In March of 2024, the Dallas-based IPTV operator William Freemon was sued for copyright infringement by Amazon, Netflix, and several major Hollywood studios.

Freemon defended himself but failed to hire a lawyer for his company, Freemon Technology Industries (FTI). Instead, he responded by filing various motions while refusing to formally answer the copyright infringement complaint.

With the case not moving forward, the movie companies eventually had enough and requested a default judgment of $18,750,000 in copyright damages.

Last month, a Texas magistrate judge recommended granting this in full, and this week, the order was formally adopted by U.S. District Judge Sam A. Lindsay.

Judge Grants $18,750,000 Judgment

As detailed in our earlier coverage , Freemon allegedly operated four unauthorized streaming services: Streaming TV Now, TV Nitro, Instant IPTV, and Cash App IPTV. In addition, he was accused of running a pirate IPTV reseller operation called Live TV Resellers.

‘Streaming TV Now’ was the most popular IPTV service, according to the legal paperwork. It first appeared online in 2020 and offers access to 11,000 live channels, as well as on-demand access to over 27,000 movies and 9,000 TV series.

The studios identified a sample of 125 copyrighted works that were available through the IPTV services, including Universal’s Oppenheimer. As damages compensation, the court granted the recommended statutory maximum of $150,000 per work for willful infringement, for a total of $18,750,000.

This judgment amount will continue to grow, as the court approved a 3.51% annual post-judgment interest rate until the amount is paid in full. In addition, the attorneys’ fee award has yet to be determined and will also add to the total.

In addition to the damages, Judge Lindsay also entered a permanent injunction, which bars Freemon and FTI from reproducing, distributing, or publicly performing any of the plaintiffs’ copyrighted works, and from assisting others in doing so.

Injunction Targets Domain Names

The signed injunction also requires the eight domain names to be transferred immeidately to the studios’ control: instantiptv.net, streamingtvnow.com, streamingtvnow.net, tvnitro.net, cashappiptv.com, livetvresellers.com, stncloud.ltd, and stnlive.ltd.

The associated domain registrars have five days to facilitate theese transfers. If they fail to do so, the TLD registries can be ordered to either transfer the domains to a registrar of the studios’ choosing, or place them on registry hold, which would make them inaccessible too.

To address a potential whack-a-mole scenario, the studios can also return to court to add further domains to the injunction, as long as evidence shows Freemon operates them.

All in all, the court order is a clear victory for the movie companies. Whether the defendant will be able to pay over $18 million in damages is another matter. The domain seizure order does not have an immediate effect either, as all the mentioned domains have been offline for a while already.

That said, if Freemon ever attempts to relaunch the services, the movie companies will come prepared.

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A copy of the default judgment, signed March 11, at the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Texas, is available here (pdf) .

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

As pirate IPTV services have continued to grow in recent years, TV broadcasters and distributors have intensified their efforts to combat the problem.

Pay TV provider DISH Network , in tandem with the International Broadcaster Coalition Against Piracy ( IBCAP ), has been particularly active on this front, filing a series of lawsuits in the United States.

DISH vs. Innetra

In one of these cases, DISH last year filed a copyright infringement complaint against UK hosting provider ‘Innetra PC’ at a California federal court, accusing the company of aiding widespread copyright infringement while ignoring takedown requests.

Based on IBCAP’s evidence, the complaint alleged that Innetra provided essential infrastructure for pirate streaming services, including the separately targeted Lemo TV and Kemo IPTV , as well as Honeybee, Xtremehd, and Caliptostreams.

In its complaint, DISH argued that Innetra could not rely on safe harbor protection, as it largely ignored hundreds of infringement notices. Additionally, Innetra allegedly failed to designate a DMCA agent and had no policy for terminating repeat infringers.

The complaint listed 171 copyrighted works and requested damages of up to $25 million against Innetra and its general partner, Elna Paulette Valentin was also named as a defendant personally.

Innetra Requested Dismissal

In July last year, Innetra responded with a motion to dismiss . The company argued that the court lacked jurisdiction, as the UK company has minimal to no contacts with the United States or California.

