In 2021, a group of film production companies including Millennium Media and Voltage Pictures sued internet provider WOW! at a federal court in Colorado, accusing it of turning a blind eye on piracy.

The stakes in this legal battle were incredibly high. After filing their original complaint, the plaintiffs recently expanded their claims to cover roughly 375 films, meaning potential statutory damages could be as high as $56 million.

WOW! previously tried to have the case dismissed, but a federal judge in Colorado rejected that attempt last year. After that, the case moved forward with both sides submitting cross-motions for summary judgment, hoping to get the matter resolved before trial.

DMCA Safe Harbor

The summary judgment requests focused on a single but important question: whether WOW! is protected by the safe harbor provisions of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.

Under Section 512 of the DMCA, an internet provider can avoid liability for pirating subscribers if it has adopted and reasonably implemented a policy to terminate repeat infringers in appropriate circumstances. This safe harbor is an affirmative defense, which means WOW! must show that it qualifies for this protection.

WOW! argued that it did , pointing to its documented policies and procedures for handling copyright complaints. However, the film companies argued the opposite, claiming WOW! failed to enforce its policy in any meaningful way and did not terminate subscribers who were repeatedly flagged for piracy.

Summary Judgment Denied

In March, Judge Daniel D. Domenico ruled on the competing motions. After reviewing the evidence in the light most favorable to each side in turn, he declined to rule for either party, finding that neither was entitled to win as a matter of law.

“I cannot say that WideOpenWest is entitled to the DMCA safe harbor as a matter of law. Nor can I say, construing the evidence in the light most favorable to WideOpenWest, that the plaintiffs are entitled to judgment as a matter of law that it is not. A reasonable juror could find for either side on a number of material fact issues,” Judge Domenico wrote.

This order was initially shielded from public view, but it was published a few days ago, after both parties informed the court that their legal battle was over.

Settlement Instead of a Verdict

Instead of going to trial, the parties filed a joint stipulation of dismissal, and the court terminated the case on May 28.

The dismissal is with prejudice, which means that the film companies can’t bring these claims against WOW! again. Each side agreed to pay for its own costs and attorneys’ fees. There is no mention of a settlement payment by either side.

Denying summary judgment left the safe harbor question unanswered. However, in light of the Supreme Court’s Cox decision earlier this year, that question matters less than it might seem. Cox had already lost its own safe harbor years earlier, but still won at the Supreme Court on the liability standard itself.

This means that even if WOW! would have ultimately lost its safe harbor, the film companies would still be required, under the new Cox precedent, to show that the Internet provider intended its service to be used for copyright infringement. This intent can be shown in only two ways: the ISP actively induced infringement, or the service it offers has no substantial lawful uses.

The new liability rules have significantly changed the legal playing field for copyright infringement cases and several lawsuits have been settled or voluntarily dismissed after the Cox ruling came out in March.

—

A copy of the stipulation of dismissal is available here (pdf) . Judge Domenico’s order on the motions for summary judgment can be found here (pdf) .

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

Z-Library is one of the largest shadow libraries on the Internet, hosting millions of books and academic articles that can be downloaded for free.

The site has defied all odds over the past years. It continued to operate despite a full-fledged criminal prosecution by the United States, which resulted in the arrest of two alleged operators in Argentina.

These two Russian defendants remain wanted by the United States . According to the most recent information we have, the defendants escaped house arrest in 2024, while awaiting their extradition, and vanished into thin air .

By now, however, it is clear that these two defendants were not vital to the site’s survival. Z-Library continued to expand its reach, despite their legal troubles.

Private White Label Mirrors

Over the years, Z-Library lost control over many of its domain names, in part due to several interventions from U.S. law enforcement. In addition, the site’s domain names are blocked by court orders in many countries, including the UK, France, India, and Germany.

Z-Library has numerous domain names in use, which helps to address these blocking and seizure efforts. In addition, the site allows its users to operate their own mirror domains. This functionality was first announced last summer and earlier this month a major update was released.

