For years, the major record labels and movie studios waged a campaign to hold US internet providers responsible for pirating subscribers.

Alleging contributory and vicarious infringement, rightsholders argued that ISPs which failed to disconnect repeat infringers should pay for the consequences.

This theory fell apart in March, when the Supreme Court reversed a billion-dollar verdict against Cox Communications. The court held that an Internet provider is not liable for contributory infringement simply because it keeps serving subscribers it knows have been flagged for piracy.

RCN now wants the New Jersey federal court to apply this precedent and end a case that has been running since 2019.

No Inducement, No Claim

In a motion for reconsideration filed yesterday, RCN argues that Supreme Court’s Cox ruling destroyed the legal foundation of the labels’ amended complaint.

An ISP is no longer contributorily liable simply for selling internet access while knowing that some subscribers will use it to infringe. Failing to cut the connections of those subscribers off does not establish intent either.

After Cox, liability now requires proof that the provider actively encouraged infringement through specific acts, or that its service has no substantial non-infringing uses. Neither applies here, RCN argues, noting that the case is “virtually identical” to the Cox lawsuit.

The labels’ second claim, vicarious infringement, should also be dismissed according to RCN, as it requires proof the ISP profited directly from the piracy itself. The Fourth Circuit ruled in Cox that monthly subscription fees do not count, and the Supreme Court declined to hear the labels’ appeal on that point.

RCN argues that subscribers pay the same price whether they pirate music or browse social media, so the fees are not a “direct financial benefit” from infringement.

The ‘Last’ Case Standing

RCN stresses that the other repeat infringer cases against ISPs have already been dismissed.

“[I]n the wake of Cox, the Labels and other rightsholders dismissed every other secondary copyright infringement case against an ISP—including the movie industry’s virtually identical lawsuit against RCN. The same should have happened here,” they write.

As reported earlier, the labels dropped their cases against Verizon and Altice within weeks of the Cox ruling. The film companies behind titles including The Hitman’s Wife’s Bodyguard dismissed a near-identical lawsuit against RCN with prejudice, and a parallel case against WideOpenWest ended a month later.

The precedent reached RCN’s sister ISP Grande Communications too. Both providers now operate under the Astound Broadband brand. Formally, the labels’ case against Grande is not over yet, however, as Grande still prefers to have a formal win on the books.

By RCN’s account, every other secondary infringement case against a US internet provider is now over, with its own case being the exception.

A Four-Year Standoff

So why is this lawsuit still pending in court after seven years?

According to RCN, the labels never meant to go to trial. The company argues that the case was filed in 2019 as leverage in settlement talks with Grande. After that, it remained pending due to a dispute over internal DMCA records.

In May 2022, Magistrate Judge Tonianne J. Bongiovanni stayed all fact depositions until document discovery was resolved. The stay has not lifted since, despite at least 20 discovery letter briefs. RCN believes the labels are holding on for a reason.

“Instead, it seems that the Labels view the ongoing privilege dispute as a form of leverage. In other words, the Labels seem to believe that RCN might be willing to pay money to avoid a resolution of that issue,” RCN tells the court.

The labels have yet to respond to the motion. RCN asks the court to vacate its 2020 order, dismiss the amended complaint with prejudice, and has requested oral argument.

—

A copy of RCN’s motion for reconsideration and supporting memorandum, filed at the U.S. District Court for the District of New Jersey, are available here (pdf) and here (pdf) .

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

Last September, Anthropic paid $1.5 billion to settle a class action lawsuit brought by book authors over seven million pirated titles.

That settlement closed one case, but it did not stop other rightsholders from pursuing their own legal claims.

In a complaint filed at the Northern District of California late last Friday, several music publishers including Sony and Warner, argue that the same book data haul included many of their songbooks, sheet music collections, and lyrics.

“Indeed, each pirated work that Defendants torrented was likely shared thousands if not tens of thousands of times, depriving Music Publishers of substantial revenue,” the complaint notes.

The lawsuit alleges direct and contributory infringement through the torrenting activity itself, as well as broader infringement through scraping and AI training, and also mentions DMCA violations for stripping copyright notices. CEO Dario Amodei and co-founder Benjamin Mann are named personally as defendants.

“A Cute Little LibGen Babysitter”

The publishers’ complaint relies largely on fact that were already established in earlier Anthropic litigation . A lot of the quoted material comes from the Bartz v. Anthropic case, where the book authors secured the $1.5 billion settlement.

