In Malaysia, Astro has been the dominant pay-TV operator that held the FIFA World Cup broadcast rights since the early 2000s.

During the previous tournaments in Russia (2018) and Qatar (2022), the company marketed itself as “the Home of the World Cup” but that changed for the 2026 tournament this summer.

Last week, Malaysia’s Minister of Communications, Datuk Fahmi Fadzil, announced that the 2026 World Cup rights had gone to public broadcaster Radio Televisyen Malaysia and IPTV service Unifi TV, which is operated by Telekom Malaysia.

This means that, with help from the government, which paid RM24 million for the rights (~$6.1 million), many Malaysians will have access to free streams.

Shortly after the deal was announced, Astro confirmed that it lost the rights. While the company said that it remains determined to be the home for Malaysian sports fans, paying millions of dollars for the broadcasting rights was not economically viable.

Astro: Piracy Devalued Broadcast Rights

Unlike the publicly funded broadcaster RTM, Astro would have had to recoup its investment in the World Cup rights commercially. That’s a significant challenge, according to the broadcaster, which explains that rights costs and piracy are both on the rise.

“Rising costs, driven by inflation and escalating international sports broadcasting rights, have significantly increased the financial investment required,” the company wrote.

“Meanwhile, rampant piracy has diminished the value of such rights to all legitimate platforms. In particular, the 2018 and 2022 World Cup were extensively pirated events in Malaysia,” the broadcaster added in its press release .

It is rare for a major broadcaster to publicly cite online piracy as one of the reasons why their bid for the licensing rights has reached a clear ceiling. They clearly believe that at the current price point, piracy has eroded the value of the broadcast rights too much.

Piracy Might Drop Now

Intriguingly, piracy could drop significantly now that Astro no longer has the FIFA World Cup broadcasting rights. Through MyTV, matches will be publicly available to millions of Malaysians rather than sitting behind a paywall. That removes one of the strongest piracy incentives: the costs.

Competing with piracy is much easier for a public broadcaster with government funding, which can offer matches for free. As a result, people who pirated the World Cup in 2018 and 2022 may now move back to freely available licensed broadcasts, lowering the piracy rate.

Of course, those piracy rates could easily pick up again when matches end up behind a paywall in the future.

Piracy Incentives in China, India, and Elsewhere

With roughly a month until kickoff, FIFA has reportedly finalized broadcast deals in more than 175 territories, but final agreements have yet to be signed in China and India .

Reports suggest that disagreements about FIFA’s licensing fees have proven to be a stumbling block. With billions of views at stake, these countries are two of FIFA’s most important markets in terms of audience demand.

This demand would not simply disappear when there are no formal broadcasters. Instead, it would redirect to unofficial streaming, including pirate ones. This adds an interesting element to the negotiations, as rightsholders and FIFA certainly don’t want to breed piracy habits.

For now, the FIFA World Cup begins on June 11, with broadcasts through both legal and pirate channels. Whether 2026 turns out to be the most pirated World Cup yet has yet to be seen.

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

In March, a coalition of thirteen major publishers, including Penguin Random House, Elsevier, and HarperCollins, filed a fresh lawsuit against Anna’s Archive.

The publishers allege the shadow library is facilitating “staggering” levels of piracy, including the use of their books as training material for AI models.

This lawsuit follows on the heels of a case various music companies filed against the site a few months earlier. They sprung into action when Anna’s Archive said it would publish material from a Spotify scrape it had obtained earlier.

As a result of the legal pressure and an injunction released in favor of the music companies, Anna’s Archive lost several domain names. Faced with a U.S. court order, the site eventually moved to .GL, .PK, and .GD domains , which remain active today.

The music companies won a massive $322 million default judgment against Anna’s Archive in April. However, while the site reportedly removed the Spotify files that triggered the music case, it continued to offer many millions of books.

The Publishers Seek $19.5 Million Judgment

The books are still being pirated, and widely used as AI training material, so the publishers now seek their own default judgment. This includes a broad permanent injunction targeting the surviving domains.

After Anna’s Archive failed to respond in court, the publishers now ask for the maximum $150,000 per work in statutory damages for 130 works, which adds up to a total of $19,500,000. That’s $1.5 million for each of the thirteen plaintiff publishers.

The financial compensation is little more than a footnote, as the site’s operators remain unknown and unlikely to pay anything. The permanent injunction the publishers request is more important, as that could help to take Anna’s Archive’s domains offline.

The music companies already obtained a similar injunction in their case, but that is no longer as effective, since Anna’s Archive stopped actively offering the Spotify files through its website. The books, however, remain available.

Injunction Targets More Than 20 Intermediaries

The publishers ask the court to issue an injunction targeting Anna’s Archive and all domain registries, registrars, hosts, and internet service providers connected to the three remaining domains. The order would prevent the transfer of the domains to anyone other than the publishers or the music companies.