The shadow library now allows people to run a mirror with their own branding, which can be password protected to add more exclusivity.

“Mirror sites […] now support branding customization and optional login‑only access. In practice, this means you can run your ‘own’ version of the library at a separate domain, with your visuals and your access rules,” Z-Library notes.

The new private white-label functionality allows anyone to launch their own custom-branded library. This is not without risk, as mirror operators could face criminal and civil repercussions.

Practically, the new functionality will also help to evade domain blocking efforts. After all, password-protected mirrors without any Z-Library branding are not easily detected by rightsholders.

20% Revenue Share, Paid in Crypto

The blocking circumvention feature was also mentioned as a key functionality when Z-Library first invited users to host their own mirrors last year. Interestingly, this also provided a revenue generating opportunity.

After registering the mirror domain, Z-Library promises to share 20% of the donation revenue through this site, which will be paid in crypto.

“As compensation, we will transfer 20% of all donations from your mirror to you to keep the mirror running. The funds will be transferred to your crypto wallet,” Z-Library’s mirror page announced.

This revenue share model is still on offer today, as shown above. The only major change is that Cloudflare-registered domains are not supported. Whether this is the result of an enforcement effort or a technical challenge, remains unknown.

Bracing for the Next Takedown

The mirrors are not the only sign that Z-Library is preparing for more enforcement actions. The site also rebuilt its main menu, which now lists every active domain in one place, alongside a downloadable file that contains the same links.

That offline file is noteworthy. By handing users a copy of its access points to keep on their own devices, Z-Library is hedging against the day many of its domains go dark all at once.

All in all, Z-Library is making access to its site as resilient as possible, while also turning its own users into a distribution network that is harder to seize or block than any central set of domains.

This expansion continues even as the U.S. criminal case remains frozen. The two indicted operators remain fugitives after fleeing house arrest in 2024, and the docket has shown no public movement in more than two years.

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

To protect rightsholders, YouTube regularly removes, disables, or demonetizes videos that contain allegedly infringing content.

For years, little was known about the scope of these copyright actions, but that changed in late 2021 when the streaming platform published its first-ever copyright transparency report .

This report and the subsequent updates have shown that roughly 99% of all copyright claims on YouTube are handled through the Content ID system . Since most claims are automated, without any human intervention, access to this powerful removal tool is restricted to a few thousand formally approved rightsholders.

2.5 Billion Claims

YouTube’s latest Transparency Report shows that the number of automated claims continues to rise. In 2025, the platform processed 2,502,941,368 Content ID claims, up 14% from 2.2 billion the year before.

Of the approved 7,626 rightsholders who currently have access to the system, 4,454 actively used it. These numbers are both slightly down from last year. YouTube doesn’t provide a specific reason, but notes that access can be revoked as part of regular evaluations.

“To keep the ecosystem safe, we regularly evaluate partners’ access to CID to ensure they demonstrate an ongoing need for scaled rights management. In some cases, these evaluations may result in removing a partner’s access to Content ID and matching them with a more appropriate copyright management tool,” the transparency report reads.

As clearly shown above, the number of rightsholders participating in the Content ID system pales in comparison to the 295,531 rightsholders who filed removal requests through the standard webform , or the 173,338 that used the automated Copyright Match Tool .

Nonetheless, Content ID’s 4,454 active rightsholders were responsible for 99.48% of all copyright actions on the video streaming platform. Compared to earlier years, the automated Content ID takedowns continues to increase, both relatively in percentages and in absolute numbers.

Millions of Disputed Claims

As with any takedown tool, uploaders and third-party rightsholders are not always in agreement. In fact, there are millions of Content ID disputes every year.

YouTube reports that of all Content ID claims, uploaders have disputed 12,840,608, or 0.51% of the total. That’s a relatively small percentage but still a rather large absolute number. For comparison, uploaders appealed 9.9% of all webform removals, which translates to little over 267,000 counter-notices.