According to the Bartz case, Mann discussed the LibGen torrenting openly in Anthropic’s internal Slack channels and shared a screenshot of his activity with colleagues. He described a program he wrote to manage the download as “a cute little libgen babysitter,” the complaint states.

The complaint also notes that Anthropic’s co-founder was aware of LibGen’s dubious legal status. Internal messages note that he characterized the site as “sketchy AF.”

Anthropic’s own Archive Team went even further and called it a “blatant violation of copyright.” Despite these concerns, Anthropic’s CEO Amodei approved the torrenting.

“Dr. Amodei admitted that Anthropic ‘ha[d] many places from which’ it could have legally purchased these copyrighted works for training, but instead torrented them because doing so was faster and free,” the complaint reads.

“A Popular (and Illegal) Library”

When Mann discovered that Pirate Library Mirror (PiLiMi) was ready for torrenting in the summer of 2022, he shared the link with colleagues and wrote, “[J]ust in time!” Another Anthropic employee responded, “zlibrary my beloved,” the complaint notes.

Anthropic engineers then compared the five million books that they already torrented from LibGen against seven million available on PiLiMi, and downloaded the two million that were new. According to internal records, employees knew what they were dealing with, describing PiLiMi as “a popular (and illegal) library.”

The publishers allege that Anthropic’s torrenting activities included hundreds of songbooks and sheet music collections. Exhibit A lists specific titles, including The Beatles Complete Scores, Best of Taylor Swift Songbook, and Bon Jovi These Days.

Even after Anthropic became “not so gung ho about” training AI models on pirated material “for legal reasons,” it kept the files in its central library anyway, the complaint adds.

Rewriting Pirate Library History

While the torrenting allegations rely on established court records, the complaint’s version of the history of pirate libraries isn’t entirely accurate. It claims the FBI shut down LibGen in late 2021, after which pirates copied its contents to create Z-Library.

In reality, LibGen was never shut down and remains online today , while Z-Library was founded in 2008 as a LibGen mirror, growing into one of the largest pirate ebook libraries in its own right.

In fact, it was Z-Library that lost its domains to the FBI, in November 2022 , months after Anthropic wrapped up its downloads.

These errors don’t change the core allegations, but for a complaint built on the details of shadow library piracy, the history is notably shaky.

One Torrenting Spree, Three Lawsuits

The first two counts of the complaint target the torrenting activity itself, not the AI training that followed. Because BitTorrent simultaneously uploads whatever a user downloads, the publishers argue that Anthropic didn’t just reproduce their works, it distributed them to countless others.

This is a theory rightsholders have used against individual torrent users for over two decades. Here it is applied to a company with a reported $2 trillion IPO on the horizon, which allegedly “sustains and normalizes” the BitTorrent piracy ecosystem through its own use.

The lawsuit is the third to arise from the same torrenting activity. Book authors settled for $1.5 billion, and music publishers including Concord, Universal, and BMG filed a similar lawsuit in January. And the latest lawsuit might not be the end of it either.

Anthropic sees things differently and believes that its activities were fair use.

“This is the third lawsuit from the same lawyers, recycling allegations from cases already before the courts,” a spokesperson told Ars Technica , adding that AI training is fair use “as the court held in Bartz” and that the company will defend itself “robustly.”

That fair use ruling applied to the training, however, not the acquisition. The same court previously noted that the downloading itself is “straightforward piracy but at massive scale.”

The publishers demand up to $150,000 in statutory damages per infringed work which, with tens of thousands of works listed, could add up to billions of dollars.

—

A copy of the complaint, filed at the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, is available here (pdf).

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

Two weeks ago, someone calling themselves ‘Cyberleek’ started posting gameplay footage from Grand Theft Auto VI, months ahead of the game’s November launch.

Take-Two Interactive immediately responded with a wave of takedown notices and a cluster of DMCA subpoenas at a federal court, aiming to hunt down whoever was behind the leak.

DMCA subpoenas are a special legal tool that allows rightsholders to request information from third parties, without first having to sue someone. In this case, the game company used it for a broad sweep, targeting thousands of Discord users.

TorrentFreak previously covered how that net also widened to Microsoft, X, and Google’s YouTube. And in new filings, it appears that the investigation is moving forward.

On Friday, a day after Rockstar streamed its extended look at the game on Netflix, Take-Two went back to court. The company requested another subpoena targeted at Discord, but this time it asked to keep the details out of public view.

A Sealed Second Discord Subpoena

Take-Two’s initial DMCA subpoena request was public. This allowed news outlets to dig through the entire demand and identify the three servers it named, including one tied to content creator DarkViperAU .