The proposed injunction names more than twenty specific companies, including familiar names from the music lawsuit such as Cloudflare, Public Interest Registry, Tucows, Njalla, the Switch Foundation, The Swedish Internet Foundation, and the National Internet Exchange of India.

The list also adds new entities that are linked to the surviving domains: TELE Greenland/Tusass for .gl, PKNIC for .pk, and Grenada’s National Telecommunications Regulatory Commission for .gd. Several hosting and registrar companies are also mentioned, including DDOS-Guard, IQWeb FZ-LLC, Hosting Concepts B.V., OwnRegistrar, Neterra, Webglobe, and CentralNic Registry.

The order would require these parties to permanently disable the domains and authoritative nameservers, cease all hosting services, preserve identifying evidence, and “refrain from frustrating” the judgment.

Will It Work?

Without a formal defense from Anna’s Archive, the chances are high that the publishers will win this legal battle. However, whether they will get the desired result is a different matter.

Even if the permanent injunction is granted, it depends on whether they are intermediaries who will fall under the U.S. jurisdiction, or whether they will comply voluntarily.

The permanent injunction obtained by the music companies, which also targeted the .GL, .PK, and .GD domains, hasn’t reached the desired result yet. Whether a new order targeting more intermediaries will fare any better has yet to be seen.

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A copy of the publishers’ memorandum of law supporting the motion for default judgment is available here (pdf) . The proposed default judgment can be found here (pdf) .

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

Adult entertainment is big business on the internet, and several of the largest brands in this niche are owned by the Aylo conglomerate.

Formerly known as Mindgeek, Aylo is the driving force behind free ‘tube’ sites such as Pornhub, YouPorn, and RedTube. It also owns many adult brands, including Brazzers and Reality Kings, that charge for subscriptions.

Over the years, the company has built an impressive library of more than 40,000 registered copyright works. The company’s enforcement arm, Aylo Premium, protects this content by various means. It has sent many millions of takedown requests and also targets pirate sites in court, hoping to shut these down.

Earlier this year, Aylo won a $90 million default judgment against a porn piracy network that included ‘Freshporno,’ ‘Kojka,’ and ‘PornHeal,’ among others. While that was a major win, at least on paper, plenty of targets remained.

That included Pornhits.com, which Aylo sued in the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Washington last December. The complaint named Anatoly Chernov as the alleged operator, along with twenty unidentified Doe defendants, and accused them of displaying 5,635 of Aylo’s registered works on the site without authorization.

According to Aylo, Pornhits misleadingly suggests that it is a user-generated content platform. The complaint alleges the upload feature visible on the site is “inoperative and illusory,” which means that all infringing content was added by the site’s operator directly. Aylo also said it sent 44,934 DMCA takedown notices, which were all ignored.

Aylo’s $84 Million Demand

As is often the case in these types of lawsuits, the defendant did not appear in court to defend himself. As a result, Aylo requested a default judgment, asking for $15,000 in statutory damages per infringed work, which is less than the maximum of $150,000 per work.

However, with 5,635 works at issue, the total does add up to $84,525,000.

To justify the figure, Aylo pointed to SimilarWeb data showing that Pornhits attracted approximately 1.7 million U.S. visitors in October 2025 alone. If all these visitors signed up for official subscriptions, the company said it would earn roughly $17 million per month.

While pirate views do not directly translate to lost sales, Aylo also referenced that the same court awarded $15,000 per work in near-identical adult content piracy defaults. This includes the Yespornplease case, which was also handled by the same U.S. District Court Judge Benjamin Settle.

“More Than Mere Guesswork”

Last week, Judge Settle granted the default judgment but rejected the damages calculation. Instead of $15,000 per work, he awarded the statutory minimum of $750, bringing the total to $4,226,250.

The order recognizes Aylo’s previous wins in the same court, but it also signals a clear shift in approach.

“The Court acknowledges these cases but determines that, upon further review, a lower award is warranted here,” Judge Settle wrote.

He noted that other district courts have begun requiring more rigorous evidence to support above-minimum awards in these types of cases. That includes evidence of its own lost profits or the infringer’s profit increase, which is clearly not available here.

“Calculating damages is difficult but the Court requires more than mere guesswork. Aylo fails to offer any concrete evidence of lost profits, relying instead upon conjecture as to the effect of Chernov’s piracy on its bottom line,” the order adds.

Judge Settle pointed out that Aylo had also failed to estimate the added profits of Pornhits, the number of visitors who might have actually paid for an Aylo subscription, or how much of the Pornhits site is dedicated to Aylo’s content.

“It is unclear to the Court whether Aylo’s works constitute even a substantial portion of pornhits’ overall content. Without such evidence, an award of $84 million would be an inappropriate windfall,” the order reads.