In 2024, uploaders won 70% of disputes. In 2025 that figure dropped slightly to 67.42%. However, those who decided to challenge the rejection though YouTube’s process, won their appeal 75% of the time.

The flow chart on the right illustrates the full appeals process.

Not all disputes are resolved though YouTube’s internal Content ID process. If uploaders persist that their content was erroneously claimed, while rightsholders argue the opposite, YouTube will reinstate the video, at which point rightsholders have to take the matter to court.

In 2025, 10,698 claims reached this stage, but fewer than 1% of these resulted in a lawsuit, YouTube notes.

Outside the Content ID system, YouTube also flags abuse of its DMCA takedown webform as a problem. In 2025, more than 6% of all these removal requests were believed to be “a likely false assertion of copyright ownership” by YouTube’s review team.

“The attempted abuse rate through the webform was more than 10 times higher than the attempted abuse rate across all other copyright removal tools,” the transparency report notes.

A $12 Billion Revenue Machine

While YouTube’s Content ID can be a significant source of frustration for uploaders, it has become a substantial revenue stream for rightsholders. Instead of removing infringing content, rightsholders chose to monetize over 90% of all Content ID claims in 2025.

YouTube reports that cumulative ad revenue paid to rightsholders through Content ID has now exceeded $12 billion since the system launched. That figure includes data up to December 2024 and will likely be billions higher today.

It is clear that not being present on YouTube at all is no longer an economically wise decision. On the contrary, for some rightsholders a viral infringing upload is no longer a problem, but a revenue opportunity intstead.

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

Last month, the U.S. Trade Representative ( USTR ) issued its annual Special 301 Report, signaling which countries can make improvements on the IP enforcement front.

In the most recent report, the USTR applied the “Priority Foreign Country” status for the first time in thirteen years, calling out Vietnam for persistent failures to deter online piracy and counterfeiting.

In recent years Vietnamese authorities reportedly helped to shut down several pirate sites, including the massive Fmovies network, which served billions of visitors. However, the criminal prosecution of Fmovies resulted in suspended prison sentences, which lack a serious deterrent effect by U.S. standards. Meanwhile, many piracy operations continue to link back to the country.

Under the Trade Act of 1974, the Priority Foreign Country designation triggers a 30-day window for USTR to decide whether to open a formal investigation. Late last week, Ambassador Jamieson Greer formally made that call.

USTR Opens Investigation

The Section 301 investigation will examine whether Vietnam’s policies and practices related to copyright protection and enforcement are unreasonable or discriminatory, hindering U.S. commerce. Judging from the comments released by the USTR, it believes that Vietnam’s shortcomings are serious.

“While Vietnam has recently taken some steps toward addressing IP concerns that the United States has chronicled over many years in USTR’s Annual Special 301 Report, IP infringement in Vietnam continues to impair the competitive position of U.S. innovators and creators,” Ambassador Greer said.

“We need to see Vietnam resolve these long-standing concerns, including on a range of IP enforcement issues, in a manner that is sustained and that deters future IP infringements,” he adds.

With the announcement of the investigation, USTR also opened a consultation round, asking stakeholders to comment on their trade-related experiences with Vietnam. This includes the piracy challenges and concerns, which are highlighted as the primary concern in the federal register notice.

Piracy First

The notice mentions that Vietnam’s failure to provide effective enforcement against online piracy is the primary reason why Vietnam is designated as a priority foreign country. The USTR wants to see significant improvement on that front.

“The United States has repeatedly raised strong concerns about Vietnam’s role in online piracy worldwide,” the notice reads.

“Vietnam remains a significant source of online piracy and continues to host popular English-language copyright infringement sites and services that target a global audience. Some of these sites provide piracy services, including extensive libraries of pirated movies and TV shows.”

The USTR notice doesn’t mention any sites and services by name. However, its earlier Notorious Markets report flagged HiAnime, Myflixerz, and MegaCloud as key threats . Interestingly, these sites all went offline in the days and week before the USTR’s Special 301 Report came out.