Among other things, Innetra said it had no U.S. servers and had signed up just one paying U.S. customer since its founding, whose account was only active for two months.

The hosting provider did not disregard the idea of a legal battle entirely. Instead, it said that if DISH insisted on filing a lawsuit, it could do so in the United Kingdom, not in the United States.

“Dish may pursue its dispute in the United Kingdom, where Innetra is located. Dish, however, may not force foreign defendants that lack minimum contacts with the United States, let alone California, to defend themselves in the United States,” Inntra wrote in its motion last year.

Court Dismisses $25 Million Lawsuit

After the motion to dismiss was filed, the court allowed DISH sixty days of jurisdictional discovery before ruling on the motion to dismiss. However, that proved not to be enough to overcome the jurisdiction challenges.

Last week, Judge Noël Wise granted Innetra’s motion to dismiss, concluding that DISH had failed to demonstrate specific personal jurisdiction over the UK hosting company. The case was dismissed without prejudice.

The court applied the “purposeful direction” test established in recent Ninth Circuit case law, which requires a plaintiff to show that a defendant made regular sales in the forum and consciously cultivated a customer base there. However, based on the evidence provided by DISH, that is not the case here.

At the time of the alleged infringement, in 2024, Innetra had no U.S. customers at all. Two American customers briefly appeared in 2025: one paid $682 over two months before cancelling, and the other signed up for nine days without purchasing anything. The court described these contacts as “scant, fleeting, and attenuated.”

DISH also argued that Innetra’s peering arrangements with NTT and Lumen showed a deliberate effort to reach U.S. users. However, evidence provided during discovery showed that Innetra contracted with the German and Dutch branches of these companies, not their U.S. affiliates. Innetra did not use U.S.-based servers from these companies.

Finally, the court was not convinced by DISH’s evidence that nearly 49,000 instances of pirate IPTV services used Innetra’s infrastructure to transmit content into the U.S. Since these pirate services were making the connection to U.S. users, not Innetra, the hosting provider is not responsible for jurisdictional purposes.

What’s Next?

Because the case was dismissed without prejudice, DISH is allowed to refile the case, potentially with extra evidence. And as Innetra noted in its motion to dismiss, DISH can also file a lawsuit in the United Kingdom if they like.

For Innetra, putting up a defense turned out to be vital. After all, another DISH lawsuit against Ukraine-based hosting provider Virtual Systems recently showed that not responding in court can result in a multi-million-dollar default judgment.
For now, there is no sign of follow-up action against Innetra yet. However, DISH certainly continues its enforcement efforts elsewhere. Just last month, the company filed a fresh $21 million lawsuit against pirate IPTV operation DMTN , whose operator allegedly posed as Breaking Bad creator Vince Gilligan.

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A copy of U.S. District Court Judge Noël Wise’s order on the motion to dismiss is available here (pdf) .

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

Through its non-profit organization, the Internet Archive (IA) aims to preserve digital history for generations to come.

The Archive’s popular Wayback Machine has archived decades of web history, and it also aims to preserve content directly: by scanning physical books or recording old gramophones, for example.

One of the more unique preservation projects centers around Myspace, which was the leading social network twenty years ago. The site was particularly popular among musicians, but today it’s a shell of its former self with virtually no new activity. In fact, quite a bit of content was permanently lost.

The Myspace Dragon Hoard

In March 2019, Myspace publicly announced that all music uploaded to the platform between 2003 and 2015 had been wiped. As the result of a failed server migration, an estimated 50 million songs from 14 million artists were gone.

Days later, Internet Archive employee Jason Scott announced on X that some files may have been preserved. An anonymous academic group had mailed him a hard drive containing roughly 490,000 of those recordings, scraped from Myspace between 2008 and 2010.

“ANNOUNCING THE MYSPACE MUSIC DRAGON HOARD, a 450,000 song collection of mp3s from 2008-2010 on Myspace, gathered before they were all ‘deleted’ by mistake,” Scott posted at the time.

This collection was uploaded to archive.org and made available for free, allowing people to stream and download the music without any limits. In addition, an unnamed entity launched a companion site, lostmyspace.com, with a dedicated search and playback interface for the archived files.