That request is still live today. According to Take-Two’s latest statements, it was issued on August 21 and “promptly served on Discord,” although the court’s records don’t list the clerk’s issuance, as would typically be the case.

Notably, Discord’s Ryan Rigney stated on X on August 24 that the company had “not yet been served with a subpoena from Take Two,” adding that Discord intended to “evaluate the validity and scope before responding.”

Whether that evaluation played any role in the second subpoena’s more targeted request is unknown, but the sequence is worth highlighting.

The second subpoena Take-Two requested at the New York federal court is different. Instead of publicly listing the Discord targets, the game company requests the court to file it under seal. This means that the targets are completely blacked out.

What we do know is that this second request is more narrowly targeted, focused on one additional Discord user and a previously identified user.

“Take-Two has identified one additional Discord user and obtained additional identifying information for a previously identified Discord user, as well as additional information concerning the community servers identified in its prior subpoena for which it now seeks more targeted information,” the request reads.

“Rapidly Evolving” Investigation

According to Take-Two, the secrecy is warranted because filing the request in the open would benefit the alleged infringers.

The motion to seal argues that the subpoena attachment “reveals highly sensitive, confidential information about an ongoing investigation into copyright infringement and the misappropriation of Take-Two’s confidential information.”

“Public disclosure of this information could compromise Take-Two’s ongoing investigation and even tip off the alleged infringers as to the nature and progress of Take-Two’s investigation and information Take-Two has gathered about the infringement,” Take-Two writes.

Take-Two fears that the infringers (it uses plural here) could then destroy or conceal important evidence.

The company stresses that its investigation “is rapidly evolving and ongoing,” which is also why the second subpoena seeks “different information” than the first.

For now, the new demands are hidden from view. The court has yet to rule on whether they will stay that way and the subpoena has not been issued yet.

YouTube Subpoena Dropped

The same “rapidly evolving” framing was also mentioned in a follow-up to Take-Two’s YouTube subpoena, with the opposite result.

Take-Two had previously asked Google to identify the people behind three YouTube personas tied to a leaked video: CyberLeeks, Surfer24k, and CyberLeek_ar_io.

Judge John P. Cronan declined to sign off on the request without further information on how the targets are linked to the video. Take-Two did provide some additional details, but ultimately dropped the request, citing the evolving investigation and stating that it no longer needs the YouTube data.

“Take-Two has determined it no longer needs the particular information requested. Thus, Take-Two respectfully withdraws its subpoena request,” it informs the court.

Take-Two reserves the right to return to Google with a new request later. For now, however, the YouTube subpoena is off the table, while the Discord demands become the focal point. Whether those will lead Take-Two to the infringers has yet to be seen.

—

A copy of Take-Two’s second Discord subpoena request and its motion to seal can be found here (pdf) and here (pdf). Take-Two’s withdrawal of the Google subpoena is available here (pdf). Judge Cronan’s memo endorsement is available here (pdf).

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

Under U.S. law, rightsholders have an option to identify alleged copyright infringers, without having to file a lawsuit.

Instead, they can request a DMCA subpoena . These documents are typically signed by a court clerk and don’t require any judicial oversight.

These DMCA subpoenas allow rightsholders to obtain the personal details of anonymous alleged infringers through third-party service providers. In recent years, this legal shortcut has shown to be a capable OSINT tool, with the Alliance for Creativity and Entertainment (ACE) as the most avid user.

This week, the Motion Picture Association, representing ACE, filed two new subpoena requests at federal courts in California. The first subpoena targets Internet infrastructure company Cloudflare and the second targets Discord users who allegedly operate pirate servers.

Miruro.to, Aniworld.to, and 47 Other Domains

The first request, filed at the Central District of California, lists 49 domain names. On behalf of ACE members including Disney, Netflix, Warner Bros., Universal, Paramount, and UEFA, the MPA asks Cloudflare to identify the people who run the associated accounts.

Three domains clearly stand out. The anime network Miruro is in the lead per Similarweb’s data, with 45 million monthly visits for the .to domain, and 37 million for the .tv variant. The German-language anime and television site Aniworld.to draws an estimated 23 million visits a month, most of them from Germany.

The rest reads like an international tour of well known streaming piracy brands. There are clones trading on the 123movies, Fmovies, and SolarMovie names, Spanish-language Pelisflix mirrors, the Chinese-language Gimy network, Hindi download portals, and some StreamEast-branded sports streaming portals that show matches from ACE member UEFA’s competitions.

A full list of all domain names is available below . These include many mirror and copycat sites that only have minimal traffic.

