insufficient.

We Can Do This The Easy Way, Or The Hard Way. No Pressure

Having sued piracy platforms and their users, attention turned to residential ISPs. Approached as potential allies, progress over the years was rarely much more than a mixed bag. When it became increasingly clear that cooperation would involve ISPs suppressing their own customers – those that the music companies had previously failed to suppress – lawsuits against the internet’s gatekeepers were inevitable.

After music giant BMG sued Cox Communications for failing to take action against repeat infringer customers, the matter was settled in BMG’s favor via a “ substantial settlement .” With big money at stake, repeat infringer lawsuits are now widespread in the United States; in 2022, BMG hit the owners of Optimum with a similar lawsuit carrying a billion-dollar payload.

The Hard Way It Is Then

Filed in the Eastern District of Texas, the complaint featured plaintiffs BMG Rights Management, UMG Recordings, Capitol Records, Concord Music Group, and Concord Bicycle Assets.

The defendants, Altice USA and CSC Holdings, were described as the operators of one of the largest ISPs in the United States. Sold under ‘Optimum’ branding and available in at least 21 states, high-speed connections made available by the defendants were allegedly being used by thousands of persistent pirates responsible for millions of infringements.

The plaintiffs informed the court that efforts to encourage the ISP to suspend or disconnect alleged infringers, had come to nothing.

“Rather than work with Plaintiffs or take other meaningful or effective steps to curb this massive infringement, Altice chose to permit infringement to run rampant, prioritizing its own profits over the Plaintiffs’ rights,” the complaint continued.

With David Bowie, Justin Bieber, Katy Perry, Keith Urban, and Lady Gaga among around 8,000 artists suffering the consequences of the alleged inaction, the stage was set for a billion dollar showdown.

After 18 Months of Litigation, Case Dismissed – Permanently

If obtaining a settlement was the plan, the next 18 months of litigation failed to give much away. The discovery process, for example, led to claims that certain materials were being withheld based on unsupported assertions of privilege. Deposition notices served on the CEOs of both BMG and Concord were challenged and eventually quashed.

Anti-piracy company OpSec Online, which had been hired by the plaintiffs to track infringement carried out on BitTorrent networks, was required to hand over considerable amounts of data. That included copies of its source code (23,693 files) and more than a million pages of documents.

Altice also sought to obtain information from the RIAA relating to repeat infringer lawsuits targeting other ISPs. Then on Wednesday this week, the parties suddenly advised the court that the lawsuit was over.

Having been dismissed with prejudice, the matter won’t see the light of day again, but the filing itself offers no information to explain why. Similar cases against other ISPs were dismissed just hours before trial , so that seemed the most likely outcome here.

Parties Agreed to Settle

Confirmation that the parties did indeed settle can be found in Altice SEC filings.

“On July 1, 2024, we and the BMG Plaintiffs settled this lawsuit and as part of the settlement we expect a stipulation of dismissal with prejudice to be filed by the parties on or before August 20, 2024. The settlement amount was accrued for as of June 30, 2024,” the document reveals.

No specific settlement figure is mentioned by Altice, but the company does reference its ongoing legal battle with Warner, Sony, and other members of the RIAA, which makes similar ‘repeat infringer’ claims while also seeking massive damages.

“We intend to and are vigorously defending against the claims in the Warner Matter. In addition to contesting the claims of liability, we have an affirmative defense under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act that, if successful, would preclude or limit monetary damages against us in connection with some or all of the Warner Plaintiffs’ asserted claims. There can be no assurance as to the outcome of this litigation,” the filing warns.

The stipulation of dismissal (with prejudice) is available here (pdf)

From: TF , for the latest news on copyright battles, piracy and more.

Widening discussions on the seemingly limitless potential of AI suggest profound implications for most jobs in the future.

Of those with the greatest chance of surviving the AI revolution, fighting crime online must be one of the stronger candidates. With piracy close to ubiquitous, work opportunities exist, to put it mildly.

The realm of content protection may yet have an AI savior waiting in the wings, but until a model can accurately determine fair use and conduct complex, error-free investigations, humans retain the upper hand. Meanwhile, the entertainment industry has more content protection work than ever before, much of it with an ideal completion date of yesterday.

