Pirate streaming apps and unauthorized IPTV services have continued to gain popularity worldwide.

This is also the case in Chile, where there’s no shortage of options. This includes brands such as MagisTV, FlujoTV, and, XuperTV, which are popular throughout many countries in the region.

These services are a thorn in the side of rightsholders, including the American Hollywood giant Warner Bros. Entertainment, which filed a formal complaint. This effort paid off in February , when Chile’s Department of Telecommunications issued a dynamic blocking order, requiring ISPs to block domains linked to these pirate brands.

Warner Bros. Raises the Stakes

While the blocking action sorted some effect, the IPTV problem remained. This prompted Warner Bros. to raise the stakes by filing a criminal complaint against a company named Streaming Chile SpA that allegedly sells copyright-infringing IPTV subscriptions.

Chilean newspaper La Tercera reports that Warner Bros. accuses the company and its representatives, the 56-year-old Marta Leyton and her son Joaquín Ávila (25) of copyright infringement and computer fraud.

The complaint mentions that IPTV services are widely adopted. While some of these streaming services operate legally, many operate without permission of rightsholders.

“Alongside the growth of a legal IPTV service industry, an illegal industry of unauthorized IPTV service providers has grown alarmingly. These providers offer their clients pay television services via the internet, providing them with access to various content (channels),” the complaint alleges.

Warner Bros. is represented by attorney Daniel Steinmetz, who noted that illegal IPTV services often rebroadcast legal streams without permission from rightsholder, bypassing copyright protections.

Several Linked IPTV Services

TorrentFreak has not seen a copy of the complaint, and the available reporting does not identify any associated URLs. However, the website streaming-chile.net notes in the its footer that it is owned by Streaming Chile SpA, which fits the picture.

The website in question mentions that the operation serves more than 35,000 customers worldwide. The same company, which also offers reseller services, is linked to other streaming platforms such as mejoriptv.net, maxtv.cl, and plandetv.cl.

As seen above, these IPTV services are also mentioned in the “our customers say” section on the main website. The Trustpilot page has less favorable reviews .

Part of a Broader Crackdown

Warner Bros. referral is part of a broader regional push against IPTV piracy. In February, for example, an Argentine court expanded the crackdown on pirate IPTV services by blocking more than 70 domains while ordering Google to disable sideloaded Android apps.

In Chile, the criminal referral against Streaming Chile SpA stands out because it targets a company and its representative by name, under criminal law rather than a civil procedure.

The Warner Bros. complaint is also the first known Chilean case to invoke the Ley de Delitos Económicos (Economic Crimes Law). Enacted in 2023, the law allows courts to order confiscation of all profits derived from criminal conduct. In addition, it imposes fines that scale with the defendant’s income, well beyond the penalties available under standard copyright law alone.

For now, the criminal complaint is at an early investigative stage. No arrests have been reported, and, as far as we can see, the IPTV services that we could link to the company remain online.

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

Anna’s Archive is generally known as a meta-search engine for shadow libraries, helping users find pirated books and other related resources.

However, last December, the site announced that it had also backed up Spotify , which came as a shock to the music industry.

Anna’s Archive initially released only Spotify metadata, and no actual music, but that put the music industry on high alert. Together with the likes of Universal, Warner, and Sony, Spotify filed a lawsuit days later, hoping to shut the site down.

Through a preliminary injunction targeting domain registrars and registries, the shadow library lost several domain names. However, not all were taken down, and the site registered various new domain names as backups .

The legal pressure also appeared to pay off in other ways. Not long after the lawsuit was filed, the shadow library removed the Spotify listing for their torrents page. The same applies to the first batch of music files that was accidentally released in February.

The site’s operator, Anna’s Archivist, hoped that these removals would motivate the music industry to back down , but that wasn’t the case. Instead, they returned to court requesting a $322 million default judgment after the defendant failed to show up in court.

$322 Million, Granted in Full

Yesterday, Judge Jed Rakoff of the Southern District of New York entered a default judgment against the site’s unknown operators, awarding Spotify and the major labels the requested $322 million damages award in full.

The music labels get the statutory maximum of $150,000 in damages for around 50 works. Spotify adds a DMCA circumvention claim of $2,500 for 120,000 music files, bringing the total to more than $322 million.

The plaintiff previously described their damages request as “extremely conservative.” The DMCA claim is based only on the 120,000 files, not the full 2.8 million that were released. Had they applied the $2,500 rate to all released files, the damages figure would exceed $7 billion.

Plaintiff(s)	Damages Sought	Amount
Total		$322,200,000.00
Warner	Statutory damages for willful copyright infringement (17 U.S.C. § 504(c)) at $150,000 for 48 sound recordings	$7,200,000.00
Sony	Statutory damages for willful copyright infringement (17 U.S.C. § 504(c)) at $150,000 for 50 sound recordings	$7,500,000.00
UMG	Statutory damages for willful copyright infringement (17 U.S.C. § 504(c)) at $150,000 for 50 sound recordings	$7,500,000.00
Spotify	Statutory damages for circumvention of a technological measure (17 U.S.C. § 1203(c)(3)(A)) at $2,500 for 120,000 music files	$300,000,000.00

Anna’s Archive did not show up in court, and the operators of the site remain unidentified. The judgment attempts to address this directly, by ordering Anna’s Archive to file a compliance report within ten business days, under penalty of perjury, that includes valid contact information for the site and its managing agents.