For every domain, ACE wants Cloudflare to hand over names, physical addresses, IP addresses, phone numbers, email addresses, payment details, and account histories. Whether this will yield any usable intel has yet to be seen, as pirate site operators tend to register false information. However, ACE hopes it points to at least some of the people involved.

Two Discord Servers

The second subpoena targets Discord and is filed at the Northern District of California. On behalf of ACE members, the MPA is requesting information linked to two servers and two accounts. These servers allegedly posted links to pirated copies of films including Wreck-It Ralph and Shutter Island, as well as episodes of Invincible and The Pitt.

The legal paperwork isn’t very informative as it only lists numeric server, account, and channel IDs, without any server or usernames attached. We could not link this information to any server names, but we do know when they were created.

Every Discord ID is stamped with the moment it was created. For one of the servers, the user, channel and server were all created in September 2025, in the span of 30 minutes. After that, it remained active until earlier this month.

The second server is much older. It was created in September 2020, while the account flagged alongside it was created last November. This means that the account that allegedly posts the content isn’t the one that created the server.

The Servers are Gone

At the time of writing, both servers have already been deleted. Whether Discord pulled the servers or the operators deleted them first is not clear, but MPA specifically asked Discord to take action in a separate takedown notice.

MPA informed Discord that the sole purpose of these servers is to “link Discord users to an online service” that provides access to pirated movies and series. This suggests that the Discord server was linked to a pirate streaming portal.

“We request that Discord remove or otherwise disable access to the server,” MPA’s notice reads.

Notably, the subpoena request is much more targeted than the DMCA subpoena Take-Two requested in its search of the GTA 6 leaker. That subpoena requested information of thousands of users connected to three servers. Here, it only seeks identifying information on the operators of the two servers and two specific accounts.

The DMCA subpoena requests have yet to be signed off by a court clerk, which means that the subpoenas have yet to be issued.

—

The Cloudflare DMCA subpoena request, filed at the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California, is available here (pdf) . The Discord subpoena request is available here (pdf) and was filed at the Northern District of California.

The 49 domains named in the Cloudflare subpoena are:

Aniworld.to, miruro.tv, flixbaba.mov, flixbaba.is, flixmomo.tv, encontrei.info, fastflix.top, seeflix.to, empire-streaming.us, fmoviess.org, yesmovies.ag, tinyzone.org, solarmovie2.com, streamzy.org, watchnest.to, watchnest.org, indexflix.to, indexflix.org, imdb.su, streamimdb.ru, miruro.ru, pelisflix200.work, pelisflix200.club, pelisflix200.best, pelisflix1.cc, pelisflix1.bio, pelisflix1.de, coflix.esq, gimy.tv, gimy.now, gimyv.com, 94580.net, movieffm.net, gimytv.biz, gimytube.com, miruro.to, miruro.bz, repelisplus.my, 94itv.app, 99itv.net, solarmovies.co, 123moviesfun.is, moviesmod.at, moviesmod.zone, nupload.top, thestreameast.fun, direttecommunity.online, livetv903.me, streameasti.is.

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

Belgium’s Department for Combating Online Infringement ( BAPO ) regularly issues site blocking decisions, which are grounded in orders from the Brussels Business court.

These blocking efforts yield some results but pirate sites often switch domain names quickly, frustrating the enforcement efforts.

With a series of new decisions issued this week, Belgium’s anti-piracy department is trying to tackle the piracy problem more directly. Instead of blocking the sites, they compel domain name registrars to identify the associated operators.

Domain Registrars and a Registry

As with the blocking effort, the five decisions are linked to an order from the French-speaking Business Court of Brussels . Four decisions are addressed to domain registrars, while the fifth targets a domain name registry that holds registrant records directly.

The order and the decisions are redacted and don’t mention the rightsholder or the targeted websites.

That said, the court’s reasoning refers to the need to preserve “the sports economy and the European solidarity model”, which clearly points at sports piracy. And there are more tells that allow us to name several of the targeted intermediaries.

BAPO told TorrentFreak the secrecy is not its own choice but the court’s. The judge “ordered the disclosure of information to enable the plaintiff to identify the infringer and conduct further investigations,” it said, and separately “ordered that the identity of the targeted content and intermediary may not be disclosed.”

BAPO did not say whether the domain names would be identified later, but three intermediaries are accidentally mentioned by name. One decision instructs Hosting Concepts to send the requested information to BAPO, another sets a deadline for Hostinger , while a third does the same for Key Systems . Every other mention in those documents is replaced with placeholders.