Domain Transfer Granted

The damages reduction clearly stands out, but the practical impact is limited. Chernov never appeared in the case, lives outside the United States, and is unlikely to pay any damages amount, whether $84 million or $4 million.

The injunction that comes with the order, on the other hand, is enforceable.

Specifically, Judge Settle ordered Verisign, the registry operator for the .com top-level domain, to change the registrar of record for pornhits.com to EuroDNS, which has to transfer the domain to Aylo Premium Ltd. The current registrar, Namecheap, was also ordered to cooperate.

The order also includes a ‘dynamic’ aspect, as we’ve seen previously, allowing Aylo to return to court to extend the injunction to additional domains, subdomains, or IP addresses that the Pornhits operator might use to continue or evade the infringing activity.

This permanent injunction is much needed because, at the time of writing, Pornhits.com remains up and running.

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A copy of Judge Benjamin Settle’s order on the motion for default judgment is available here (pdf).

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

More than six years ago, Bulgaria informed the U.S. authorities that it wanted to shut down the country’s largest torrent trackers, including ArenaBG, Zamunda, and Zelka.

Specifically, the country asked the U.S. authorities for help. That help eventually arrived in January this year, when the domain names of these torrent trackers were effectively seized .

The multinational effort involved Bulgarian authorities and law enforcement, as well as their American counterparts. This included the U.S. Department of Justice, Homeland Security Investigations, and National IPR Coordination Center, which were all featured on the seizure banner that’s still online today.

Multi-Decade Crackdown

The crackdown did not come as a surprise. Rightsholders have complained about the Bulgarian torrent trackers for many years, and the local authorities have also tried to address these issues for nearly two decades.

As far back as 2010, Yavor Kolev, the head of Bulgaria’s Computer Crimes Department, said that his organization was intent on shutting down Zamunda and ArenaBG. At the time, police investigations into these trackers had already been ongoing for years.

While the authorities managed to shut down some pirate sites over the years, these major targets survived. In fact, Zamunda had grown to become the 11th most visited site at the start of 2026, until its main domain was seized in January.

U.S. Piracy Watch List

Bulgaria’s challenge to address the local piracy problems motivated the USTR to add the country to the Special 301 Report. This annual overview is meant to urge foreign governments to improve policy and legislation in favor of U.S. copyright holders.

In 2025, for example, Bulgaria was put on the “Watch List” with USTR stating that the country “continues to be a safe haven for online piracy.”

There was change afoot, however, as the country enacted new legislation in 2023 that would make it easier to investigate and prosecute piracy cases. While that had not been used until recently, it provided the basis for the crackdown that took place in January.

Bulgaria Removed from Watch List

The implementation of the new legislation and the subsequent torrent tracker crackdown worked. The latest version of the USTR Special 301 Report specifically states that Bulgaria was removed because of the progress it has made. This relates to the shutdowns and associated prosecutions, which remain ongoing.

“Bulgaria is removed from the Watch List this year due to significant enforcement actions and progress in criminal prosecutions during the past year,” USTR writes.

USTR specifically references Article 172a of the updated criminal code, which allows for the criminal prosecution of people who “ create conditions ” for online piracy through the “development and maintenance” of torrent trackers and other platforms. This law was used as the basis for the January crackdown, which led to the arrest of several individuals.

“In January 2026, Bulgarian law enforcement seized the five most popular Bulgarian piracy domains, executed search and seizure warrants at 30 locations, and arrested several individuals, some of whom have been charged under Article 172a discussed above,” the report reads.

According to local reports , the operation targeted 44 websites, not just the three mentioned trackers. By February, three of the four detained individuals had been formally charged.

While Bulgaria must be happy with this development, the country was previously removed from the watchlist in 2007 and 2018, just to be readded over new concerns within a few years. Time will tell whether this year’s removal will last.

More Removals and Additions

Bulgaria isn’t the only country to see its status change in this year’s Special 301 Report. Argentina and Mexico are both moved from the Priority Watch List to the lower-tier Watch List.

Argentina is credited for its February 2026 agreement with U.S. authorities, where the country promised to address site-blocking, ISP liability, and online enforcement. Mexico’s lowered risk is tied to draft amendments to the Federal Copyright Law and Federal Criminal Code, which would clarify ISP secondary liability and remove the “direct economic benefit” requirement, which was a roadblock for criminal piracy prosecutions.

The European Union, meanwhile, was added to the Watch List for the first time as a bloc since 2006. USTR cites a wide variety of concerns, including parts of the Digital Services Act, which rightsholders believe may impact their rights. The newly applicable AI Act is also flagged for monitoring.

The most notable change related to Vietnam, however, which was the first country in thirteen years to be designated as a Priority Foreign Country. According to the USTR, the country’s failure to take action against copyright infringers has turned it into a safe haven for pirate site operators.