Larissa Knapp , the new head of content protection at the MPA, will undoubtedly meet challenges like these head on. This week the former FBI official revealed the culmination of an investigation in the United States where basic mistakes may have contributed to the services’ downfall. The press release itself includes some interesting presentational changes.

US-Based IPTV Services Shut Down

The anti-piracy profiles of the MPA, and more recently ACE, are without parallel in the United States. At least in part, high-profile lawsuits and in some cases criminal actions, have dampened pirates’ enthusiasm for becoming the next ‘victim’ of Hollywood’s piracy grinder. As a result, actions against IPTV providers in the U.S. are relatively rare.

On Wednesday, however, ACE announced the shutdown of at least four branded IPTV services on home soil; AnytimeTV (the most prominent), Cobra Servers, Elite Servers, and Lost Highway Media. Customers of some of these services have been complaining about their sudden disappearance since early June.

According to ACE, when combined these platforms had “thousands of subscribers” and “hundreds of thousands of domain visits annually.” The big question is whether the profit made on subscriptions will be enough to pay off ACE.

$2m+ Settlement Agreed

The closure of these services will be governed by a settlement agreement between ACE and three U.S.-based IPTV operators. ACE has mentioned reaching settlement agreements with platform owners in the past, but in this matter the financial aspect is given a much higher profile than usual.

ACE reports that the three operators have agreed to pay over $2 million in compensation; through unofficial channels TF has previously heard of settlement offers in the hundreds of thousands, but with so many cases, the sample is too small to predict the true range.

“These landmark settlements should serve as a warning to illegal streaming operators about the severe penalties they will face for breaking copyright law, including legal actions, substantial financial settlements and fines, and jail time,” Knapp says .

In most cases, settlements require domains used in connection with pirate services to be signed over to the MPA. Those specifically mentioned by ACE in this matter include anytimetv.us, anytimewebhosting.com, elite-servers.com, losthighway-media.com, and webhostsupply.com. Some already divert to the ACE seizure page.

Paying the Price for Zero Security

Groups like ACE never reveal exactly what makes one service more likely to face enforcement measures than another. Nevertheless, factors such as size or strategic position in the piracy market are typically weighed against prudent use of resources and prospects of success. Political considerations and matters related to overarching strategy may influence decisions too, but in some cases, enforcement action simply makes sense.

Services increasing in popularity, such as those recently shut down, may require more urgent attention. When that can take place on home soil, enforcement is likely to be more effective. When the domain anytimetv.us appeared in the mix, that may have made things much more interesting.

Unlike foreign domains, WHOIS records for .us domains cannot be hidden, with registrars facing potential repercussions for not following the rules. That’s why pirate sites usually avoid .us domains and prefer options such as .to, where the opposite is true.

In this case, public WHOIS records for anytimetv.us included a real name and a real physical address. With those details established, related information becomes easier to find.

On LinkedIn, for example, one service was presented by its owner as a regular business, using a name that can be cross-referenced with WHOIS records and other online databases. Similarly, engagement on Trust Pilot and other review platforms suggested that potential enforcement was hardly considered, if it was considered at all.

Whether ACE offered one or any of these services an early opportunity to shut down is unknown. What we can say with absolute certainty is that at least one of them was compromised years ago when legal action targeted an entity responsible for supplying their streams. A company name, banking details, and details of monthly payments made for streams, were obtained by an anti-piracy group as part of a much larger haul, which eventually entered the public domain.

Given the sheer number of platforms ACE has shut down since 2017, running a pirate IPTV service so openly with the above as background, makes zero sense. Even if we entertain the idea that identities, addresses, and profiles on social media, are simply elaborate fakes placed online for misdirection purposes, the bottom line still tells exactly the same story: services shut down and profits confiscated. And that’s just the lucky ones.

From: TF , for the latest news on copyright battles, piracy and more.

Late 2019, Internet provider Cox Communications lost its legal battle against a group of major record labels, including Sony and Universal.

Following a two-week trial, a Virginia jury held Cox liable for its pirating subscribers. The ISP failed to disconnect repeat infringers and was ordered to pay $1 billion in damages.

Cox challenged the verdict through several routes and earlier this year booked a partial victory. The Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals confirmed that the ISP was contributorily liable for pirating subscribers, but reversed the vicarious copyright infringement finding. A new trial will determine the appropriate damages amount given these new conclusions.