Whether the site will comply with this order is highly uncertain.

For now, the monetary judgment is mostly a victory on paper, as recouping money from an unknown entity is impossible. For this reason, the music companies also requested a permanent injunction.

Permanent Injunction Targets Domains

In addition to the damages award, Rakoff entered a permanent worldwide injunction covering ten Anna’s Archive domains: annas-archive.org, .li, .se, .in, .pm, .gl, .ch, .pk, .gd, and .vg.

Domain registries and registrars of record, along with hosting and internet service providers, are ordered to permanently disable access to those domains, disable authoritative nameservers, cease hosting services, and preserve evidence that could identify the site’s operators.

The judgment names specific third parties bound by those obligations, including Public Interest Registry, Cloudflare, Switch Foundation, The Swedish Internet Foundation, Njalla SRL, IQWeb FZ-LLC, Immaterialism Ltd., Hosting Concepts B.V., Tucows Domains Inc., and OwnRegistrar, Inc.

Anna’s Archive is also ordered to destroy all copies of works scraped from Spotify and to file a compliance report within ten business days, under penalty of perjury, including valid contact information for the site and its managing agents. That last requirement could prove significant, given that the identity of the site’s operators remains unknown.

A Way Out, at a Price

In theory, Anna’s Archive has the option to prevent the domain suspension. The permanent injunction allows the site to seek relief from this measure, after showing that it has paid the full $322 million damages award and complied with all injunctive obligations.

That’s an unlikely option, to say the least. At the same time, however, it is not guaranteed that the site’s domain names will be suspended.

As reported previously, several domain names, including the Greenland-based .gl version , are linked to registries and registrars outside the jurisdiction of the U.S. court. As such, they previously did not comply to the preliminary injunction, and it is unknown whether the latest order changes that.

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A copy of the default judgment entered by Judge Rakoff is available here (pdf) .

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

Since the late 2000’s , European countries have been at the forefront of site-blocking efforts.

These blocking measures initially relied on court orders that required Internet providers to restrict access to notorious pirate sites. More recently, however, blocking requirements spread to other online intermediaries.

For example, in several countries, blocking injunctions expanded to third-party DNS resolvers such as Cloudflare, OpenDNS and Google. Not much later, VPN services became a target, as these could also be used to circumvent blocking orders.

While major rightsholders argue these measures are effective and proportionate, critics have documented cases of overblocking, where anti-piracy systems restricted access to legitimate sites and services. They raised concerns about collateral damage to the free flow of information.

A new report published by the Centre for European Policy Studies ( CEPS ) today adds substantial weight to that critique. CEPS is not part of the EU, but it operates as a leading independent think tank that advises on EU policy.

Benefits and Costs of Website-Blocking Legislation

The study , titled The Benefits and Costs of Website-Blocking Legislation: An Economic, Legal and Policy Assessment examines website-blocking measures across all 27 EU Member States and assesses whether those measures are effective, proportionate, and compatible with EU law.

The report’s central finding is blunt. It concludes that site blocking is associated with substantial risk of unintended consequences and harmful side effects. These adverse effects, including overblocking, are not always fully recognized before site-blocking measures are enacted.

The report suggests that blocking schemes are prone to overblocking because these rightsholders are not liable for mistakes, nor do they bear the costs, which are typically paid by the ISPs or other intermediaries.

“These problems are exacerbated by the fact that rightsholders bear none of the costs of website blocking and are thus incentivised to pursue stringent blocking orders without concern for the collateral damage they cause – there is no back-pressure,” the report reads.

Italy and Spain: A Pattern of Collateral Damage

The report examines six EU jurisdictions in detail, and in each case, the findings are critical of site blocking.

Italy’s Piracy Shield, operated by regulator AGCOM, requires ISPs to block notified domains and IP addresses within 30 minutes, with no prior court order. This system has repeatedly resulted in overblocking, where the anti-piracy system blocked access to legitimate sites and services .

Instead of addressing the collateral damage concerns, AGCOM fined Cloudflare €14.2 million in January , after the company refused to globally filter its 1.1.1.1 DNS resolver. Cloudflare has since appealed the fine , while challenging the legitimacy of the Piracy Shield system.

Spain has also seen reports of similar collateral damage through its blocking regime. For example, the report notes that when LaLiga was granted a court order in its favor, it targeted a series of Cloudflare-owned IP addresses starting in February 2025. These blocked pirate streams, but also 3,300 lawful services that used the same infrastructure.

“The collateral damage was significant for ordinary users, businesses, and services that had no connection whatsoever to piracy,” the report notes, adding that the court formally dismissed Cloudflare’s appeal in March 2025.