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A copy of the U.S. Trade Representative’s 2026 Special 301 Report is available here (pdf) .

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

Chip giant NVIDIA has been one of the main financial beneficiaries in the artificial intelligence boom.

Revenue surged due to high demand for its AI-learning chips and data center services, and the end doesn’t appear to be in sight.

Besides selling the most sought-after hardware, NVIDIA is also developing its own models, including NeMo Megatron models. These were trained using their own hardware and with help from large text libraries, much like other tech giants do.

Authors Sue NVIDIA for Copyright Infringement

This includes authors, who, in various lawsuits, accused tech companies of training their models on pirated books. In early 2024, for example, several authors, including Abdi Nazemian, sued NVIDIA over alleged copyright infringement.

Through the class action lawsuit, they claimed that the company’s AI models were trained on the Books3 dataset that included copyrighted works taken from the ‘pirate’ site Bibliotik.

As the case progressed, the authors also brought up NVIDIA’s contacts with Anna’s Archive , inquiring about “high-speed access” to the shadow library’s massive collection of pirated books.

NVIDIA Wants Case Dismissed

In January, NVIDIA fired back with a comprehensive motion to dismiss , calling the authors’ allegations speculative, vague, and legally insufficient. At the California federal court, NVIDIA argues that the authors’ complaint is built on speculation rather than facts.

Specifically, the company asked the court to dismiss the direct copyright infringement claims linked to Bibliotik, Books3, and The Pile dataset.

In addition, the motion also targets the contributory copyright infringement allegations, which center on scripts and tools NVIDIA allegedly distributed so corporate customers could automatically download ‘The Pile,’ the dataset that contains Books3.

The chip giant initially asked the court to dismiss claims relating to Anna’s Archive, Z-Library, LibGen, Sci-Hub, and the Slimpajama dataset as well, but it withdrew this request in March, which substantially narrowed the dispute.

Scripts Have No Other Purpose than Infringement

In an order issued yesterday, U.S. District Judge Jon Tigar denied most of the dismissal request. Importantly, the contributory infringement claim survives, even after the Supreme Court’s Cox v. Sony ruling, which significantly impacts many copyright infringement cases.

NVIDIA argued that Cox tightened the standard, requiring “active encouragement through specific acts,” while stressing that the NeMo Megatron Framework as a whole has substantial non-infringing uses. Marketing or promoting this framework as a piracy tool was needed to prove this claim, NVIDIA argued.

Judge Tigar rejected the framing. Instead of analyzing the Megatron framework as a whole, he zeroed in on the specific scripts that NVIDIA distributed to clients so they could automatically download and preprocess The Pile dataset. Those scripts have no purpose other than enabling infringement, the court concluded.

“The scripts are alleged to have no other purpose than to speed up the process of infringement, unlike the digital video recorder systems at issue in Sony Corp. or the internet service provided in Cox,” Judge Tigar wrote.

This appears to be the first AI training case to apply the new Cox standard, and the result didn’t go the way NVIDIA hoped. The scripts it offered satisfied both the new ‘inducement’ and ‘tailored to infringement’ standards required for a contributory infringement finding.

BitTorrent Is ‘Merely a Tool’

Regarding the direct copyright infringement claims, NVIDIA also asked the court to dismiss “allegations concerning its ‘use of any [sic] BitTorrent Protocol.'”

The request was pretty thin, Judge Tigar noted, pointing out that the complaint contains exactly one reference to BitTorrent. That reference doesn’t point to any of NVIDIA’s alleged wrongdoing. It’s a descriptive line about Bibliotik distributing pirated works via the protocol.

Judge Tigar refused to dismiss all BitTorrent allegations, stressing that “BitTorrent is merely a tool, not a library or dataset.” He also offered a rather colorful analogy.

“Asking to dismiss allegations concerning BitTorrent is like asking to dismiss allegations concerning paintbrushes in a case about a dolphin painting,” the order reads, citing Folkens v. Wyland Worldwide, a copyright dispute over a painting of two dolphins crossing underwater.

NVIDIA’s interest in stripping BitTorrent from the case is easier to understand in light of Meta’s troubles in a parallel AI lawsuit. There, Meta’s BitTorrent seeding resulted in direct copyright infringement claims. NVIDIA appears to have wanted that door closed before discovery could open it.

Lawsuit Moves Forward

NVIDIA did get a small win as Judge Tigar dismissed the vicarious copyright infringement claim.

To state that claim, the authors needed to plausibly allege that NVIDIA had both the legal right to control the direct infringers and a direct financial interest in the infringement. Tigar found neither was adequately pleaded, but allowed the authors 21 days to address the deficiencies and refile.

For now, it is clear that this legal battle between the authors and NVIDIA is far from over.