These are all EU-based domain registrars. The fourth registrar and the domain name registry are not named. The same is true for the domain names that are targeted.

Bank Details, Crypto Wallets, and Server Logs

The four registrar decisions each demand the same seven categories of information. This includes a long list of data that should be handed over, including the customer’s name, every postal address, email address and phone number ever attached to the account.

The intermediaries are also compelled to disclose “the full IBANs and the exact names of the holder(s) of the relevant bank accounts”, and card details down to the issuing bank, country of issue and card type.

Payments in cryptocurrency are covered too. The orders cover any “means of payment in crypto-assets, where applicable, including in particular the wallet addresses used, the type of crypto-asset concerned, and the transaction identifiers (hash IDs)”.

The registrars also have to check their logs for the target’s IP address, device type, operating system and browser used to create the account, followed by “all logs and connection data retained by the relevant intermediary relating to the use of the customer account over the last twelve (12) months”.

The domain registry decision is more narrow, requesting registrant details, the identity of the registrar, the nameservers in use, and the history of changes. The Brussels Business court concluded that these demands are proportionate and BAPO has relayed these to the intermediaries.

Gag Order

The decisions come with a gag order. The domain registrars and registry are not allowed to disclose the information-seeking request to their customers or any third parties, including the press.

That order covers “any information concerning the very existence of these proceedings or of the order, or of any matter connected with the proceedings”.

The EU’s Digital Services Act ( DSA ) normally requires a provider to inform affected users that their data has been handed over. However, BAPO notes that there is an exception when criminal investigation and prosecution are at stake, which it believes applies here.

What the criminal allegations are isn’t immediately clear. However, the order effectively means that the pirate site operators can have their identity, banking history and connection logs handed over to rightsholders without their knowledge.

Can it be Enforced?

The decisions rely on Article 10 of the DSA, which covers how an information order applies to a provider elsewhere in the EU. BAPO’s actual powers come from Belgian law, and all the named intermediaries sit outside Belgium, so whether it can enforce the measures against them has yet to be seen.

BAPO went further, telling TorrentFreak the orders aren’t even limited to the EU. Under the Belgian civil procedure and the DSA, it said, “every intermediary whose service is being used to give access to illegal content within the Belgian territory can be ordered to disclose information regarding its customer.”

That is a broad claim. Whether it holds up in practice is another matter.

Unfortunately, the press and the public at large are left in the dark, as it remains a mystery who requested the order, who it targets, and which other intermediaries it applies to.

Whether any of the intermediaries have complied yet is unknown and, given the gag order, they are not likely to let anyone know.

—

Copies of BAPO’s five decisions are available here (pdf) , here (pdf) , here (pdf) , here (pdf) and here (pdf) .

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

Piracy portal Cineby has started its planned shutdown , which now comes with a detailed schedule.

A new announcement on the site lays out a staged process that runs for more than a week, taking the operation offline one service at a time.

“We’ve decided to wind things down in stages,” the operators write, without explaining why they are throwing in the towel.

With more than 160 million estimated visits last month, Cineby is one of the most popular pirate sites online. The same operation also includes Fmovies+ and Cineplay, each with millions of monthly visits on their own.

September 5: The End

The shutdown started by redirecting these companion sites to the main domain, followed by seven additional stages, listed below.

Aug 25: Mirror sites Fmovies+ and Cineplay redirect to Cineby.
Aug 26: Anime and sports streams switched off.
Aug 27: File downloads switched off.
Aug 28: Account system taken down, user accounts deleted.
Aug 30: Last day to watch films and series.
Aug 31: Film and series streaming switched off.
Sept 1: Cineby says goodbye.
Sept 5: Every remaining domain taken down for good.

Earlier today the second step was completed on schedule with the livestream page going dark. The initial announcement suggested the whole operation would disappear on August 26, but the plans have changed.

The operators now say the last films and series will play on August 30. The final domain names are now being taken offline on September 5, with Cineby noting that this step is irreversible.

TorrentFreak reached out to Cineby earlier this week, hoping to find out more about the reason for the shutdown. The official email address bounced, however, so we don’t expect to get a response anytime soon.

Legal Pressure

The shutdown follows a year of steady legal pressure. For example, last fall the Motion Picture Association (MPA) named Cineby as a notorious piracy operation in its submission to the US Trade Representative, linking the operation to Russia.

The Cineby brand was also targeted in several site-blocking orders this year. The site was listed in the UK “omnibus” order and Canada’s “expanded scope” order , which both covered Cineby and its future successors.