Meanwhile, in Belgium, site-blocking orders have targeted DNS resolvers, which led to OpenDNS temporarily exiting the country in April 2025. The company eventually returned as the ruling was suspended pending appeal, but by then it had already done its damage.

“The episode illustrates how overreaching court orders can have unintended consequences for the broader digital ecosystem, and how disproportionate liability exposure can sometimes incentivise service provider withdrawal rather than compliance,” the report writes.

Report Questions Blocking Effectiveness

Beyond the collateral damage, the report also questions whether blocking achieves its stated objective of stopping piracy. After all, users are typically good at bypassing blocking measures.

The report cites various academic studies, including a 2023 paper published by researchers from Chapman University and Carnegie Mellon University, which found that site blocking led to a modest increase in visits to legal sites. According to the report, it’s unclear if these effects last.

“Recent research confirms that blocking can sharply reduce access to targeted IPTV and streaming piracy services, but no study in the past five years provides a rigorous estimate of how long these effects persist,” the report reads.

The report does find that illegal consumption of films and music has declined substantially over time. However, it attributes this to increasing availability and affordability of legal content, not to enforcement.

Rightsholders are well aware of the limits of site blocking. In response, they expanded their blocking requests to also cover DNS resolvers and VPN providers, as we have seen in France , Belgium , Italy , Spain , and elsewhere.

The CEPS report does not see stricter blocking measures as a solution; it suggests a wide range of other recommendations for the EU, member states, and copyright holders.

IP Blocking Should Be Abolished

The report makes 12 formal recommendations. The most significant is that IP-based blocking should be avoided altogether, due to its inherent tendency to block large numbers of legitimate service sites. DNS-level or URL-level blocking should be used instead.

CEPS points out that this conclusion was also reached following reviews conducted by local telecoms regulator TKK, which effectively banned IP-address blocking in the country.

“To the extent that blocking is used at all, better targeted mechanisms such as DNS-level or URL-level blocking should be used instead, consistent with the Austrian TKK’s reasoning. IP-based blocking is inherently overinclusive because shared IP addresses serve thousands or millions of legitimate domains,” the report reads.

Other recommendations include a requirement for rightsholders to contribute to the costs of implementing blocking measures, and the option to be held liable for damages caused by overblocking at their request.

The report also calls for all blocking orders to be subject to prior or rapid judicial review, to be time-limited with periodic reviews, and narrow in scope.

According to the report, the UK blocking model comes closest to its ideal. English High Court orders are time-limited, technically evidenced, and require rightsholders to demonstrate that proposed blocking methods will not affect legitimate content. There hasn’t been any significant overblocking reported in the UK either.

Nord Security Funded the Study

CEPS writes that the study was conducted at the request of and with the support of Nord Security , parent company of NordVPN. However, the think tank states that the analysis and conclusions are entirely independent and reflect the views of the authors alone.

Speaking with TorrentFreak, a Nord Security spokesperson confirmed its support of the study while stressing that the research was conducted independently.

“Website-blocking measures are expanding across Europe, yet there has been limited independent analysis of whether they are effective, proportionate, and compatible with EU law. Nord Security funded this CEPS study because we believe policy in this area should be shaped by evidence, not assumptions,” Nord told us.

As one of the world’s most widely used VPN services, NordVPN has a major stake in the blocking debate. The company has been targeted by blocking orders, including in France, where it recently lost its appeal together with other VPN services.

Nord Security was also present in Brussels this afternoon, where its Regulatory Policy & Compliance Counsel Emilija Beržanskaitė was critical about site-blocking efforts. At the same hearing , the EU’s Intellectual Property Office and the EU’s Directorate-General for Communications Networks, Content and Technology were also present.

For now, the report arrives at a moment when intermediaries are pushing back against blocking regimes across Europe, while the European Commission is yet to issue harmonized guidance on how member states should address blocking concerns.

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

Since 2024, the Paris Judicial Court has gradually expanded the typical piracy site blocking orders beyond residential Internet providers.

The initial order required Cloudflare, Google, and Cisco to actively block access to pirate sites through their own DNS resolvers, confirming that third-party intermediaries can be required to take responsibility. Not much later, VPN providers were added to the blocking roster.

Initially, these orders were to address circumvention techniques for domains that were already blocked through ISPs. The DNS resolver and VPN provider blockades limited these loopholes. Several blocking orders have followed since, but a series of orders that came out at the Paris Judicial Court take a different approach.

On March 18, Judge Jean-Christophe Gayet issued seven simultaneous rulings, targeting a broad range of online intermediaries that enable access to pirate sports streams in France. The cases were filed by the Spanish professional football league LaLiga, which requested blocking measures against 35 domain names of sports streaming sites.

The pirate sites listed include librefutboltv.su, which has over 27 million monthly visits, as well as smaller ones such as tflix.live, daddylive.dad, yallashooot.video, ballcontrol.click, and kora-live.im.

The targeted intermediaries span every layer of the technical stack: this includes major French ISPs, alternative DNS resolvers such as Google, Cloudflare, and Quad9, as well as several of the world’s largest VPN providers.