With key historical data safely stored, the Myspace preservation effort was celebrated widely. However, not everyone was pleased.

Musician Sues Internet Archive

Two years ago, the Illinois-based musician Anthony Martino found out that several of his songs were part of the Myspace Dragon Hoard. These files were hosted by the Internet Archive without his permission and formed the basis of a legal challenge.

Last December, Martino filed a copyright infringement complaint in federal court. He argues that the recordings from his Myspace should not have been included to begin with, as he made these inaccessible to the public around 2011, long before Myspace lost the data.

An amended complaint, filed in January, accuses Internet Archive of copyright infringement, requesting the maximum statutory damages of $150,000 per work for willful infringement.

In addition to 11 works in the Myspace database, Martino also claims IA scanned and digitized his physical CD liner notes and printed lyrics, adding 48 additional works to the mix. This puts the (theoretical) maximum damages at $8,850,000.

However, in its answer, Internet Archive pointed out that potential damages should be reduced to the statutory minimum, as low as $200 per work, because any infringement was innocent. That would put the damages floor at roughly $11,800.

Internet Archive: We Didn’t Upload Anything

The Internet Archive vehemently disputes the copyright infringement claims. The organization explains that it was not directly involved in uploading the ‘Myspace Dragon Hoard’. IA notes that this was done by the anonymous academic researchers that were mentioned earlier.

“A group of academics that had saved some of the lost materials uploaded their archive onto the Internet Archive’s website,” the Archive’s attorney informed the court in a joint case management statement last week, noting that the organization is protected against third-party claims by the DMCA safe harbor.

IA does not see any outstanding issues and says that, to its understanding, all of Martino’s takedown DMCA requests were eventually processed.

In its formal answer to the complaint, Internet Archive also raises a notable counter-argument: it denies that any license Martino granted to Myspace by uploading his recordings was “fully and immediately revocable,” and denies that such a license prohibited distribution to third parties outside Myspace’s platform.

Martino, meanwhile, remains convinced that IA has a more active role. Among other things, he points to public statements by Scott himself describing his role in coordinating the collection’s upload.

To Trial

Since the case will move forward to trial, both parties will get the chance to conduct discovery to find evidence for their claims. The eventual trial date has not been scheduled yet, but both parties suggest planning it for April of 2027.

This is not the first music copyright dispute the Internet Archive is involved in. The organization was previously sued by several major music labels for digitizing gramophones. This case was settled confidentially last September.

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A copy of Martino’s amended complaint is available here (pdf) . The Internet Archive’s answer can be found here (pdf) , while the case management statement is here (pdf) .

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

Anna’s Archive has already faced its fair share of legal trouble and domain name problems this year.

The popular shadow library was sued by Spotify and several major record labels in late December and lost many of its domain names .

The site responded by adding new domain names. After losing its .LI domain last week, it added .VG,.PK, and .GD as new alternatives . However, this does not mean that the pressure is fading. Within a matter of days, the .VG domain was already suspended by the domain registrar.

63 Million Pirated Books

After watching the music industry’s legal push, a group of thirteen major publishers has also sprung into action. In a complaint filed at a New York federal court last week, they accuse Anna’s Archive of staggering copyright infringement by hosting 63 million books and 95 million papers, most of which are pirated.

“Defendants shamelessly describe themselves as a collection of ‘pirates’ not ‘bound by the law’,” the complaint reads.

The publishers highlight that the site facilitated 763,000 downloads per day last Tuesday, as reported by the site’s own statistics. These downloads are predominantly unauthorized, they add.

“Plaintiffs are not aware that any of the copyright-protected works on Anna’s Archive are licensed or authorized by the copyright owners; to the contrary, their reproduction and distributions are blatantly illegal infringements,” the complaint notes.

The publishers also highlight the AI training angle. They note that the shadow library provided high-speed access to 140+ million texts to LLM developers in China, Russia, and elsewhere. This includes a blog post titled “ If You’re an LLM, Please Read This ” which specifically targets AI companies.

The complaint alleged that Anna’s Archive reportedly charges significant fees for premium access, citing a LinkedIn post that mentioned a $200,000 donation.