In July a Delhi High Court order obtained by HBO targeted four Cineby domains. The main .at domain stayed online, however, suggesting its registrar had not acted on the Indian order.

Staged

Given this backdrop, it would not be a stretch to think that Cineby’s operators caved to the legal pressure, but history also leaves room for other options.

Previously, we have seen popular pirate sites staging their own demise , to continue operating under a new brand. There is no evidence that this is happening here. If that’s the case, visitors will likely be redirected to a new site at some point.

Cineby currently refers users to legal services including Apple TV and Amazon Prime. However, it also points to the FMHY subreddit, which provides an overview of pirate streaming alternatives. For now, the first thing to keep an eye on is whether the site sticks to its own schedule, or if plans change again.

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

Over the past two decades, FlavaWorks has built a reputation as one of the most aggressive enforcers in the adult entertainment industry.

The company has targeted both individual pirates and private torrent trackers through U.S. federal courts.

Earlier this year, the Illinois-based company filed a high-profile lawsuit against Gay-Torrents.org, targeting the site’s operators, administrators, a Bulgarian shell company, and hundreds of individual members. That lawsuit prompted the operators to shut the site down , but that did not end their legal worries.

The tracker’s users also remain on the radar and are at the center of a new legal campaign. A new complaint filed last week at an Illinois federal court targets a fresh batch of 75 members, including one named defendant and 74 John Does who are identified only by their site usernames. Notably, Flava filed it as a RICO case.

RICO Complaint Against Torrent Users

The complaint describes Gay-Torrents.org as an “association-in-fact enterprise” with the goal to profit from the unauthorized distribution of copyrighted works. The RICO complaint, referring to the federal racketeering statute, alleges that the tracker’s members contributed to the racketeering operation. This claim comes in addition to a copyright infringement allegation.

Members who uploaded and downloaded infringing content are characterized as “lower-rung participants” who supplied the site’s infringing inventory, participating in Gay-Torrents’ sharing-ratio system. Those members who paid for VIP access are seen as “funders” and face an additional allegation of wire fraud.

FlavaWorks argues that every VIP payment was a fraudulent act. Members were sent to sham web-hosting fronts and ordered ‘VPS plans’ they knew did not exist. The goal of these disguised payments was to conceal the true nature of the transaction from banks and payment processors.

“On information and belief, the enterprise generated in excess of €7,000,000 since 2009 across more than 15,000 documented VIP payment events, each invoiced as a sham “web-hosting” fee,” the complaint reads.

This €7 million figure is an estimation based on Flava’s calculations, covering all revenue that was generated in 17 years. This same number was also cited in the April lawsuit, where Flava requested an asset freezing order targeting the tracker’s alleged payment providers, including PayPal.

Unique Forensic Identifier

The sole named defendant is Jason A. S., a Virginia man who, according to the complaint, was a paying subscriber to FlavaWorks’ legal websites from March 2020 to July 2021. During that period, he allegedly downloaded more than 200 of the company’s works.

FlavaWorks uses a forensic watermarking system that embeds a unique identifier into every file it delivered to subscribers. So when pirated copies of the videos with his identifier appeared on Gay-Torrents, Flava knew where they originated.

These copies were first spotted in 2022 and Flava writes that it sent a cease-and-desist notice to the defendant at the time. However, the man allegedly continued to use the site and copies of the content kept circulating up until 2025.

In addition to distributing pirated content, Jason A. S. allegedly paid for a VIP membership too. That means he is both an uploader and a funder under the complaint’s RICO theory. This makes him the “anchor defendant” whose connection to Illinois gives the court jurisdiction over the remaining defendants through RICO’s provisions.

The Case for RICO

The first lawsuit also targeted members, but relied on copyright and state-law claims. That legal approach ran into a common problem: the amended complaint had to drop hundreds of defendants, apparently because they would not fall under the jurisdiction of an Illinois court.

RICO solves that problem. The statute authorizes nationwide service of process, so Flava only needs one “anchor defendant” with ties to Illinois. After that, all co-conspirator defendants can be added to the case, as long as they live in the United States.

It also raises the legal stakes. RICO provides higher damages and introduces conspiracy liability, which effectively means that a member who only paid VIP fees and never uploaded a single file could still face liability for the enterprise’s copyright infringement.

To make the RICO theory work, Gay-Torrents’ operators should remain out of the case. Indeed, the complaint identified the operators as non-party co-conspirators instead of defendants.

