Copyright And Piracy

Reports of a major outage at Spotify spread like wildfire last week. Then a curious picture began to emerge, one of outages only affecting those using modified Spotify apps designed to provide the Premium service at the free tier price. News that the problem has now been fixed and those in need can download new pirate apps, means that many are rushing to do so. Whether that will end well seems to hang in the balance. Could go this way, or could go that.

Popular torrent site TorrentGalaxy has been offline for two weeks, with no explanation from its operators. Members of the site's staff are also being kept in the dark, and many fear the site may never return. To the delight of copyright holders, the site's troubles are now being felt across the torrent ecosystem after the site's upload bots also stopped working.

After 15 years or so of relatively plain sailing, comment platform Disqus is cracking down on sites that violate its terms of service. Pirate manga and anime sites have received notifications that Disqus will no longer provide services after copyright infringement came to its attention. With evictions now spreading to sites including FitGirl Repacks and KickassAnime, it's a race against the clock to export years of chat in the 24/48 hours notice given.

Meta's legal battle over its alleged use of pirated books as AI training data continues to deliver new twists. Fresh allegations that Meta may have shared data with third parties while "leeching" from torrents have added a critical layer to the legal dispute. The book authors obtained permission to put a spotlight on Meta's "leeching" activity and, in addition, requested summary judgment on copyright infringement.

Following a complaint filed two years ago by a national pay-TV broadcaster, police in Germany say they now have three main suspects in custody following a huge law enforcement operation. Over 150 officers carried out searches against 18 suspects in 17 locations, with the aim of shutting down an as-yet unnamed illegal streaming operation with an estimated 30,000 subscribers. The three men, aged between 36 and 59, face charges including suspected commercial computer fraud, which carries a potential sentence of 10 years imprisonment.

We are getting reports of YouTube rolling out an experiment to some accounts where normal videos only have DRM formats available on the tv (TVHTML5) Innertube client.

Anora was the big winner at the Oscars a week ago, securing awards for best picture, actress, and director, among others. This major achievement puts the movie in the spotlight and increases interest through both legal and illegal channels. Fresh data collected by TorrentFreak shows that pirate downloads surged right after the awards ceremony ended.

Sadly there's no recording of this talk.

In December 2024, Microsoft Threat Intelligence identified a malware campaign stemming from pirate streaming sites. Using iframe malvertising redirector URLs to generate revenue, and redirects up to five layers deep, malware payloads hosted on GitHub, Discord and Dropbox, acted as a dropper for additional payloads hosted elsewhere. Microsoft says the goal was to steal information and it believes almost a million devices were infected.

So...this one is a bit left-of-field.

According to court documents, Steven R. Hale, 37, of Memphis, worked for a multinational company that, among other things, manufactured and distributed DVDs and Blu-rays of movies. From approximately February 2021 to March 2022, Hale allegedly stole numerous “pre-release” DVDs and Blu-rays, that is, discs being prepared for commercial distribution in the United States and not available for sale to the public. These included DVDs and Blu-rays for such popular films as “F9: The Fast Saga,” “Venom: Let There Be Carnage,” “Godzilla v. Kong,” “Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings,” “Dune,” and “Black Widow.” Hale allegedly sold the DVDs and Blu-rays through e-commerce sites. At least one pre-release Blu-ray that Hale allegedly stole and sold, “Spider-Man: No Way Home,” was “ripped” — that is, extracted from the Blu-ray by bypassing the encryption that prevents unauthorized copying — and copied. That digital copy was then illegally made available over the internet more than a month before the Blu-ray’s official scheduled release date. Copies of “Spider-Man: No Way Home” were downloaded tens of millions of times, with an estimated loss to the copyright owner of tens of millions of dollars.

Nice!

New research on ad-funded piracy centers on manga site Tu Manga Online (TMO). After switching to a new domain 'zonatmo.com' around September last year, it took just 90 days to transform a new start into half a billion visits per month. According to the research, the site's revenue generating scheme is an open secret. Yet, for unknown reasons, nobody tries to stop it.

Nintendo celebrated victory over French file-hosting service 1fichier.com this week. The French Supreme Court denied the filehoster's appeal and upheld a piracy liability ruling in favor of the gaming company. The ruling confirms that hosting platforms can be held liable if they fail to remove pirated content when asked.

The website "braflix.gd" recommended on the megathread has been taken down and now points to a "alliance4creativity.com" Domain

A single DMCA anti-circumvention notice, sent by Nintendo on the one-year anniversary of its 2024 lawsuit against Yuzu, showed just how much things can change in a year. Targeting nine repos linked to Switch emulator Ryujinx, the domino effect led to the removal of 4,238 repos. Elsewhere, the distilled components of Yuzu's demise can be found in recent takedown notices

Members of the Alliance for Creativity and Entertainment (ACE) filed two separate copyright infringement lawsuits yesterday, targeting the alleged operators of IPTV services including 'Outer Limits IPTV', 'Shrugs' and 'Zing'. Amazon, Netflix and several major Hollywood studios demand an end to the infringing activity and an award for damages, which could run to millions of dollars.

How do they know?

Stolen from mastodon

For those who keep up with which games coming up will ship with DRM, it's come to light that the new Elden Ring title will use GuardIT

The BBC, Premier League, and Sky have submitted a joint response to the UK investigation into Google's search dominance, calling for tougher anti-piracy measures. The rightsholders argue that Google's current efforts to combat piracy are insufficient to prevent piracy. They propose a "Know Your Customer" (KYC) requirement for advertisers and a transparent repeat infringer policy to address the issue.

Maybe you're used to all of this now, but my attempt is to share an older style of gaming news post. Something maybe a lil bit like the old gaming blogs / news sites that the internet used to have. Casual, opinion-based, image-heavy and maybe-filled-with-things-you-already-spotted.

In response to several court orders, Cloudflare geoblocked more than 400 sports streaming piracy domain names on its pass-through service in France last year. Notably. Cloudflare says that, despite requests, it has not blocked any websites through the 1.1.1.1 Public DNS Resolver. That last comment is relevant to the renewed site blocking push in the United States.

For people who pirate HBO service products, no changes, your lifetime subscription to piracy is still valid.

# Unleashed Recompiled is an unofficial PC port of the Xbox 360 version of Sonic Unleashed created through the process of static recompilation. This means you get to play Sonic Unleashed on your PC with the following benefits:

Before the Oscars are handed out early March, the Motion Picture Association (MPA) has announced its own annual awards. Wicked director Jon Chu is a proud recipient, but the bulk of the accolades go to lawmakers and the U.S. Government's IPR Center, who helped to combat online piracy. Perhaps not coincidentally, those lawmakers could help to push a pirate site blocking bill over the line.

Crosspost from: https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/38810596

# # # After my previous post 24 hours ago (the link to which is here), I asked you all if the way I share *mostly* Steam Deck news here is okay, and if you'd enjoy more of these.

This marks the first release of the app since 2022! Read more about the update and obstacles we overcame to make this happen in the blog post.

🤡

As a preface, I used to do this a *lot* on Reddit. My hobby (sounds odd) was to make a little old-school-blog-style post, detailing what *I found interesting* in gaming in the last week or so. I got a name for it, for a time, but having long-since abandoned reddit I thought I might try the same thing here, if you'll indulge me!

nvm, it stalled after a couple of seconds

Following the arrest of Telegram founder Pavel Durov in France last summer, some positive changes were reported. The criminal probe is not centered on piracy, but Telegram appeared more responsive. Some reported that the speed at which takedown requests were processed, went from more than 24 hours to less than 20 minutes, for example.