Whether the operators of these sites are targeted in criminal investigations in unknown. However, USTR’s notice mentioned that pirate site operators in Vietnam have had it relatively easy in recent years.

There have been criminal prosecutions in high profile piracy cases, including the cases against the operators of BestBuyIPTV and Fmovies. However, these resulted in mild suspended sentences with relatively low fines. According to USTR, these lack a proper deterrent effect.

“Despite Vietnam having criminal laws that provide for substantial fines and years of incarceration for copyright infringement, the defendants in recent criminal prosecutions received suspended sentences and were only ordered to pay relatively low financial penalties,” USTR writes.

“The operators of these sites and services likely based themselves in Vietnam because Vietnam’s IP enforcement efforts have historically lacked the follow-through and substantial penalties needed to deter infringement.”

The problem runs deeper than lenient sentences alone. According to the federal register notice, rightsholders face informal pressure from Vietnamese enforcement authorities to file administrative complaints rather than pursue civil or criminal enforcement. These administrative proceedings carry no meaningful deterrent effect.

Tariffs are on the Table

The request for public comments asks stakeholders to weigh in on “what action, if any, should be taken, including tariff and non-tariff actions.” This means that different types of trade sanctions are now on the table.

The USTR must make its final determination within six months and right holders and other parties have a month to submit their comments.

Behind the scenes, USTR will also consult with the Vietnamese government to see if the concerns can be addressed before it makes a decision, in consultation with President Trump. If Vietnam engages, in order to avoid possible sanctions, we might see more enforcement actions taking place in the country.

In that sense, the recent disappearances of Myflixerz and MegaCloud , and the shutdown of HiAnime , may have been a primer for what’s to come.

—

The Federal Register Notice is available here (pdf) . The USTR press release can be found here .

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

The Internet is full of cheap IPTV services that offer access to premium sports, films, and television content for a fraction of what legal services charge.

This has turned into a multi-million dollar business for several similar networks, which are typically more professional and organized than the ‘hobby’ pirate projects that emerged two decades ago.

The professionality of these services is matched by the severeness of the law enforcement response. The modern-day piracy networks, which are not easily threatened by a cease and desist notice, are now often targeted in international law enforcement operations. This includes KRATOS 2.

Operation KRATOS 2

The KRATOS 2 operation was coordinated by Bulgaria’s General Directorate for Combating Organised Crime ( GDBOP ), with operational support from Europol .

This wasn’t an isolated crackdown, but a months-long operation that ran from September 2025 to April 2026, Besides Bulgaria, it also involved Belgium, Croatia, France, Greece, Ireland, Italy, the Netherlands, Poland, Romania, Spain, the United Kingdom, and the United States.

The results, based on their sheer numbers, appear to be substantial. Press releases report that nine criminal organizations were dismantled, 29 people arrested, while another 86 suspects identified. In total, investigators carried out 148 house searches.

With 72 ongoing criminal investigations and 59 cases referred to judicial authorities, there may be further fallout in the future. However, while these numbers are significant, there is no concrete mention of any targets.

Reported Domains and Removed URLs

In the past, we have regularly reported on concrete actions, where domain names were seized, such as the Streameast and Fmovies crackdowns. However, the press release issued by Europol and others is more carefully worded.

There is no mention of domains that were seized or taken down. Instead, it mentions “169 reported domains”. Similarly, it mentioned that 27,332 URLs were removed, without disclosing where these URLs were removed from, and if these belonged to one or more domains.

The list of operational statistics adds that 722,961 infringing objects were identified since September last year. While that sounds impressive, we recently reported that Google removes nearly 10 million URLs from its index every day, following requests from the takedown outfit Link-Busters.

Private sector partners including ACE/MPA, LaLiga, UEFA, Friend MTS, beIN, and Irdeto, helped identify an additional 4,370 piracy-linked domains, 18,331 associated IP addresses, and 397,384 URLs that were flagged for suspension.