74 Does & the Evidence Trail

The complaint lists 74 John Does, who are all identified by their Gay-Torrents.org username and internal user-ID number. Flava will try to identify these defendants as the case moves forward.

Some of the evidence trail is straightforward. Usernames and user IDs are presumably visible to any member of a private tracker, and FlavaWorks clearly had at least one account on the site. After all, the forensic identifier matches come from FlavaWorks’ own system, comparing copies downloaded from the tracker against its subscriber records.

In addition, the evidence shows that a Flava investigator purchased a VIP subscription at the tracker.

The VIP payment data can also come from a different source. The complaint notes that subpoenas were issued to Skrill and PayPal in the first lawsuit, and those records would show which users paid for VIP memberships.

How Flava identified the user download activity and other internal records is not immediately clear to us. The complaint refers broadly to “the Site’s own per-member records” without explaining how they were obtained.

RICO Raises the Bar

The RICO complaint accuses the defendants of direct and contributory copyright infringement, a RICO violation, and RICO conspiracy. It lists 85 copyrighted works, with statutory damages of up to $150,000 per work on the copyright claims. The RICO counts could add treble damages on top of that.

However, RICO comes with a higher evidence bar. The criminal copyright infringement allegations, for example, need to show willfulness and commercial advantage or financial gain. On top of proving that, Flava must show a pattern of racketeering activity, how each defendant is involved, and more.

The wire-fraud count also requires detailed evidence, to document the who, what, when, and how of each alleged fraudulent transaction.

Whether Flava will litigate these claims in a trial has yet to be seen. Filing a RICO case raises the pressure on the defendants, but actually proving these claims against individual users at trial is much harder than pursuing a standard copyright infringement claim.

For now, however, Flava has already reached its key goal by shutting the tracker down. In a way, this means that everything it gets out of the RICO complaint is a bonus. For the users, however, the stakes have been raised and the concerns are real.

—

copy of the complaint, filed by FlavaWorks Entertainment, Inc. at the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Illinois, is available here (pdf) .

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

Mid August, shadow library Anna’s Archive faced extended downtime, which had many regular visitors concerned.

These worries didn’t come out of nowhere as the site has been under quite a bit of legal pressure in recent months.

Lawsuit Takes Domains Offline

In January, the site lost its flagship .org domain . Initially it wasn’t clear what was behind this action but unsealed court records eventually connected it to a lawsuit filed by music companies. This case was a direct response to a Spotify scrape Anna’s Archive announced a few weeks earlier.

The music companies obtained an injunction from a U.S. federal court to go after the site’s domain names. This took out not only the .ORG domain but also the .SE domain, as well as the .PM and .VG domains that were put in place as backups.

Anna’s Archive eventually landed on .GL, .PK, and .GD domains, which remain active today. These are connected to registrars and registries based outside the United States that, apparently, do not comply with U.S. court orders.

Two Lawsuits, $340 Million

The music industry injunction also came with a substantial default judgment that was handed down in April. This includes a $322 million default judgment against the unknown operators of Anna’s Archive, who failed to show up in court.

This judgment was soon followed by a similar request from a group of major book publishers, including Penguin Random House, Elsevier, and HarperCollins, who sued the shadow library at a New York federal court.

That case also resulted in a default judgment, with a damages award that is smaller, but still substantial at $19.5 million . In addition, the court also issued an injunction targeting Anna’s Archive’s domain registrars and registries.

‘Coordinated Attack’

With this backdrop, it is no surprise that legal troubles came to mind when the site became unreachable earlier this month. However, this time around, the threat appears to have come from elsewhere.

After the site came back online, the official AnnaArchivist account attributed it to a coordinated attack by an unnamed party.

“Apologies for the issues. We suspect a coordinated attack. We’ve mitigated the attack vectors…” the message read, while noting that memberships already include one to two extra days per month to account for downtime.

Theoretically, an attack can also come from a rogue anti-piracy group, but there’s no evidence for that. A scam or phishing operation, which tries to cash in on Anna’s Archive search traffic, is another option. Neither is confirmed.

What Options Are Left?

Looking more broadly at the enforcement action that has taken place over the past months, we see that U.S. courts have run into their jurisdictional borders on the Internet.

This likely comes as a disappointment for rightsholders, but it also offers a clear takeaway.

U.S. courts can’t reach domains registered beyond their jurisdiction. That’s likely to increase calls for site-blocking legislation, a measure the industry has long favored and that remains high on the political agenda in the United States.

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

Grand Theft Auto VI is one of the most anticipated game releases in years, with the official launch scheduled this fall.