The same also applies to a long list of other AI training lawsuits, which continue to grow every month. That includes a lawsuit filed against Meta and Mark Zuckerberg yesterday by major publishers, which, like many others, also accuses Meta of training on pirated books.

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A copy of U.S. District Court Judge Jon Tigar’s order on NVIDIA’s motion to dismiss is available here (pdf) .

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

With over 120 million daily users, Reddit is undoubtedly one of the most visited sites on the Internet.

The community-oriented social sharing platform, founded twenty years ago, has since transformed from a hobby project to the publicly traded multi-billion-dollar company it is today.

This growth also brought added responsibility. In addition to the billions of casual, insightful, and heartwarming messages, Reddit’s popularity was also embraced by those who color outside the lines of the law, including copyright infringers.

Reddit’s Transparency Report

To show the public how it responds to copyright complaints, takedown notices, and other removals, it publishes a biannual transparency report. The latest version, covering the second half of 2025, shows some interesting new trends.

Overall, the transparency report reveals the massive volume of content that’s added to the site. In just six months, Redditors shared over 2.2 billion posts and comments. More than 150 million of these were removed by moderators and site admins for various reasons.

In addition, Reddit received 69,154 DMCA takedown notices from rightsholders, identifying 425,471 pieces of allegedly infringing content. Reddit removed 217,787 of those, which is an actionability rate of 51% on all reported content.

These DMCA takedown numbers are roughly on par with previous years and down significantly from the 2022-2023 period, as seen below.

Bans Shift From Subreddits to Users

While the overall takedown volume remains relatively steady, the number of accounts and communities banned for repeat infringement reveals a notable change.

In the second half of 2025, Reddit banned 1,595 user accounts for repeat copyright violations. That’s a 90% increase compared to the first half of the year, when 837 user accounts were terminated.

The number of subreddits banned for repeat copyright violations went the other way. Reddit banned 563 subreddits in the second half of 2025, down 25% from the 709 subreddits removed in the first half.

The pattern flips the picture from six months ago , when subreddit bans more than doubled year-over-year while user bans grew at a more modest pace. This time, it’s the user bans that surge while subreddit takedowns are lower.

Reddit doesn’t explain the divergence in its transparency report, but today’s user and subreddit bans remain well below the 2022 peak. In the first half of 2022, 3,859 user accounts and 1,543 subreddits were banned for repeat copyright violations. That’s more than double the current numbers in both categories.

Notable Refusals and Fair Use

In addition to these headline figures, Reddit’s transparency report flags several takedown requests it declined to act on.

For example, someone representing an Indian religious leader filed a takedown notice targeting an AI-animated video that showed them being showered with money, paired with a post title hinting at greed. Reddit didn’t take action, characterizing it as fair use.

Another fair use call involved a mobile app developer who tried to take down a post sharing a screenshot of the app’s source code. Since the post was meant to warn that the app was quietly sharing user data without permission, Reddit refused to remove it.

Notable Examples

The examples Reddit shared are meant to illustrate that the company doesn’t take down content blindly, but that it makes fair use calls when it sees fit.

Some of the granted removals are also worth a callout. Reddit highlights, for example, that it removed multiple posts that shared social media recruitment videos for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). These posts were taken down because they used music from MGMT without the band’s permission , as was widely reported in the media last year.

Reddit’s full breakdown, including notable government and law enforcement requests, is available in the report linked below.

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A copy of Reddit’s H2 2025 transparency report is available here (pdf) .

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

Each year the Office of the United States Trade Representative ( USTR ) publishes a new update of its Special 301 Report , highlighting countries that fail to live up to U.S. copyright protection standards.

The annual overview is meant to urge foreign governments to improve policy and legislation in favor of U.S. copyright holders.

The process has shown itself to be an effective diplomatic tool and has helped to kick-start copyright reforms around the globe. Not all governments are equally susceptible to critique, and Canada once described the process as flawed . Still, no country wants to be included in the list.

U.S. Elevates Vietnam to ‘Priority Foreign Country’

USTR’s latest Special 301 Report reiterated much of the critique we have seen in past years. China and Russia, for example, remain on the Priority Watch List, as they were previously. However, for the first time in thirteen years, the rarely used Priority Foreign Country (PFC) category was added.

The PFC label is reserved for the most serious cases, and according to USTR’s latest report, Vietnam falls into this category. The report flags several IP-related concerns, including counterfeiting, but the country’s failure to combat online piracy is at the top of the list.

These concerns are not new, and over the past years, the U.S. and Vietnam have come together in an attempt to resolve the concerns. The U.S. first proposed an IP Work Plan to Vietnam in 2020, which was revised in 2023, but that didn’t book sufficient results.

The USTR notes that online piracy is not just popular among the country’s own residents; many operators of major pirate sites also reportedly reside in the country.

“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,” the report reads, providing various examples.