Court: LaLiga Lacks Standing

Interestingly, however, LaLiga was not victorious in court. In each of the seven cases, the court declared the league’s claims inadmissible.

The court explained that, under Article L. 333-10 of the French Sports Code, the right to bring blocking injunctions applies to rightsholders, broadcasting companies, and professional sports leagues. However, the court interprets that last category narrowly.

To qualify for protection, sports leagues must be created by a state-delegated federation under French law, specifically under Articles L. 131-14 and L. 132-1 of the Sports Code. As a Spanish association with no delegation from the French state, LaLiga does not meet that definition.

LaLiga argued that the law should also cover foreign leagues that commercialize their audiovisual rights, and that reading it otherwise would discriminate against non-French rights holders. However, the court rejected these arguments.

The restriction has nothing to do with LaLiga’s nationality, the court noted; the league simply needs a subdelegation from the French state to qualify for protection via site-blocking orders. Additionally, the court concluded that LaLiga is not directly harmed by piracy in France, as it assigned its exclusive French broadcast rights to beIN Sports France.

This same reasoning applied to all seven cases and initially appears to be a major setback for the football league. However, help was just around the corner.

beIN Sports Steps In

beIN Sports France , which holds exclusive broadcast rights to LaLiga in France as part of a deal with the Spanish league, intervened voluntarily in all seven cases.

As the company that acquired exclusive French broadcasting rights for LaLiga, it qualifies under the second category in Article L. 333-10. Unlike LaLiga, beIN could also point to documented harm, including evidence that 35 disputed domain names were streaming LaLiga matches, with beIN Sports branding visible in the pirate feeds.

The court ultimately concluded that there was grave and repeated infringement of beIN Sports France’s exclusive rights in all seven cases and granted the blocking orders in its name.

Blocking The Full Stack

What further stands out is the fact that these orders all came out on the same day, targeting nineteen French ISPs, three DNS resolvers, a CDN provider, and four VPN services. This broad approach ensures that the most popular circumvention options are immediately cut off.

The orders run until June 21, 2026, and are also dynamic in nature. This means that new domain names can be added in the future, once they are approved for blocking by France’s audiovisual regulator, ARCOM.

The ISP order will have the most direct impact. It includes France’s largest providers, such as Orange, SFR, Free, and Bouygues Telecom, as well as various smaller ones.

If subscribers try to circumvent these blocking measures by switching to alternative DNS resolvers, orders against Google , Cloudflare , and Quad9 will prevent this.

VPN providers are not necessarily an option either, as the court granted blocking orders against ProtonVPN , as well as CyberGhost and ExpressVPN . LaLiga also referenced orders against NordVPN and Surfshark jointly, but TorrentFreak was unable to locate these.

The Cloudflare order is the most technically comprehensive of the batch. It covers not only Cloudflare’s public DNS resolver but also its CDN, reverse proxy service, and WARP service under a single ruling. The court requires Cloudflare to block the domains across its infrastructure, by whatever technical means it chooses.

Some of the defendants raised counterarguments in court. For example, several VPN providers argued that Article L. 333-10 conflicts with the EU E-Commerce Directive, while others sought a referral to the Court of Justice. However, none of these arguments convinced the court.

Site Blocking Evolution

The seven court orders represent the most comprehensive single-day blocking action under France’s sports piracy framework, as far as we know. Whereas initial orders targeted single intermediary categories, these come in one full sweep.

LaLiga president Javier Tebas is pleased with the outcome and thanks beIN for their cooperation.

“These rulings represent a significant step forward because they extend protection to the entire technical ecosystem that piracy currently relies on. The fight against audiovisual fraud must grow through collaboration, as is the case here with beIN Sports France, which has been key to developing a solid and effective defense in the French market,” Tebas said.

After multiple successful site-blocking petitions, it’s clear that the French court sees a blocking role for a wide variety of intermediaries. This was recently confirmed by the Paris Court of Appeal too.

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A copy of the ISP blocking order (RG 25/10055) is available here (pdf) . The Cloudflare order (RG 25/08543) can be found here (pdf) . The Google order (RG 25/08548) is available here (pdf) . The Quad9 order (RG 25/10053) is available here (pdf) . The ProtonVPN order (RG 25/10054) is available here (pdf) . The CyberGhost/ExpressVPN order (RG 25/08569) is available here (pdf) .

Below is a list of all 35 targeted domain names:

daddylive.dad daddylive2.top daddylivehd.world daddyliveru.top rojadirecta.at rojadirectaenvivo.me rojadirectaenvivo.sx la12hd.com jalaace2.cc jalaliveace3.cc stream196tp.com hoca4u.xyz bfpc.jllivetx.cc bienkoora.live kora-live.im yalla1shoot.com camel1.live yacine-tv.com ppv.to live-match-tv.net librefutboltv.su yallashooot.video tv.tflix.app hesgoal.im rojadirecta-tv.net directfr.sbs koora-live.net live.sia-live.live s3.stream-on.live yacine-tv.watch ar.kora-top.space envivolibre.com pl.yalashoot.xyz tflix.live ballcontrol.click

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

In June 2020, Spanish police led a Europe-wide operation that arrested 11 people connected to a pirate IPTV platform with two million subscribers.