Rockstar Games and its parent company, Take-Two Interactive, have kept the game’s marketing under tight control, with a planned “Extended Look” at the gameplay premiering on Netflix later this month.

However, a few days ago, millions of fans already got a sneak peek. On August 18, someone identifying as “Cyberleek” started posting unreleased gameplay footage online. These clips went viral on social media, despite Take-Two issuing a barrage of takedown notices.

The leak came with a manifesto, criticizing the move away from physical discs, among other things. In addition, the leaked gameplay was branded with a Solana token advert.

The Discord and Microsoft ‘Dragnet’ Subpoenas

Take-Two did not take this leak lightly. As widely reported in the media, the game company requested two DMCA subpoenas at the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, directed at Discord servers and at Microsoft’s internal cyberleek investigation, device identifiers, IP logs, and OneDrive content tied to GTA.

The Discord subpoena is particularly broad. As highlighted by Tom’s Hardware , Kotaku , and others, the subpoena sought identifying details for every account that communicated in three named Discord servers since June 1, not only those tied to the leaks.

Take-Two also seeks “all identifying information associated with all user accounts that are/were members of the Discord community servers and channels listed below.”

The Discord and Microsoft DMCA subpoena requests were filed by law firm Kirkland & Ellis. While some media reports suggest they have been issued, that’s not the case yet. A judge signed an order directing the clerk to issue, but the clerk hasn’t issued them.

The docket does include a proposed subpoena, requiring Discord and Microsoft to disclose the requested information, as shown above. But there’s more.

Take-Two Targets X

A day after the initial subpoenas were requested, Take-Two applied for DMCA subpoenas against X Corp. and Google, again at the Southern District of New York. These filings came from a different law firm, Ruttenberg IP Law, and are more narrowly targeted.

The proposed X subpoena lists three usernames: @cyberleek_ar_io, @cyberleekario, and @MrCyberLeek. For each, it demands the account ID, registration email, IP access logs, phone numbers, connected accounts, and any associated device identifiers, again covering June 1 to the present.

Notably, the GTA fan community had flagged these accounts as impostors before the subpoena was filed. Cyberleek also watermarked “CYBERLEEK DOES NOT HAVE TWITTER” onto later leaked videos. The named X accounts are now all suspended.

Whether Take-Two treats these X accounts as impostors who copied the leaks, or as the source, is not mentioned in the filing.

The YouTube Channel Subpoena

The Google/YouTube subpoena is a lot narrower than the Discord sweep. It names a single YouTube video and three channels that are believed to be associated with it: CyberLeeks, Surfer24k, and Cyberleek_ar_io.

Surfer24k also appears in the Discord subpoena, as it is linked to one of the named servers. Obtaining personal records for this user from both Google and Discord allows Take-Two to compare the information of both platforms.

An exhibit filed with the petition lists Rockstar’s takedown request on YouTube. The company logged a reference file as “UNAUTH_2026AUG_VIDEO2,” and YouTube’s Content ID system flagged and claimed the matching upload shortly after it went live.

The same exhibit shows a “BUY $CYBERLEEK ON SOLANA” watermark on the footage, as shown above.

Not Disclosed, Yet

None of the four filings is a lawsuit. They are subpoenas issued under Section 512(h) of the DMCA, which lets a copyright holder compel a service provider to identify an alleged infringer without first suing anyone.

These subpoenas do not require a ruling on the merits and a signature from the court clerk is sufficient, as long as all other conditions are met.

As it stands, none of the four subpoenas has been issued. Judge Andrew L. Carter Jr. and Judge Jennifer L. Rochon each signed an order directing the clerk to act, but the clerk has not yet done so. No user data has changed hands as a result.

Notably, DMCA subpoenas are restricted to targeting alleged infringers that are tied to specific material. Whether that covers thousands of Discord users, many of whom may have posted nothing at all, is up for debate.

Take-Two’s counsel declared that the purpose of the subpoenas is “to obtain the identity of an alleged infringer or infringers, and that such information will only be used for the purpose of protecting Take-Two’s rights.” This means that a lawsuit could eventually follow.

Before that happens, however, it is possible that the targeted intermediaries or their users will file an objection. Service providers regularly resist DMCA subpoenas which they see as being overbroad, and targeted users can move to quash.

It’s clear that Take-Two is determined to get the leaker’s identity, but how broad its DMCA dragnet can reach has yet to be seen.

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A copy of the request for a DMCA subpoena directed at Google/YouTube is available here ( pdf , pdf , pdf ) and the X Corp variant is here ( pdf , pdf , pdf ).

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