Following this ruling, Cox asked for the damages question to be put on hold, as there were other matters pending. Among them, a planned Supreme Court petition filed a few hours ago.

Cox Files Supreme Court Petition

In a public statement today, Cox warns that the current ruling jeopardizes internet access for all Americans, as it forces ISPs to terminate the accounts of subscribers who are repeatedly accused of sharing copyright-infringing content.

“Terminating internet service would not just impact the individual accused of unlawfully downloading content, it would kick an entire household off the internet,” Cox notes.

“This would have a particularly devastating impact on rural communities with only one service provider or where an alternative provider offers slow or unreliable connections — termination would leave a household with no viable access to the internet.”

After the Cox case was docketed, similar lawsuits were filed against other Internet providers, including Grande, Verizon, RCN, Bright House, Frontier and others. Some complaints were settled and others remain pending.

These cases have already changed how Internet providers handle repeat infringers on their networks and “terminations” are now more common. According to Cox, however, the current verdict goes too far.

Draconian Liability Regime

In its petition Cox writes that, in its view, the lower court’s ruling stretches service provider liability too far. As a result, ISPs find themselves ‘forced’ to terminate subscribers, who may have done little wrong.

“Cox Communications — which provides internet service to millions of homes and businesses — must either terminate internet connections previously used for infringement or else face liability for any future infringement.

“In doing so, the court installed the most draconian secondary-liability regime in the country, one that departs from three other circuits, defies this Court’s precedents, and threatens mass disruption across the internet,” Cox warns.

The Supreme Court petition aims to place the ‘repeat infringer’ issue into perspective, noting that pirating accounts represented roughly 1% of its total subscribers. Of this group, Cox was able to motivate 95% to stop.

The remaining ‘repeat infringers’ were able to continue. The music companies argued that the ISP could and should have terminated these accounts, some 57,000 in total, but Cox believes this is a step too far.

Universities, Hotels and Military Housing

Cox argues that subscribers shouldn’t lose their internet access based on unadjudicated third-party accusations; especially since the repeat infringers included business accounts with many simultaneous connections.

“In practice, the accounts that continued to rack up notices without termination were regional ISPs, universities, hotels, military housing, and other business accounts used by hundreds or thousands of individual users,” the petition reads.

Disconnecting universities and hospitals could have devastating consequences but Cox also continued to provide its services to many regular subscribers, who also continued to pirate.

While these examples are less dramatic, the company argues that disconnecting regular subscribers can also have serious consequences.

“Even with respect to individuals who did, in fact, infringe, loss of internet access is very heavy punishment for illegally downloading two songs. A person without internet might lose their job or have to drop out of school.”

Cox hopes that the Supreme Court will take on the case and limit secondary liability for Internet providers. The current Fourth Circuit ruling weighs heavily in favor of rightsholders, to the detriment of ISPs and their subscribers, the petition argues.

Two Questions

In recent weeks, Cox has put considerable effort into explaining its position to the press. When doing so, there was a strong focus on the potentially devastating impact on Internet users.

While this is undoubtedly an important issue, the matter at hand is ultimately about service provider liability. And the key questions presented to the Supreme Court don’t directly involve hospitals in rural areas.

This case is about who is responsible for Internet piracy. Is it only the users who actually share pirated material, or can ISPs be held responsible too?

The Fourth Circuit concluded that Cox “materially contributed” to the infringements of its subscribers, because the company knew about this activity and didn’t terminate their accounts.

That leads Cox to present the following question to the Supreme Court:

“Did the Fourth Circuit err in holding that a service provider can be held liable […] merely because it knew that people were using certain accounts to infringe and did not terminate access, without proof that the service provider affirmatively fostered infringement or otherwise intended to promote it?”

The second question is indirectly related to the damages award. The jury awarded the maximum statutory damages of $150,000 per work, which is typically reserved for “willful” infringement.

Cox questions whether simply knowing about copyright infringements of subscribers is willful, if the company didn’t know that its own conduct was illegal.

“Did the Fourth Circuit err in holding that mere knowledge of another’s direct infringement suffices to find willfulness under 17 U.S.C. § 504(c)?” the petition reads.