“The amount of the ‘enterprise-level donation’ is not specified on the Website but it is reported to be $200,000. In an e-mail exchange with a researcher inquiring about the cost of the collection for AI training, Anna’s Archive offered premium access for $200,000,” the complaint notes.

The Injunction is Key

With 130 copyrighted works mentioned in the complaint, and damages up to $150,000 per infringed work, the publishers seek up to $19.5 million in compensation. However, with the site’s operators being unknown and unreachable, chances are slim that this amount will be paid.

The publishers are aware of this. In fact, if we carefully read the framing of their complaint, it appears that the legal action is predominantly intended to target domain names and other technical infrastructure of Anna’s Archive.

In recent weeks, the music industry injunction in the Atlantic/Spotify case has helped to take out several domain names. However, Anna’s Archive has since removed music-related content from the site. Therefore, the publishers now seek a similar injunction.

“Were the Defendants to repost the contents of its illegal repository of stolen works without these audio files, the Atlantic Order would still be satisfied. Nor can the publisher Plaintiffs in this case enforce the Atlantic Order to protect their own copyrights,” the complaint reads.

Injunction Targeting Hosts, Registrars, and Registries

The publishers want to play their part in taking Anna’s Archive offline, and they therefore request an injunction to protect their copyrights. This proposed injunction requires the site and its operator to halt all infringing activity and destroy all pirated books and articles.

More importantly, the injunction would also require third-party intermediaries to stop providing services to the shadow library. This applies to data centers, and hosting and service providers, domain registrars, and domain registries.

The proposed injunction would apply to all current domain names, as well as “any other websites that host the infringing content or directly facilitate its distribution.”

At the time of writing, the court has yet to sign off on the requested injunction. Whether that order will be enough to keep Anna’s Archive offline for good, given its track record of quickly securing new domains, has yet to be seen.

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A copy of the complaint, filed at the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, is available here (pdf) . The exhibit listing works in suit can be found here (pdf) .

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

Last May, the Guardia di Finanza announced that 2,282 pirate IPTV subscribers had been fined across 80 Italian provinces.

The user details came from a criminal investigation in Lecce that dismantled a large IPTV operation, leaving behind a subscriber database that authorities put to immediate use.

Those fines, typically starting at €154 and rising to €5,000 for repeat offenders, were only the beginning. The same pirate IPTV (Pezzotto) users were in for more trouble.

Two Bills, Same Offense

In the autumn of 2025, DAZN sent letters to many of the pirate IPTV users who were already fined, offering to settle a civil damages claim for €500. This new payment request was in addition to the state fine, not instead of it.

Taking a page from this playbook, Serie A followed with its own damages demand. In January, the league’s CEO, Luigi De Siervo, announced that lawyers sent approximately 2,000 letters to individuals who were previously identified by the Guardia di Finanza, requesting €1,000 each as a settlement for the damages caused by their illegal streaming.

In late February, Serie A CEO Luigi De Siervo confirmed that the first payments have now been received. As with the DAZN case, these payments are also linked to Criminal Case no. 7719/2022 at the Tribunal of Lecce.

“Finally, even in our country, we are restoring the rule of law,” De Siervo said in a statement, adding that this is “only the beginning.”

“Those who use the pezzotto or illegally watch matches on apps, pirate IPTV, or via VPN, must know that they will be identified by the competent authorities, will have to pay fines of up to €5,000 as provided by law, and will above all be required to pay an additional €1,000 to Serie A as compensation for damages. Piracy is theft, period.”

Serie A does not mention how many payments it has received in response to the thousands of letters it sent out. This could be less than a handful, for now.

Follow The Money

It is clear that the messaging aims to deter future IPTV pirates, suggesting that even a VPN can’t secure them. While this statement is technically correct, it deserves some nuance.

The IPTV pirates who were identified in this case did not have their connections monitored in any way. Instead, the IPTV users were identified through their payment details, banking data, and other personal information obtained as part of a criminal investigation into an IPTV operator.

This is a notable distinction, as defense lawyers in the Lecce case have argued that some of the administrative fines issued lack technical evidence of actual piracy, resting solely on the payment trail.