Europol and Eurojust announced the action with considerable fanfare but declined to name the service. However, at the time we confirmed that a key target was RapidIPTV, a platform that had been quietly running an IPTV streaming empire since at least 2014.

The authorities saw Amir Z. as the alleged mastermind behind the empire, which also offered a ‘franchise’ model. The man, known to his colleagues as “ Dash the Iranian ,” was arrested, and this week, after nearly six years of pre-trial proceedings, the prosecution formally started in court.

RapidIPTV Kingpin Goes to Trial

Spain’s National Court ( Audiencia Nacional ) began hearing the case on Tuesday against five defendants, all of Iranian origin. The charges cover membership of a criminal organization, intellectual property crimes, offenses against the market and consumers, as well as money laundering.

In sharp contrast to the multi-year wait following the arrests, the trial was relatively short-lived.

After three hours of negotiation, all defendants reached an agreement with prosecutors, according to EFE . The prosecution agreed to drop the most serious charge, membership of a criminal organization, after the defendants pleaded guilty to the three other charges.

This resulted in a large sentencing reduction. The prosecution had originally sought 22 and a half years of prison time for Amir Z., but the agreed sentence was just over two years. Similarly, the money-laundering fine that initially could be as high as €70 million was reduced to €8 million as part of the deal.

Because all sides agreed to the plea deal, it cannot be appealed by any party. This effectively ends the prosecution. The sentences for the remaining defendants were not reported.

€12 Million for the Rights-Holders

In addition to the €8 million fine to the state, the sentence also includes a damages fee of €12 million for the affected companies. The court also ordered the confiscation of all material seized during the raids, as well as all funds and accounts held by the defendants.

The private prosecution coalition was an unusually large one. Warner Bros, Universal, Columbia, Sony Pictures, Paramount, New Line, Netflix, Amazon, Disney, and LaLiga had all joined the action under Spain’s acusación particular mechanism, to hold the IPTV operators responsible.

How much money can eventually be recouped has yet to be seen, but with an estimated 2 million subscribers, the operation generated substantial revenue.

A Building in Iran, a Flat in Barcelona

The money-laundering element of the case was also notable. Prosecutors alleged that the group moved approximately €25.1 million through payment processors, cryptocurrency exchanges, shell companies, and falsified invoices.

Specific transactions identified by investigators included the construction of a residential building in Iran, the purchase of a Barcelona property valued at €1.6 million, and the purchase of two luxury vehicles worth a combined €400,000.

Those figures partially overlap with what was already public: at the time of the 2020 raids, Europol reported that police seized real estate, cars, jewelry, cash, and cryptocurrency worth approximately €4.8 million, and €1.1 million frozen in bank accounts.

The platform used various domain names, including rapidiptv.com, rapidiptv.net, iptvstack.com, and the iptv.community forum. According to the prosecution, it captured signals from licensed pay-TV platforms and routed them through a private server network of 50 servers in at least 13 countries across Europe and North America.

Interestingly, iptvstack.com and iptv.community both remain operational at the time of writing.

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

Pirate streaming network Dramacool and several associated sites shut down in November 2024 , citing legal pressure from copyright holders.

The operators of the Asian drama and anime portal never revealed who was behind that pressure, but court records later showed it was Wavve Americas Inc., the parent company of legal Korean streaming service Kocowa.

Wavve had filed a copyright lawsuit in Arizona federal court against the unknown operators of multiple Dramacool domains, hoping to take the associated sites offline permanently.

Defendants Go Silent

When Wavve eventually identified the defendants , they were scattered across Thailand, Vietnam, Pakistan, the Netherlands, and New Jersey.

Kocowa identified domain operators in Thailand, Vietnam, Pakistan, the Netherlands, and New Jersey. The amended complaint named Asian C, Tommy USA, Najeeb Ullah Mirani, Baidar Bakhtand, and Dorothy Bradshaw, none appeared in court to answer the complaint.

Meanwhile, some Dramacool domains remained operational. While these may include copycat sites unrelated to the original operation, the ongoing copyright infringement is a serious problem for Kocowa.

To break this impasse, Wavve filed a motion for default judgment in September 2025, noting that some defendants had not only ignored the litigation but expanded their operations to new domains while the case was pending.

The company did not seek any monetary compensation but simply requested an order that would allow the company to take over the Dramacool domain names.

Default Judgment Entered

Earlier this week, U.S. District Judge Krissa M. Lanham granted the motion for a default judgment in full. The court found the requested injunction proportional and appropriate.

“Requiring defendants stop their infringing activities will not cause any legitimate hardship. And the public interest is served in enforcing copyright law. A permanent injunction prohibiting defendants from continuing their activities is appropriate,” the order reads.

The order prohibits all defendants from operating the sixteen named domain names, including watchasia.to and asianwiki.co, and also bars them from registering or owning any new piracy-linked domain names.