Landmark Case

If the Supreme Court decides to take on this case, it will undoubtedly result in a landmark decision. The music companies also indicate that they may present their own petition to the court, which will make the matter even more crucial.

Both sides are expected to garner support from third parties, which are expected to file supporting briefs on their behalf. After that, the Supreme Court will have to decide whether to take on the case.

Whatever the ultimate outcome, Internet providers could certainly benefit from extra clarity on the “repeat infringer” problem. Whether they will like the eventual outcome, remains to be seen.

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A copy of Cox Communication’s Supreme Court petition is available here (pdf)

From: TF , for the latest news on copyright battles, piracy and more.

More than twelve years have passed since Megaupload became the prime target in a high-profile law enforcement operation, which led to the collapse of Kim Dotcom’s file-storage empire.

While time moved on, the New Zealand-based ‘Internet personality’ was still waiting to hear whether he would be extradited to the United States where a criminal prosecution is pending.

With the stakes this high, no legal resources are being spared. Many millions of dollars have been poured into this legal battle since 2012, and the end is still nowhere in sight.

In 2020, the Supreme Court of New Zealand ruled that Kim Dotcom and his colleagues could indeed be extradited to the United States. However, this still wasn’t set in stone, as judicial reviews and appeals were still pending.

Megaupload defendants van der Kolk and Ortmann eventually opted for a deal. The pair pled guilty but were allowed to serve their respective 30 and 31-month prison sentences in New Zealand. Dotcom, meanwhile, vowed to ‘fight on’ .

“I’m now the last man standing in this fight and I will continue to fight because unlike my co-defendants I won’t accept the injustice we have been subjected to,” Dotcom said two years ago.

Justice Minister Signs Dotcom Extradition

In recent years, Dotcom hasn’t shied away from the public eye, often sharing controversial takes on political and societal events. In the background, however, potential extradition loomed, before reaching its conclusion earlier today.

According to Stuff , New Zealand Justice Minister Paul Goldsmith informed Kim Dotcom that he will be deported to the United States to stand trial.

“I have received extensive advice from the Ministry of Justice on this matter,” Goldsmith said. “I considered all of the information carefully, and have decided that Mr Dotcom should be surrendered to the US to face trial.”

“As is common practice, I have allowed Mr Dotcom a short period of time to consider and take advice on my decision. I will not, therefore, be commenting further at this stage,” the Justice Minister added.

Dotcom has always denied the charges and has left no stone unturned in support of his defense. This means that the latest extradition decision will be challenged as well.

‘I Have a Plan’

The Ministry of Justice confirmed the extradition order earlier today. Dotcom revealed the decision on social media earlier in the week, describing New Zealand as an “obedient U.S. colony”.

“[T]he obedient US colony in the South Pacific just decided to extradite me for what users uploaded to Megaupload, unsolicited, and what copyright holders were able to remove with direct delete access instantly and without question. But who cares? That’s justice these days,” he wrote on Tuesday.

Today, Dotcom followed up , stating that he has “a plan,” “loves New Zealand,” and doesn’t intend to leave the country.

The nature of Dotcom’s plan is unknown but if the past twelve years are any indication, he won’t let any adverse decision pass without a fight.

From: TF , for the latest news on copyright battles, piracy and more.

People being arrested for pirate IPTV activities isn’t anything new, not in the UK or indeed anywhere else, but it is mentioned a lot more than before.

The terminology currently used to describe offenders seems to have changed too. Last month it was reported that 40 illegal ‘IPTV operators’ were served with official warnings, some via an in-person visit by police and anti-piracy group FACT.

For smaller players, subscription resellers, for example, the strategy makes complete sense. Yet the idea of having a similar doorstep chat with known wholesale suppliers doesn’t add up at all. Ambiguities such as this make it more difficult to determine the significance of new developments, all of which are currently reported by UK tabloids on a single level – extreme – regardless of the facts.

Five years ago, events were significantly less distorted, meaning that big events stood out as they should.

Action Takes Out Two Alleged IPTV Operators

In March 2019, raids in London carried out by police, Trading Standards, and anti-piracy outfit Federation Against Copyright Theft (FACT), targeted what was described as a “£3 million fraud operation” to “download, encrypt and widely distribute TV content from Sky, Virgin and BT.”