As shown above, the USTR report specifically mentions the piracy-as-a-service provider MegaCloud and the popular pirate streaming site MyFlixerz as key problems. Interestingly, these prominent targets went dark in April , just a few days before the USTR released its report.

Whether the sudden disappearance of these pirate services, which have millions of monthly users, is a mere coincidence or if it’s related to the diplomatic pressure is unknown.

U.S. Wants More Deterrent Prosecutions

To address these and other piracy concerns, the USTR would like the Vietnamese authorities to step up their enforcement actions. This includes the subsequent prosecutions, which have lacked a deterrent effect thus far.

“The operators of these sites and services likely based themselves in Vietnam because enforcement efforts there historically lacked the follow-through and substantial penalties needed to deter infringement,” the report notes.

The USTR specifically mentions the takedown of Fmovies, which once was one of the largest pirate sites. This landmark case resulted in the prosecution of two operators, who received suspended sentences and criminal fines of around $2,700 and $770, respectively.

These sentences lack a deterrent effect, USTR argues, noting that the country could also increase the number of prosecutions.

“Vietnam must provide effective enforcement and take persistent and effective enforcement actions to combat online piracy, including by bringing significantly more criminal prosecutions against online piracy operations; seeking deterrent-level prison sentences, monetary fines, and other criminal penalties; and addressing obstacles to pursuing effective enforcement.”

Recent Shutdowns

USTR report acknowledges a series of recent enforcement actions in Vietnam. In 2025, the music industry group IFPI took action against Y2Mate and 11 other stream-ripping websites , for example.

In March 2026, after the Ministry of Public Security sought feedback on a draft decree on book piracy, several Vietnamese pirated e-book platforms, including TVE-4U, VCTVEGroup, and Ebookvie, ceased operations or stopped sharing copyrighted material.

Interestingly, the report also references the recent shutdown of HiAnime.to , the popular anime streaming site that was widely believed to be operated from Vietnam. However, as far as we know, no authority or rightsholder has publicly claimed responsibility, and no arrests or operator identifications have been announced.

HiAnime went dark in mid-March 2026, posting a brief farewell message, without any clear sign of an enforcement action.

The Clock is Ticking

In addition to addressing online piracy, USTR also flags counterfeiting, border enforcement, use of unlicensed software in the government, and cable and satellite signal theft as key concerns. Together, these put Vietnam in the Priority Foreign Country category.

The PFC label is not symbolic. Within 30 days of the identification, USTR has to decide whether it will launch an investigation under Section 301 of the Trade Act of 1974, which can result in tariffs and sanctions.

For now, the designation itself sends a strong signal: take action or else.

Vietnam-related piracy concerns have been a recurring item in Special 301 reports for years, but stepping from the Priority Watch List into the Priority Foreign Country category is a rather significant escalation, which no other country has faced in well over a decade.

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A copy of the U.S. Trade Representative’s 2026 Special 301 Report is available here (pdf) .

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

FlavaWorks is an Illinois-based adult entertainment company specializing in content featuring Black and Latino men.

The company has pursued copyright infringers aggressively for years, including a $1.5 million damages award against a defendant who shared its films on BitTorrent and a high-profile clash with an unnamed television executive that was eventually settled.

This week, the company continues its legal pressure with a complaint filed last week at the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Illinois. The lawsuit targets the owner and administrators of private BitTorrent tracker Gay-Torrents.org, the company that allegedly receives the site’s revenue, and 325 individual members identified only by their site usernames.

Site Owner, Admins, and a Bulgarian Company

Gay-Torrents.org is a private, invite-only BitTorrent tracker that has operated since June 2009. According to the complaint, more than 146,000 members registered at the site since its launch, of which 20,671 members are currently active.

The complaint largely targets unnamed defendants, including the site’s alleged operator, who goes by the handle “TheMan”. According to Flava, “TheMan” was one of the first registered members, using the site’s official email address as the main contact.

In addition to the operator, seven administrators are also named as John Doe defendants, identified only by their site usernames: sgmusuk, jasepl, Marius, ams_guy, lucasneo, simlacroix, and matthewmancs. According to the complaint, matthewmancs alone has generated more than 470 terabytes of upload and download traffic, the largest sharing volume of any user.

Flava does not only list unnamed defendants; it also identifies BYZONA LTD, a Bulgarian company, as being involved. This company and its operator are allegedly linked to 247host.eu and cloud2max.club. These are shell entities, which Flava believes are used to route VIP-membership payments through Skrill and PayPal, while concealing the site’s true beneficiaries.

The complaint alleges that the two shells together have generated more than €7 million in revenue since 2009. This is not an exact calculation, but based on Flava’s analysis of the site’s VIP pricing, donation records, and the registered member data.