Wavve had acknowledged that an award for monetary damages would be meaningless, as the foreign pirate site operators are unresponsive. Therefore, they set all their hopes on a domain transfer order, which the court granted as well.

Domain Transfers Granted

In the order, Judge Lanham acknowledged that domain transfers are legally contested territory in copyright cases. The standard trademark statute that typically enables such transfers does not apply here, as the lawsuit did not include trademark claims.

However, since none of the defendants put up a defense and because several of the associated sites remain online, the transfers were granted. This was in part justified by judgments in a number of other courts, which approved domain transfers in similar copyright cases.

The order notes that domain transfers can be an appropriate remedy when there are indications that the defendants will not comply with an injunction. That is the case here, Judge Lanham concluded.

“Here, defendants concealed their identities, ignored this litigation, and have an ‘established practice of evading copyright enforcement by moving their operation to new domains, even after having a judgment rendered against them’,” the order reads,

“Wavve is entitled to an order transferring the domain names,” Judge Lanham adds.

Dramacool Domains Still Online

Whether Wavve can actually take control of all 16 domains remains to be seen, as not all registrars and registries may comply with U.S. court orders.

Several of the original Dramacool-operated domains, including dramanice.la, runasian.net, watchasia.to, asianc.sh, and asianwiki.co, have been offline since the November 2024 shutdown.

However, at least three of the named domains are still actively serving pirated content several days after the judgment was entered. Dramacool.bg, dramacool.com.tr, and dramacool.ba all remain online, redirecting visitors to functional streaming sites with full drama libraries.

In closing, it is worth stressing that the permanent injunction prevents the defendants from registering new domain names for infringing purposes. However, the domain transfer order targeted at registrars and registries, is limited to the sixteen named domain names.

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A copy of the default judgment order, issued by U.S. District Judge Krissa M. Lanham, is available here (pdf) . The clerk’s entry of default judgment is available here (pdf) .

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

In late 2022, several of the world’s largest music companies, including Warner Bros. and Sony Music prevailed in their lawsuit against Internet provider Grande Communications.

The record labels accused the Astound-owned ISP of not doing enough to stop pirating subscribers. Specifically, they alleged that the company failed to terminate repeat infringers.

The trial lasted more than two weeks and ended in a resounding victory for the labels. A Texas federal jury found Grande liable for willful contributory copyright infringement, and the ISP was ordered to pay $47 million in damages to the record labels. The copyright infringement verdict was confirmed by the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, though the Fifth Circuit ordered a new trial on damages.

The verdict was not the final word yet, as Grande petitioned the Supreme Court last year, urging the justices to take up the case and review the Fifth Circuit’s decision.

Grande’s petition centered on the crucial question of ISP liability in cases of contributory copyright infringement. Grande framed the issue as an “exceptionally important question under the Copyright Act,” highlighting a “nationwide litigation campaign by the U.S. recording industry” to hold ISPs liable for copyright violations carried out by their customers.

The central question is as follows:

“Whether an ISP is liable for contributory copyright infringement by (i) providing content-neutral internet access to the general public and (ii) failing to terminate that access after receiving two third-party notices alleging someone at a customer’s IP address has infringed.”

Knowledge is Not Intent

The case and the questions are similar to the Cox v. Sony case , which the Supreme Court decided in favor of the Internet provider last month. In a 7-2 decision, it concluded that an ISP cannot be held contributorily liable for copyright infringement merely because it kept providing service to subscribers that were flagged for piracy.

In Cox, the Supreme Court stated that contributory liability requires proof that the provider intended its service to be used for infringement. That intent can only be shown in one of two ways. Either the provider actively induced infringement, or the service is one that has no substantial non-infringing uses.

“Under our precedents, a company is not liable as a copyright infringer for merely providing a service to the general public with knowledge that it will be used by some to infringe copyrights. Accordingly, we reverse,” Justice Thomas wrote in the opinion last month.

The Court also directly countered the Fourth Circuit’s reasoning, which held that supplying a product with “knowledge” of future infringement was enough to establish liability.

Supreme Court Sends Grande v. UMG Back to Fifth Circuit

With Cox v. Sony now settled, the Supreme Court turned its attention to Grande’s pending petition. Rather than taking up the case on the merits, the Court issued a GVR order , granting the petition, vacating the Fifth Circuit’s judgment, and remanding the case for reconsideration under the Cox standard.

The order effectively removes the case from the Supreme Court docket, urging the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals to take another look at its decision in light of the new ruling.

Given the similarities between the two cases, it is no surprise that the Supreme Court came to this conclusion.

It is now up to the Fifth Circuit to revisit whether Grande’s conduct meets the intent threshold that was established in Cox. That is a significantly higher bar than the one applied in the original verdict, which found that continuing to provide service to known infringers was enough to establish material contribution.

The music companies previously said they sent over a million copyright infringement notices, but that Grande failed to terminate even a single subscriber account in response. However, without proof of active inducement, these absolute numbers carry less weight now.

Whether this translates into a win for Grande on remand remains to be seen. For now, however, the original $47 million verdict is further away than ever.