While the terminology could’ve benefited from a tweak or two, this had all the hallmarks of a raid against an actual provider of illegal streams, which is still relatively rare in the UK. Confirmation that searches of shop premises and homes had uncovered equipment valued at £100k – computers, servers, and set-top boxes – that reportedly enabled the operation, left little doubt that this was important news.

Two men were arrested on suspicion of fraud , with police claiming that the suspects generated £600,000 per year from their activities. A list of 3,000 subscribers to their services found in the shop, was reportedly in the hands of the authorities. As is usually the case, we asked a few questions about the event at the time to guide our reporting but, as is mostly the case, answers never arrived.

Five Years Later, Suddenly More News

In an announcement to the press on Tuesday, it was revealed that two brothers had been sentenced to “a total of 11 years in prison” for “operating an illegal streaming service” that offered subscriptions to premium television content, including Sky.

Amir Butt, aged 56 from Ilford, was sentenced to seven years in prison while his brother, Ammar Hussain, aged 39 and also from Ilford, was sentenced to four years.

Given the length of Butt’s sentence, clarity is obviously important. However, while the announcement clearly states that Hussain was “found guilty of conspiracy to defraud over a seven-year period” (August 2012 to March 2019), the offense or offenses for which Butt received a significantly longer sentence seem to be missing. (separation of statements below for illustration purposes) .

Of course, we could assume that all seven years were for conspiracy to defraud but at minimum, that wouldn’t account for Butt failing to appear, or indeed any other offenses, such as they exist. Offenses are normally described in fine detail, but not here.

The next paragraph covering the raids in March 2019 also raises questions. It notes that Butt was arrested at his home address and Hussain was arrested at a shop in Ilford, which had operated under various company names over the years including Tech & Sat Ltd, Techsat, and Tech + Sat.

“The pair sold annual subscriptions, which provided access to a range of sports and entertainment content, for £200 each,” the statement continued.

Other details presented to the media five years ago have been changed or reassessed, made less specific, or even removed.

Scale of the Fraud Diminishes

Having previously claimed to have seized a list of 3,000 subscribers, the announcement yesterday adjusted to “they were believed to have thousands of customers.”

The £3 million “fraud operation” is now described as “depriving legitimate tv providers in excess of £1m.” An early claim of “£600k per year” in revenue now reads “hundreds of thousands of pounds in revenue,” presumably in total.

It would be naive to believe that all evidence meets prosecution standards, so reductions should never come as a surprise. Equally, generating hundreds of thousands of pounds selling illegal access to a legitimate service’s content, is still a very serious offense, one that has custodial sentence written all over it.

The Nature of the Operation Remains Unclear

But even more difficult to square is the following statement:

Cash and a substantial amount of equipment, including Sky set-top boxes and viewing cards, were seized from the addresses for further forensic analysis.

Given that Sky set-top boxes are clearly visible in Google Street View images of the shop, the fact that some were seized along with some cash is hardly a surprise.

What the statement does not say is that the equipment was actually used to “download, encrypt and widely distribute TV content” nor does it make any attempt to reveal what the forensic analysis actually found.

These details are extremely important when attempting to weigh the significance of any enforcement action. The strong suggestion earlier, that a provider had been shut down, would mean actual content being removed from the market. Removing a reseller, no matter how big, would leave the supply intact and a gap in the market easily filled with minimal effort.

Unlike in the United States, where court records are mostly freely available, in the UK there’s a much greater reliance on press releases issued by those directly and commercially involved, despite prosecutions being funded by the public purse. Requests to see actual court records are always denied.

Prison Sentences For Two, One Had Better Things to Do

There’s no question that in appropriate cases, convictions are critical to deter criminality; indeed, during the last 24 hours all information we’ve managed to uncover suggests that custodial sentences were entirely appropriate and almost inevitable. Yet another surprise here is that the trial actually took place nearly a year ago and ran for four weeks.

While that indicates a plea of ‘not guilty’ for Hussain, it appears that Butt may have had something more important to do; for reasons that aren’t explained, he failed to appear for his own trial.

That somehow led to Butt being found guilty first, for whatever crime or combination of crimes that justified a sentence almost double that of his business partner, Hussain, who received his four-year sentence at Snaresbrook Crown Court just this week.