“Straight-Up Extortion”

This is not the first time that Flava has targeted users of the private torrent tracker. In fact, the complaint quotes the site’s owner characterizing FlavaWorks’ enforcement as a scam. Last December, TheMan posted on the Gay-Torrents.org forum in response to a member who had received a cease and desist letter from the studio.

Posting under his “Owner” account, TheMan wrote: “This is straight-up extortion, and people shouldn’t fall for it.”

TheMan also told users the studio had been “uploading their own shitty content themselves just so they can blackmail users afterwards,” and claimed: “We deleted all of their stuff a long time ago.”

Flava’s complaint points out that the private tracker did not remove all contested content, as 47 of the 56 infringing links it reported in February 2024 remained active on the site twenty months later. Some of the infringing content remained accessible when the lawsuit was filed, the company adds.

A French Uploader and 325 Registered Users

The lawsuit doesn’t only focus on the alleged owner and administrators; it also lists a prolific uploader who is identified as the Frenchman Ludovic D. This defendant allegedly purchased two paid subscriptions to FlavaWorks-affiliated sites in 2004 and 2013, which were both traceable to the same email address and other personal details.

Since Flava uses a forensic-watermarking system to link videos to registered users, it could track the man’s account to more than thirty videos that were uploaded to the torrent tracker.

“Defendant [D.] cancelled his subscription approximately thirty days after purchase, on the same day as his final download session—a pattern consistent with bulk acquisition for redistribution rather than ordinary consumption,” the complaint reads.

In addition to the named Frenchman, the complaint also lists 325 “John Doe” defendants who are only known by their usernames. These users all allegedly shared Flava’s copyrighted works, are based in the U.S., were active in the Gay-Torrents forums, and purchased VIP memberships.

Courts have previously been wary of joining this many Doe defendants in a single lawsuit. Flava recognizes this and specifically notes that this isn’t part of a mass settlement scheme, while promising to dismiss all defendants who don’t fall under the court’s jurisdiction.

“This is not a mass-joinder action seeking to extract settlements from non-resident Doe defendants in a distant forum,” the complaint reads.

‘$7 Million’ Asset Freeze and More

Flava also requests an asset freezing order targeting the assets in the Skrill account associated with BYZONA and the PayPal account associated with cloud2max.club. Those can be as high as €7,000,000, the complaint notes. That is an estimation based on Flava’s calculations, assuming that no funds were spent or taken out in 17 years.

In addition, the complaint also asks the court to direct Cloudflare to preserve all records relating to the gay-torrents.org domain, including DNS configuration records and customer communications, without taking the site offline.

In total, the complaint lists seven counts, including copyright claims for direct, contributory, and vicarious infringement, and a separate inducement count against the alleged operator and administrators.

To support these secondary liability claims, Flava cites the Supreme Court’s recent ruling in Cox Communications v. Sony , arguing that the Bulgarian shell entities are “tailored to infringement” and without any “substantial noninfringing use.”

The remaining three are state-law claims for unjust enrichment, civil conspiracy, and fraudulent concealment. The latter is built around the alleged payment-routing scheme through 247host.eu and cloud2max.club.

As compensation, Flava requests statutory damages of up to $150,000 per work for willful infringement. The exact number of works is not listed, but with hundreds of titles in Flava’s catalog, the potential damages run into the many millions of dollars.

Finally, it is worth noting that this is not Flava’s only case against a private torrent tracker. Last March , the adult company filed a copyright lawsuit against an alleged Canadian leaker of its videos, as well as 47 users of the private torrent tracker GayTorrent.ru. This lawsuit remains pending at the Illinois federal court.

—

A copy of the complaint, filed this week 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.

Links between piracy and organized crime have been around for several decades.

The framing first emerged in the late 1990s, when the IFPI raised concerns about transborder smuggling of pirated CDs by criminal networks. Back then, most piracy took place offline.

A terrorism angle was added to the mix in 2003, when the U.S. House held a hearing on piracy’s “links to organized crime and terrorism.” Four months later, Interpol Secretary General Ronald Noble told Congress that intellectual property crime had become “the preferred method of funding for a number of terrorist groups.”

In December that year, the messaging made it into a new campaign by the UK anti-piracy group FACT, warning moviegoers that “piracy funds organised crime” and “piracy funds terrorism.”

The most pivotal study appeared in 2009, when a RAND report linked film piracy, organized crime, and terrorism . This movie industry-funded report was not without critique, as it blurred the line between counterfeiting and piracy , while evidence for structural crime connections was missing.

Nonetheless, the RAND study introduced case studies that have been cited ever since. This includes the Barakat Network in the Tri-Border Area, D-Company in India, and the Provisional IRA in Northern Ireland, which all reappeared in a new study this week.

Report: Organized. Piracy. Crime.

The new report titled “ Organized. Piracy. Crime. ” was released by anti-piracy group IP House and the Digital Citizens Alliance ( DCA ). Despite the long history described here, the report describes online piracy as “a new flavor of organized crime,” not something that has been around for decades.