Again, these numbers are significant, but relatively modest compared to traditional DMCA removal campaigns.

No Names?

Interestingly, the press release does not mention any names either. There are no platforms mentioned, no operator names identified, and no seized domain names cited. This stands in sharp contrast to the exact figured that are reported on the broader operation.

It is possible that the authorities don’t want to interfere with ongoing investigations, but some more context on the targets and what was actually achieved in terms of deterrence, would be helpful.

With the information at hand, it is essentially impossible for journalists to independently verify the operation’s impact. Whether the 27,332 “removed” URLs represent meaningful anti-piracy disruption, or whether these links were immediately replaced is unknown.

Many news outlets repeat the headline figures, without giving any context or asking any questions. While that may be what’s intended by the authorities, it’s not particularly helpful from a news providing perspective.

Bulgaria’s Removal from the U.S. Piracy Watch List

The KRATOS 2 operation follows the original operation, conducted during the summer of 2024. That action targeted a piracy network that catered to 22 million users. It resulted in 11 arrests, the seizure of 29 servers and 270 IPTV devices, and the takedown of 100 domains.

TorrentFreak covered that operation under its Italian name, Operation Takendown . No piracy platform name was disclosed in that case either but Bulgaria also had a leading role there.

Most Bulgarian coverage on KRATOS 2 cited the name figures and details that were covered by the Europol press release. However, they also add a specific note that went unmentioned by the official communication channels.

A few weeks ago, the United States Representative ( USTR ) removed Bulgaria from its Special 301 Piracy Watch List due to “ significant enforcement actions ” and “criminal prosecutions.” This included a torrent tracker crackdown, but the KRATOS operations likely played a key role as well.

According to Europol, KRATOS 2 as part of an ongoing enforcement campaign so it’s possible that a third phase will follow. Whether that will include names in addition to numbers, has yet to be seen.

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

Link-Busters is the preferred anti-piracy partner for many of the world’s largest book publishers, including Penguin Random House and HarperCollins.

The Dutch company is also the most active DMCA sender at Google by a wide margin, flagging billions of ‘pirate’ URLs in the search engine, mostly from shadow libraries.

6.5 Billion and Plateauing

Google recently updated its search transparency report, showing that Link-Busters now accounts for more than 6.5 billion delisting requests. This is more than a third of the nearly 18 billion requests Google received in total.

The 6.5 billion is also more than four times the volume of the next-largest reporting organization, Rivendell, which sits just under 1.5 billion. MG Premium, the enforcement arm of Pornhub parent Aylo, follows with roughly 1.26 billion removal requests.

These mind-boggling numbers are all the more impressive when you realize that the company only started ramping up its takedown efforts less than three years ago. In record time, its output dwarfed that of all competitors. However, its takedown activity no longer appears to be growing.

Looking at Link-Busters’ takedown activity shows a near-vertical rise through 2023 and into 2024, which flattened into a plateau in the 60 to 70 million weekly range about a year ago. The volume is enormous, but it is no longer growing.

The shape of the data suggests a hard ceiling rather than a coincidental drop in infringing material to report. To find out what is keeping these URL reports on a plateau, we reached out to Link-Busters, but the company did not respond to a request for comment.

“The Quantity They Need”

TorrentFreak asked Google directly whether it enforces a daily cap, and if so, why. A spokesperson for the search engine did not confirm or deny the existence of a hard cap. Instead, they pointed out that trusted rightsholders get what they need.

“We offer a Trusted Content Removal Program (TCRP) that provides a path for bulk submissions from trusted partners, and work to ensure the accuracy of these submissions and that these partners can submit the quantity they need,” a Google spokesperson said.

The response did not directly answer our question. It is, however, more reserved than the response we received in 2013, when Google said there was “no limit on the number of DMCA notices” rightsholders may send in.