Finally, it’s worth highlighting that the overwhelming majority of news related to IPTV in the UK is managed as part of the BeStreamWise anti-piracy campaign . Viewed through that prism, there’s a clear incentive to only report news in a way that supports the campaign, rather than reporting the details as-is, warts and all.

From: TF , for the latest news on copyright battles, piracy and more.

Library Genesis ( LibGen ) is one of the oldest shadow libraries on the Internet, offering free access to millions of books and academic papers people otherwise have to pay for.

The site’s origins reportedly trace back to the Soviet Union’s underground publishing culture ‘ samizdat ,’ which was used to bypass state censorship in the last century.

LibGen launched around 2008 as a digital version of the same concept. In addition to bypassing ‘local’ censorship, it’s widely used to circumvent the paywalls of major international publishing companies, serving as a popular ‘pirate’ site for (text)books and academic works.

Rightsholders have attempted to take the site offline several times over the years, but none led to concrete results. Today, Libgen.rs, Libgen.is and Libgen.st remain online, but downloading pirated books turns out to be quite a challenge.

Inactive LibGen Admin and Downloads?

Starting last weekend, regular LibGen downloads suddenly stopped working. The outage suggests that there’s a problem with the storage servers, but there’s no official explanation.

The lack of communication doesn’t come as a complete surprise. A few months ago, the site already appeared to have some internal struggles. The person in charge of the site’s coding has reportedly been ‘inactive’ for a while.

This personnel issue may explain the database errors and technical trouble that resulted in broken functionality a few months back. It may also explain why new torrents are not being added on a weekly or daily basis. Presently, the latest torrent archive on the site dates back to April.

Whether these earlier reports are related to the current download problems is unknown, but without any official update or mention from the people behind the curtain, it could mean that LibGen is no longer actively managed.

Legal Troubles

Technical issues can admittedly have various causes. Aside from a lack of manpower, it’s also possible that servers were targeted by complaints from rightsholders. This seems less likely, however, as most parts of the website remain online.

LibGen has previously been the subject of legal action, however. Through court orders, LibGen is now blocked in several countries, but taking the operation permanently offline has proven quite the challenge, not least since the identities of its operators are unknown.

Last year, LibGen was also targeted in U.S. court by several prominent textbook publishers including Cengage, Macmillan Learning, and Pearson Education. The companies requested millions in damages and an injunction to shut down various domain names.

LibGen hasn’t responded to this complaint in court, and a request for a default judgment is currently pending. If that’s granted, LibGen can lose control over some of its domain names.

There is no indication that the current download problems are related to this court case, however. The domain names in question still work.

LibGen has many millions of monthly users, some of whom have shared their frustrations on social media, including on Reddit . This includes many students, who were hoping to pirate textbooks ready for the start of the school year, which is no longer an option today via any of the official domains.

Time will tell whether this is the end of LibGen, or just a temporary hiccup.

From: TF , for the latest news on copyright battles, piracy and more.

At the height of the cyberlocker boom in the early 2010s, Uptobox was already an established name.

The platform remained online despite a fierce anti-piracy crackdown that led to the demise of Megaupload, Hotfile, and many other file-hosting services.

Uptobox faced some trouble with payment providers but still managed to grow in the decade that followed. Like many other sites of this kind, it was frequently abused by pirates to share copyrighted content. To address this, Uptobox had a takedown policy to swiftly remove those files in response to rightsholders’ reports.

Uptobox Blocked and Raided

Takedowns couldn’t prevent the site from being targeted in a site blocking order in France, where roughly a third of the site’s 30 million monthly visits originated. The site didn’t agree with this decision and, as a countermeasure, informed users how the DNS blockades could be circumvented.

For the less technically inclined, Uptobox vowed to contest the site blocking measures in court. However, before it could do so, rightsholders including Columbia, Paramount, StudioCanal, Warner Bros, Disney, Apple, and Amazon, showed that they were a step ahead .

In September 2023, French cloud hosting providers Scaleway and OpCore pulled the plug on Uptobox’s servers. Initially, it wasn’t clear who was behind the action, but it later transpired that the Alliance for Creativity and Entertainment ( ACE ) was a driving force behind it.

The server shutdowns were backed by a court order and ACE pointed a finger at two French nationals, who operated the platform from the Dubai-based company ‘Genius Servers Tech FZE’.