This week’s GVR order is just one of the many ripple effects of the Sony ruling on other contributory infringement cases. Last week, we reported how X already asked the court to dismiss its liability battle with several music publishers. Meanwhile, the ruling will also directly impact Verizon’s repeat infringer battle with the music industry.

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

Last week, X asked a federal court in Tennessee to dismiss a music piracy lawsuit , arguing that the Supreme Court’s ruling in Cox v. Sony, rendered the music companies’ contributory infringement theory futile.

The music publishers, meanwhile, were busy in a different court, asking a Texas judge to throw out X’s antitrust complaint against them with similar finality.

The motion to dismiss, filed in the Northern District of Texas, argues that X’s lawsuit doesn’t hold up and the music companies want all eight counts dismissed with prejudice.

A Conspiracy Built on One Word

X filed its antitrust complaint in January , accusing the National Music Publishers’ Association (NMPA) and a coalition of major music publishers, including Sony, Universal, and Warner Chappell, of coordinating a “weaponized” DMCA takedown campaign to coerce X into industry-wide licensing deals.

The conspiracy claim rested heavily on a pre-litigation email sent by NMPA President David Israelite to Twitter in October 2021. X alleged that Israelite threatened a “massive program” of DMCA notices on a scale “larger than any previous effort in DMCA history” if X did not agree to a partnership.

However, the publishers have now submitted the full email chain to the court, arguing that X’s complaint “selectively crops, paraphrases, and misconstrues” it. They note that the complete exchange tells a more nuanced story.

In his October 6 email, Israelite warned Twitter that the NMPA was preparing a “massive program” of DMCA notices, adding that his “preference is not to go down that road, but instead to develop a partnership.” He closed by writing (emphasis added): “If you are interested in engaging in such a conversation, please let me know. If you choose not to do so, then please know we are open to starting a conversation at any point during the future process.”

The publishers argue that X’s conspiracy theory rests almost entirely on that final word.

“X argues that by using the word ‘we,’ NMPA meant that X could only deal with the Music Publishers collectively for a license and that no individual Music Publisher would negotiate separately. That inference is not only implausible, it is completely devoid of factual basis or allegation. An antitrust claim cannot rest on such a tenuous thread.”

Same Judge, Same Problem

One of the key reasons for a dismissal is the argument that there can be no antitrust injury, as X and the music publishers do not compete. The music companies argue that antitrust law requires a competitor to be involved in a refusal-to-deal claim.

The argument has already succeeded once against X, in the same courthouse, before the same judge. In February, District Judge Jane Boyle dismissed X’s antitrust lawsuit against the World Federation of Advertisers with prejudice, finding that X had failed to allege antitrust injury because no competitor was involved in the alleged boycott.

The publishers quote that ruling extensively and argue the present case is largely similar.

“Specifically, X does not allege that any participant in the alleged conspiracy is its competitor, a necessary requirement for antitrust injury to flow from an alleged refusal to deal,” the motion states.

The proposed order submitted alongside the motion has Judge Boyle’s name pre-filled.

Retaliation, Not Antitrust

The music publishers take their motion to dismiss beyond simply refuting X’s claims. They also suggest that X filed the antitrust suit as leverage in the copyright infringement case the music companies filed in the Tennessee federal court.

“The paucity of factual allegations supporting an antitrust claim is no accident. X’s motivation in filing suit was different: retaliation and leverage for the copyright suit the Music Publishers filed against it, which is currently pending in Tennessee federal court,” the motion notes.

X argues that the music companies sent a flood of “baseless” DMCA notices, targeting over 200,000 posts and suspending 50,000 users. However, the music publishers motion counters that none of the takedown notices was objectively baseless.

The Sham Exception

The music companies argue that their takedown campaign was a First Amendment-protected pre-litigation activity. They invoke the Noerr-Pennington doctrine , which shields things such as pre-litigation notices and cease-and-desist letters from antitrust liability.

DMCA takedown notices, they argue, fall in the same category, especially since these were used as key evidence in the the copyright lawsuit currently pending in Tennessee.

This type of protection does not apply if the notices themselves are “baseless” or a “sham,” which X argued is the case here. The original complaint pointed to several examples, including a takedown notice targeting a video where the non-commercial use of background music was flagged as copyright infringement.

The music companies, however, counter that X does and cannot claim that any notices were baseless. This includes the background music example: this may qualify for fair use defense, but the publishers add that “infringing use of incidental background music is still infringing.”

All in all, the motion to dismiss concludes that the music companies used the DMCA as Congress intended, and that it is not an antitrust violation. The complaint should therefore be dismissed with prejudice on all counts.

It is now up to Judge Boyle to decide whether the antitrust case can continue or whether it should be dismissed outright. The same is true for the Nashville case, where X asked the court to completely dismiss the music companies’ copyright infringement lawsuit.

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A copy of the motion to dismiss, filed April 2, 2026 at the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Texas, is available here (pdf) . The supporting memorandum can be found here (pdf) .