At the time, Google was accused of enforcing a cap of 10,000 URLs per day per rightsholder, which anti-piracy group BREIN was trying to raise to 40,000 . In that context, a ceiling of roughly 10 million reported URLs per day for a single reporter would be a 1,000-fold increase.

3.5 Billion Reported URLs a Year….

At the current rate, Link-Busters is reporting roughly 3.5 billion URLs per year. The company has a good standing when it comes to the accuracy of its notices, with less than a percent being duplicates or other errors. That’s well below the average error rate.

Finally, it should be noted that nearly 8% of the reported URLs were not indexed by Google, yet. Google removed these URLs proactively to accommodate rightsholders.

Whether the 70 million weekly figure is a deliberate limit, a technical bottleneck, or simply the point at which Link-Busters’ own crawling capacity tops out, remains a mystery for now. What is clear is that the line was drawn nearly a year ago and appears to be holding.

Ceiling or not, Link-Busters remains comfortably the largest DMCA sender Google has ever seen. No other company comes even close to hitting the same 70 million ceiling.

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

There are a handful of traditions we have at TorrentFreak, and remembering the first raid on The Pirate Bay is one of them.

It was not only the first major story we covered, it also shaped how the piracy ecosystem evolved over the years. And it changed the lives of the site’s co-founders, who were eventually convicted.

What many people may not realize, however, is that without a few keystrokes in the site’s early days, it would be a distant memory today.

This is what happened.

On May 31, 2006, less than three years after The Pirate Bay was founded, 65 Swedish police officers entered a datacenter in Stockholm. They had instructions to take the site’s servers offline as part of a criminal probe, following pressure from the US government.

As the police were about to enter, Pirate Bay co-founders Gottfrid Svartholm and Fredrik Neij knew something wasn’t quite right. Both men said they had noticed being tailed by private investigators. This time, however, their servers were the target.

At around 10:00 in the morning, Gottfrid told Fredrik that there were police officers at their office. He asked his colleague to head down to the co-location facility and get rid of the ‘incriminating evidence’, although none of it, whatever it was, related to The Pirate Bay.

A Crucial Backup

As Fredrik was leaving, he suddenly realized the problems might be linked to their torrent tracker. Just in case, he decided to make a full backup of the site.

When he arrived at the co-location facility, those concerns turned out to be justified. Dozens of police officers were floating around, taking away dozens of servers, most of which belonged to clients unrelated to The Pirate Bay.

In the days that followed, it became clear that Fredrik’s decision to back up the site was probably the most pivotal moment in its history. Because of that backup, the Pirate Bay team managed to resurrect the site within three days.

“The Police Bay”

The entire situation was handled with the mockery TPB had become known for.

Unimpressed, the operators renamed the site “The Police Bay”, complete with a new logo shooting cannonballs at Hollywood. A few days later the logo was replaced by a Phoenix, a reference to the site rising from its digital ashes.

Instead of shutting it down, the raid propelled The Pirate Bay into the mainstream press, not least due to its swift resurrection. The publicity also triggered a huge traffic spike, exactly the opposite of what Hollywood had hoped for.

The US Pushed Sweden

Although the raid and the subsequent criminal investigation were carried out in Sweden, the US Government played a major role behind the scenes. For many years the scale of that involvement was unknown. However, information obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request in 2017 helped to fill in some blanks .

The trail started with a cable sent from the US Embassy in Sweden to Washington in November 2005, roughly six months before the raid. The Embassy wrote that Hollywood’s MPA met with US Ambassador Bivins and, separately, with the Swedish State Secretary of Justice. The Pirate Bay was one of the top agenda items.

“The MPA is particularly concerned about PirateBay, the world’s largest Torrent file-sharing tracker. According to the MPA and based on Embassy’s follow-up discussions, the Justice Ministry is very interested in a constructive dialogue with the US. on these concerns,” the cable read.

The Embassy explained that Hollywood would like Sweden to take action against a big player such as The Pirate Bay.