Uptobox Challenges Blocking Order

While Uptobox initially remained quiet, it didn’t plan to throw in the towel so easily. The company was very critical of the shutdown, not least since it was partly based on the EU’s ‘ Piracy Watch List ,’ which relies heavily on input from rightsholders and is not a legal determination.

In recent months, Uptobox pushed back by challenging the blocking action in a Paris court. While Genius Servers hoped to turn the case around, Marc Rees at l’Informé reports that this initial attempt failed. Last Friday, the Paris judicial court denied Uptobox’s request to lift the blocking measures.

In its defense, Uptobox explained that it had a proper takedown policy, under which 98.9% of the links reported by movie industry groups were promptly removed.

Genius Servers further argued that 70% of the files on its site were never downloaded, and that another 15% were downloaded less than 10 times. The company also stressed that Uptobox had never encouraged its users to store pirated content on its platform.

The court wasn’t convinced by these arguments, in part because they were based on information that was gathered after the fact. The company didn’t share the underlying database for review either.

Rightsholders Paint a Pirate Picture

Instead, the court went along with evidence presented by rightsholders, including a report compiled by a representative from the Association for the Fight against Audiovisual Piracy ( ALPA ).

The report revealed that ALPA uploaded a copyright infringing file last year to test the takedown policy. While the uploaded content could indeed be removed, the representative was able to re-upload the same content later, without any countermeasures.

ALPA further found that in a random sample of 25,504 active French-language links that were available in February 2023, the majority (84%) “referred to infringing works”. The millions of Uptobox.com takedown notices that were processed by Google further corroborates the ‘infringing’ nature, the court heard.

The same also applies to Uptobox sister site Upstream, which was blocked by the same court order due to its association with pirated content.

Takedowns are not Enough

The rightsholders arguments were sufficient for the Paris court to keep the existing blocking measures in place.

“It is clear from all these elements that the Uptobox service was used predominantly to illegally make content available to the public, violating copyright and related rights, and that the operator knew or should have known this,” the court concluded.

An important aspect of the judgment is that simply processing takedown notices was deemed insufficient. Uptobox did remove pirated files but, according to the court, it had an obligation to do more. For example, by sanctioning repeat infringers, or by making sure the pirated content couldn’t be re-uploaded so easily.

Specifically, the court writes that Uptobox “does not take any proactive measures to prevent counterfeiting on its platform, such as combating the re-uploading of deleted files, matching files, or providing contact tools for rightsholders”.

According to the court’s reading of EU law and jurisprudence, including the CJEU’s Cyando/YouTube ruling , these additional measures are required.

Finally, the court found that Uptobox’s freedom to conduct a business, which is a fundamental EU right, was not violated as Uptobox is seen as a predominantly infringing service. The copyrights of users, who may have shared private files on the platform, does not get in the way of the blocking order either, the court ruled.

From: TF , for the latest news on copyright battles, piracy and more.

For pirate IPTV blocking orders to be effective, the time between spotting a domain or IP address to be blocked, and the blocking actually taking place, needs to be as short as possible.

For legal, practical, and technical reasons, the gap seems unlikely to shorten to the extent most rightsholders would like, but in general the process seems to be heading in that direction.

In an order dated July 26, top tier French football leagues Ligue 1 McDonald’s and Ligue 2 BKT requested blocking of dozens of domains linked to the provision of pirated live match streams. On August 2, the Paris Judicial Court issued a blocking order, having taken just a week, including a weekend, to process an application that could’ve taken weeks or months just a few years ago.

Permission to Tackle Piracy That Hasn’t Happened Yet

The 2024/25 first and second division football championships don’t even start until August 17, so the new order aims to tackle piracy that hasn’t happened yet. In the UK, the Premier League has been taking a similar approach for years, with the High Court – and now the Paris Court – weighing piracy services’ past behavior against the likelihood of piracy resuming when the new season begins.

“LFP welcomes this decision by the Paris Judicial Court, which makes it possible to combat piracy of the Ligue 1 McDonald’s and Ligue 2 BKT championships in their entirety,” LFP said in a statement welcoming the new order.