Or, as IP-House puts it on LinkedIn: “Piracy is not what it used to be. It has evolved into something far more structured and sophisticated.”

While the old counterfeiting references are not completely gone, the new report offers several new insights and confirms that times have changed. In 2009, the largest pirate sites were still operated by people who started out as hobbyists with a passion for technology and file-sharing. The same can’t be said for many large pirate streaming networks that operate today.

Piracy Networks as Organized Crime

The new report cites more than a dozen recent enforcement actions to argue that today’s pirate streaming networks meet the formal definitions of organized crime set by Interpol, Europol, and the UN. The cases come from Spain, Italy, Brazil, Canada, India, and the United States, among others.

The most prominent example is the high-profile European “Kratos” takedown that took place in November 2024, which targeted an IPTV operation that reportedly served 22 million subscribers across multiple countries.

The report mentions that raids across eleven countries found $1.9 million in cryptocurrency, $46,000 in cash, and “drugs and weapons.” The report sees this as evidence that piracy operators now sit alongside more traditional criminal trades.

Several other IPTV operations have also been connected to other types of crime. The Spanish ‘Operation Fake,’ for example, targeted an IPTV enterprise that allegedly combined content theft with cryptocurrency mining, property fraud, drug trafficking, and money laundering.

Italy is prominently featured too, with the report referencing a former pirate operator turned informant who told Italian television that “those who pay for IPTV are funding the Camorra.” These links between IPTV operations and the Mafia are not new , but they remain difficult to verify through public records.

A Multi-Layered Model

A clear line needs to be drawn between hard evidence, such as weapons and drug seizures, and hearsay. However, those who have been observing the piracy landscape over the past 20 years have clearly seen more organized and money-driven operations emerge.

Where pirate sites would previously foster a sense of community, modern streaming operations often use a franchise model, sourcing pirated content and complete pirate site scripts through a “Piracy as a Service” model.

The report recognizes and documents this shift and argues that piracy has adopted a franchise structure that mirrors organized crime more broadly. Among other things, it mentions the 2019 takedown of Xtream Codes , a management platform that powered thousands of IPTV brands worldwide, as a key example. Wholesale operators sold turnkey kits to retail-level resellers, the report says, leaving the core operation insulated when downstream services were shut down.

This organizational structure, where various parts of piracy operators are compartmentalized, was also used by KickassTorrents, Z-Library, and the SPARKS group, the report notes. Importantly, however, it does not connect these examples to other types of crime.

The IP House and DCA report offers a detailed overview of the piracy landscape, moving toward organized and profit driven operations. It is fair to say that piracy is no longer the realm of copyleft or anarchist hobbyists. At the same time, not all piracy operations are created equal, and the cases collected in the report cover a wide range of business models, scales, and degrees of sophistication.

This will be something for policymakers to keep in mind when the report lands on their desks.

Report Calls on U.S. Congress to Implement Site Blocking

After spending most of its 42 pages arguing that piracy networks are now organized crime, the report closes with a policy section directed at the U.S. Congress. Specifically, the report recommends site-blocking legislation, noting that this blocking approach is already adopted by “more than 50 countries.”

In addition to site blocking, the report also calls for harsher penalties, payment-processor obligations, and expanded Treasury Department authority to designate foreign piracy operations as “primary money laundering concerns.”

There is some tension between the report’s threat model and its proposed solution.

The report describes piracy operations as sophisticated, adaptive criminal organizations that diversify across revenue streams. If site blocking works by lowering that revenue, these criminals may shift their focus to other endeavors, such as drug trafficking, human trafficking, and weapons smuggling.

Speaking with TorrentFreak, IP House CEO Jan van Voorn says that site blocking doesn’t answer all problems and that other crimes remain a separate challenge. However, he notes that doing nothing is worse.

“By cutting off a low-risk, high-margin revenue stream, site-blocking targets how organized networks monetize piracy to fund broader transnational activity. It’s not a silver bullet, but a practical tool to add friction and reduce illicit income,” he says.

“Doing nothing leaves a highly profitable channel intact. More broadly, different criminal activities require the right legal tools. Site-blocking addresses piracy, and where additional measures are needed to combat other crimes, those should be considered as well.”

The recommendation comes at a time when lawmakers in U.S. Congress are working on a bipartisan and bicameral site-blocking bill. As a result, the lobbying efforts have clearly started to pick up.

Earlier this week, the Motion Picture Association (MPA) used World IP Day to make a similar site-blocking pitch . In addition, a new MPA-funded study on the links between piracy and cyberthreats in Latin America ( pdf ) also references site blocking as a potential countermeasure.

Whether the renewed U.S. site-blocking push will succeed, and whether it can address the organized crime or cybersecurity threats it claims to target, remains to be seen.

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