“We have yet to see a ‘big fish’ tried, something the MPA badly wants to see, particularly in light of the fact that Sweden hosts the largest Bit Torrent file-sharing tracker in the world, ‘Pirate-Bay’, which openly flaunts IPR,” the cable writer commented.

Fast forward half a year and, indeed, 65 police officers were ready to take The Pirate Bay’s servers offline. While there is no written evidence that US officials were actively involved in planning the investigation or raid, indirectly they played a major role.

This is backed up by further evidence. In a cable sent in April 2007, the Embassy nominated one of its employees, whose name is redacted, for the State Department’s Foreign Service National (FSN) of the year award. Again, The Pirate Bay case was cited.

“REDACTED skillful outreach directly led to a bold decision by Swedish law enforcement authorities to raid Pirate Bay and shut it down. This was recognized as a major achievement in Washington in furthering U.S. efforts to combat Internet piracy worldwide.”

We don’t know if the employee in question received the award. In hindsight, however, the raid did very little to deter piracy.

The Aftermath

The swift comeback turned the site’s founders into heroes for many. The story made headline news around the world, and in Stockholm people waved pirate flags in the streets, a sentiment that benefited the newly founded Pirate Party as well.

The raid eventually resulted in negative consequences for the founders. It was the start of a criminal investigation, which led to a trial, and prison sentences for several of the site’s key players.

This became another turning point. Many of the people involved from the early days decided to cut their ties with the site, which was handed over to a more anonymous group, ostensibly located in the Seychelles.

The outspokenness of the early years was replaced by the silent treatment. While some moderators have spoken out, the anonymous operator nicknamed ‘Winston’ remains behind the scenes at all times.

This was made obvious in 2014, when the site disappeared for weeks following another raid at a Stockholm data center. At the time, even the site’s staffers had no idea what was going on.

The Pirate Bay recovered from that second raid too, and remains seen as a piracy icon by many. These days the site bills itself as ‘the galaxy’s most resilient torrent site’, a title it arguably earned on May 31, 2006.

For now, the site remains online, twenty years after Hollywood thought it had seen the last of it. And whoever is in charge today, will likely do everything possible to keep it that way.

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

With millions of regular users, YTS is arguably the most visited torrent site on the internet today.

The current operators ‘unofficially’ took over the YTS brand in 2015 after the original group threw in the towel. Since then, it has amassed a rather impressive user base.

After adopting one of the most iconic piracy brands, YTS faced its fair share of legal troubles. In 2019, the popular torrent site and its operator were accused of mass copyright infringement in multiple lawsuits filed by filmmakers in the United States. Surprisingly, YTS managed to settle these lawsuits to live another day, although that came at a price , also for its users.

More recently, the site dealt with a string of domain troubles. Last November, its long-standing YTS.mx domain abruptly stopped resolving, prompting a move to YTS.lt before the operators settled on the current YTS.bz domain earlier this year.

Extended Downtime

This week, YTS.bz went dark again. Starting a little over a day ago, YTS users noticed that the popular torrent site became unreachable.

The domain currently returns a Cloudflare “504 Gateway time-out” error, with the diagnostic page showing that Cloudflare is working fine, while the origin server does not respond. That typically points to hosting problems.

The site’s other official domains, including YTS.lt, all redirect to the .bz domain and logically point to the same Cloudflare error. For now, there is no working version on the site, besides copycats.

No Official Response

Adding to the confusion, the status tracker ytsproxies.com continues to list the official domains as online. These reports are inaccurate, as each of the listed domains resolves to an error page.

The operators, meanwhile, have offered no explanation. YTS’s official Telegram channel was last updated in March, and the new X account @YTSreal has not mentioned the recent downtime.

This leaves users without an authoritative source of information, a vacuum quickly filled by rumors, as well as unofficial mirrors and copycat sites.

Extended stretches of downtime are not unusual for YTS, however, and the site has so far always resurfaced after previous troubles. Whether that will happen again, and what triggered the current outage, is unknown.