“While this decision is the fourth blocking injunction obtained by the LFP since the creation of the system to combat sports piracy in January 2022, it is the first to have been obtained before the start of a season, on the basis of findings of serious and repeated infringements of the LFP’s audiovisual exploitation rights during the previous season.”

Reacting to Countermeasures

Without the ability to respond quickly to countermeasures deployed by pirate sites and services, blocking orders would risk outliving their usefulness before the end of the first match. However, under Article L. 333-10 of the French Sports Code , LFP has access to a powerful tool; after referring the matter to telecoms regulator ARCOM, new sites and services illegally broadcasting LFP content can be swiftly added to the existing blocklist.

On the website of the Paris Court, the domains authorized for blocking in the August 2 order initially appear somewhat chaotically, despite being the most important part of the order.

Fortunately, the list is repeated much more clearly at the end of the order so skipping directly to the end is advised. That being said, for reasons that don’t stop at sheer volume of domains, the need for clarity and pinpoint blocking will only increase moving forward.

Most of the complexities are directly connected to moves made by pirate sites as they attempt to avoid blocking, with any resulting confusion or uncertainty probably considered a bonus.

Domains and Subdomains

The domain list is quite specific when detailing exactly what should be blocked. For example, the domain lol-foot.ru appears along with the subdomain www.lol-foot.ru which currently lead to the same page, but that could be subject to change. The domain www.tv1337.buzz currently points to the same domain that lol-foot.ru and www.lol-foot.ru now redirect to (euro2024direct.ru)..

Sportplus.live and www.sportplus.live appear to redirect to a subdomain of sportplus.live that changes depending on the visitor’s geographical location. In the order fr22.sportplus.live is specified for blocking, but it would be trivial to switch that to almost anything else.

When visited directly, some domains on the list give the impression that they’re non-functional. That hasn’t stopped LFP from finding out that’s not actually the case, but it’s nevertheless interesting to see some of the tactics deployed.

When tested a few hours ago, visitors to bobres.net were greeted with nothing due to a lack of DNS records, while www.bobres.net (listed for blocking) remained fully functional. Another domain, kiwi-ip.tv, appears broken but the subdomain identified by LFP (app.kiwi-ip.tv) has a DNS record mapping it to ip.sltv.be. This domain/subdomain is also listed in the court order but visitors using a browser won’t find much since it’s probably configured for set-top boxes.

Visitors to ardenty.xyz might conclude that the domain is still parked but as LFP has clearly discovered, ahgs.ardenty.xyz is very much alive. The list goes on, and is always subject to change.

Careful….

Finally, it’s worth highlighting three similar domains/subdomains in the list that if blocked at the main domain level, risk affecting any number of innocent parties.

The domains/subdomains kooralive.pp.ua, www.kooralive.pp.ua, and www.kooralive1.pp.ua, all use pp.ua which appears to be a service offering free domains and currently has at least 270 subdomains.

Targeted blocking of the subdomains kooralive, www.kooralive, and www.kooralive1 should present no issues but if pp.ua was targeted in error, that would wipe out at least 270 services and probably more.

The list of fully-qualified domains (FQDN) as they appear in the order are listed below with the main domains and other related data appearing in the table underneath.

lol-foot.ru, www.lol-foot.ru, www.tv1337.buzz, sportplus.live, www.sportplus.live, fr22.sportplus.live, play-iptv.com, m3u.sf-m3u.me, premiumiptv.me, fbxc.cc, crackstreams.sbs, www.crackstreams.sbs, hes-goals.tv, www.hes-goals.tv, kooralive.pp.ua, www.kooralive.pp.ua, www.kooralive1.pp.ua, rojadirectaenvivo.re, www.rojadirectaenvivo.re, www.seehdgames.co, seehdgames.co, pre.soccerstreamslinks.com, vl.streameast.top, tarjetaroja.ws, www.tarjetaroja.ws, totalsportek.ai, www.totalsportek.ai, nbatvhd.online, www.nbatvhd.online, sportsbay.dk, www.sportsbay.dk, telerium.run, www.telerium.run, popcorniptv.com, ahgs.ardenty.xyz, www.bobres.net, ip.sltv.be, app.kiwi-ip.tv, dfwu.link, ip1.mypsx.net, supremtv.fr

From: TF , for the latest news on copyright battles, piracy and more.