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

The Supreme Court’s decision to reverse the billion-dollar piracy liability verdict against Cox Communications is a major win for Internet service providers.

It confirms that they can’t be held liable for pirating activities of subscribers or customers unless they actively induce copyright infringement through specific acts, or if their service has no substantial non-infringing uses.

For rightsholders, however, the ruling represents a significant setback, as it makes it much harder to hold ISPs liable for pirating subscribers.

Or, as Justice Sotomayor noted in her concurring Supreme Court opinion, the majority’s decision “permits ISPs to sell an internet connection to every single infringer who wants one without fear of liability and without lifting a finger to prevent infringement.”

The ruling reshapes the liability landscape, giving new urgency to site-blocking efforts.

Internet providers have previously opposed such legislation over liability concerns. Have those concerns been resolved by the Supreme Court? And where do the U.S. site-blocking legislative efforts stand today?

A Bicameral, Bipartisan Site Blocking Push

Last year, several new site-blocking proposals emerged in Congress. In January 2025, Lofgren had filed her Foreign Anti-Digital Piracy Act ( FADPA ) in the House. A few months later, Senator Tillis announced a draft of the Block BEARD Act , with bipartisan support from Senators Chris Coons, Marsha Blackburn, and Adam Schiff.

At the time, the House and Senate efforts were not coordinated. That has changed.

TorrentFreak has learned that, over the past months, Senator Tillis and Representative Lofgren have been working on a draft that would combine their separate site-blocking proposals into a single piece of legislation.

The unified approach marks a significant shift from the fragmented approach of the past year.

No draft text has been circulated publicly, and sources could not provide a specific timeline for introduction beyond noting it would need to happen before Tillis’s term ends in January 2027.

One possibility mentioned by sources is that the legislation could be attached to an omnibus spending bill. For now, however, that remains speculative.

Targeting ISPs and DNS Resolvers

While detailed specifics on the bill will have to wait until a draft is circulating, it is expected that the legislation will require both ISPs and large DNS providers to block foreign pirate sites.

This is in line with Lofgren’s original FADPA bill, which specifically included DNS resolvers with more than $100 million in annual revenue. Tillis’s Block BEARD act does not mention DNS resolvers, but uses the Section 512(k)(1)(A) DMCA service provider definition, which is wide enough to capture them.

The inclusion of DNS resolvers is significant, as it brings tech companies such as Google and Cloudflare into the mix. Targeting DNS resolvers is relatively novel internationally, as most site-blocking regimes do not explicitly include DNS providers.

We reached out to Google and Cloudflare, requesting comment, but they did not reply before publication. However, these companies have appealed similar blocking requests elsewhere, including in France , so they likely have reservations.

Notably, last year the Internet Infrastructure Coalition ( I2Coalition ), which represents major tech companies including Amazon, Cloudflare, and Google, launched its DNS at Risk campaign, warning the public about such DNS blocking threats.

Support and Opposition

Rightsholder groups including the RIAA , MPA , and Creative Future have supported the site-blocking efforts, while consumer advocates have raised concerns. However, the public discourse has been relatively quiet compared to the SOPA debates in 2012.

Times have changed and site blocking is much more common today than it was back then. That said, discussions, support, and critique will likely pick up when the legislation moves forward.

It is notable, however, that Representative Lofgren’s leading role is a shift from her position during the SOPA debates. At the time, she was among the fiercest opponents of SOPA in 2012, warning that blocking threatened the open internet.

Lofgren believes that her FADPA proposal is a “ smart, targeted approach ” that is mindful of due process, and respects free speech while using a narrow and targeted blocking approach.

Rep. Issa’s Wild Card

Running parallel to the Tillis-Lofgren effort is a separate proposal from Representative Darrell Issa, chairman of the House Judiciary Subcommittee on Courts, Intellectual Property, and the Internet.

Issa’s American Copyright Protection Act (ACPA) has been circulated in draft form for a while but has not been formally introduced. The bill takes a different procedural path. Rather than relying on standard district court jurisdiction, ACPA proposes that the Judicial Conference of the United States maintain a roster of designated judges to hear all piracy blocking cases.

Whether the Tillis-Lofgren framework and Issa’s separate effort will eventually converge remains unclear. Sources indicate that, in earlier stages, these were two separate, uncoordinated tracks.

Issa’s proposal also includes DNS resolvers. At the same time, it also addresses overblocking concerns directly. If a third party’s site is blocked due to an error caused by the copyright owner, the third party could request up to $250,000 in compensation from the rightsholder.

The Timeline

At the time of writing, the introduction timeline for the bicameral bill is unknown. However, Senator Tillis is not running for reelection. That gives him until January 2027 to advance the legislation and also creates a hard deadline.

Whether the bill surfaces as standalone legislation, gets attached to an omnibus spending package, or eventually blends with Issa’s separate ACPA proposal has yet to be seen. But it’s clear that, behind the scenes, lawmakers are still working on getting it ready.

With the Cox decision reshaping the legal landscape, site-blocking efforts have gained new urgency for both ISPs, DNS providers, and rightsholders.

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