For now, YTS remains dark. If more information becomes available, we will update this article accordingly.

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

The FIFA 2026 World Cup officially kicks off on June 11, hosted across Mexico, the United States, and Canada.

As the largest sports tournament in the world, and with multi-billion-dollar broadcast rights, these events typically increase the demand for pirate streaming sites.

World Cup Host City Raises Piracy Alarm

The organizers of the tournament are also aware of this. This includes Mexico City’s host committee, which published an alarming letter on X a few days ago. The letter, sent to the federal consumer protection agency (Profeco), flagged online piracy as a severe problem that deserves the government’s attention.

The letter explains that social media and news reports have alerted them to the increased popularity of pirate apps and sites, including KaelusTV , ThunderTV , Telelatino , Sunset TV , and PopTV , which operate from a wide variety of domain names.

Social media promotions, including the TikTok ad for one of the many Sunset TV apps, are indeed not difficult to find.

Aside from obvious copyright infringement concerns that put commercial profits at risk, the host city points at another issue. These piracy apps and services can put the personal data of Mexicans at risk by stealing passwords and other info, while also raising malware and fraud concerns.

Consumer Awareness

Mexico City’s host committee argues that a government-backed consumer protection campaign is warranted. The letter offers no public evidence for the fraud claims, and says the platform names themselves came from news reports and social media.

“I most attentively request that the Federal Consumer Protection Agency implement an informative campaign, which we will gladly support, to alert consumers in Mexico about the risks they incur when accepting to contract the services of this type of providers, which can even lead to financial fraud, theft of personal data or passwords, as well as banking data housed on their devices,” the letter reads.

The letter flags piracy as a broad problem, but its only ask is for a government-backed awareness campaign. Despite its targeted message, the response was broad, ranging from anonymous football fans to the country’s president.

Piracy & Commercial Interests

Posting the message publicly on X resulted in a wave of commentary that’s not in favor of FIFA and the rightsholders. Several cited the high costs of the ticket prices, and merchandise, as well as the fact that many World Cup matches are behind a paywall.

In Mexico, where Televisa is the main rightsholder, streaming most matches through its paid ViX Premium service for subscribers with a 499-peso World Cup pass. Mexico’s national team matches will be available freely, but the paywall is likely to increase the interest in pirate services among fans.

“Piracy isn’t the problem; it’s the consequence of the real problem, which is the attempt to elitize football,” one commenter noted .

A negative response from the public, whose interests the host city is partly trying to protect, is somewhat ironic but not unexpected. Instead of talking about malware threats, the entire discussion is dominated by cost issues and commercial interests.

The consumer protection agency, Profeco, responded through César Iván Escalante, who noted that this request has not been made in the official FIFA working groups, which it is already taking part in. Instead, it appears to be an isolated request from the Mexico City host committee.

Escalante notes that the letter, which was sent personally by the director of the stadium hosting the Mexico City matches, asks the government to help protect commercial interests.

“Regarding the transmission rights, what they want is for us to take part in protecting the transmission rights that belong to Televisa, to prevent these platforms from being able to use them,” he said , suggesting that this is more than a simple consumer protection issue.

President Responds

The consumer angle is particularly striking when considering that the Mexican public has been rather critical of the commercial interests.

To a degree, that also applies to Mexico’s president, Claudia Sheinbaum, who also responded to the matter. Sheinbaum would personally prefer the broadcasts to be open, while acknowledging that FIFA has sold them to commercial platforms.

“The broadcast should be open, that’s what I think, but FIFA decided a while ago that the matches are only shown on certain platforms. So, those platforms have to be accessible so that people can watch the matches,” Sheinbaum said, while noting that it is not correct to complain via social media while you are in official meetings with the same people.

Instead of launching an anti-piracy campaign, the president stated that the government will set up massive screens in public squares around the country, so people can watch for free. It is unclear whether the authorities have secured a public rebroadcasting license for these screens.

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