One lawyer filed formal correction requests with Italian media, stressing that no IP addresses were identified, no devices were seized, and no specific copyrighted work was named in the citations. However, those challenges have not prevented the compensation letters from going out, or the payments from coming in.

Looming Threat

The Lecce case is one of several active proceedings. There are several other prosecutions, and, with permission from the Prosecutor’s Office, more details of pirate subscribers are reportedly shared with rightsholders.

Italy’s Minister for Sport, Andrea Abodi, went even further in October, suggesting that the names of those caught buying illegal subscriptions could eventually be published in a public naming and shaming campaign. “It’s beyond privacy concerns; it’s a crime,” he said at the time.

For now, however, the government appears content to let the financial pressure do the work. This also serves as a deterrent message, as those who received the €1,000 letter from Serie A but chose to ignore it potentially face a more expensive civil claim.

Meanwhile, the official Serie A website features a prominent advertisement for its long-running partner , 1XBET.

This is notable because the same gambling company the Motion Picture Association has flagged as a notorious piracy market , as it is frequently promoted through watermarked pirated movies and other advertisements on prominent pirate sites.

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

In the race to build the most capable LLM models, several tech companies sourced copyrighted content for use as training data, without obtaining permission from content owners.

Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, was one of the companies to get sued. In 2023, well-known book authors, including Richard Kadrey, Sarah Silverman, and Christopher Golden, filed a class-action lawsuit against the company.

Meta’s Bittersweet Victory

Last summer, Meta scored a key victory in this case, as the court concluded that using pirated books to train its Llama LLM qualified as fair use, based on the arguments presented in this case. This was a bittersweet victory , however, as Meta remained on the hook for downloading and sharing the books via BitTorrent.

By downloading books from shadow libraries such as Anna’s Archive, Meta relied on BitTorrent transfers. In addition to downloading content, these typically upload data to others as well. According to the authors, this means that Meta was engaged in widespread and direct copyright infringement.

In recent months, the lawsuit continued based on this remaining direct copyright infringement claim. While both parties collected additional evidence through the discovery process, it remained unclear what defense Meta would use. Until now.

Seeding Pirated Books is Fair Use

Last week, Meta served a supplemental interrogatory response at the California federal court, which marks a new direction in its defense. For the first time, the company argued that uploading pirated books to other BitTorrent users during the torrent download process also qualifies as fair use.

Meta’s reasoning is straightforward. Anyone who uses BitTorrent to transfer files automatically uploads content to other people, as it is inherent to the protocol. In other words, the uploading wasn’t a choice, it was simply how the technology works.

Meta also argued that the BitTorrent sharing was a necessity to get the valuable (but pirated) data. In the case of Anna’s Archive, Meta said, the datasets were only available in bulk through torrent downloads, making BitTorrent the only practical option.

“Meta used BitTorrent because it was a more efficient and reliable means of obtaining the datasets, and in the case of Anna’s Archive, those datasets were only available in bulk through torrent downloads,” Meta’s attorney writes.

“Accordingly, to the extent Plaintiffs can come forth with evidence that their works or portions thereof were theoretically ‘made available’ to others on the BitTorrent network during the torrent download process, this was part-and-parcel of the download of Plaintiffs’ works in furtherance of Meta’s transformative fair use purpose.”

In other words, obtaining the millions of books that were needed to engage in the fair use training of its LLM, required the direct downloading, which ultimately serves the same fair use purpose.

Authors and Meta Disagree over Fair Use Timing

The authors were not happy with last week’s late Friday submission and the new defense. On Monday morning, their lawyers filed a letter with Judge Vince Chhabria flagging the late-night filing as an improper end-run around the discovery deadline.

They point out that Meta had been aware of the uploading claims since November 2024, but that it never brought up this fair use defense in the past, not even when the court asked about it.

The letter specifically mentions that while Meta has a “continuing duty” to supplement discovery under Rule 26(e), this rule does not create a “loophole” allowing a party to add new defenses to its advantage after a court deadline has passed.

“Meta (for understandable reasons) never once suggested it would assert a fair use defense to the uploading-based claims, including after this Court raised the issue with Meta last November,” the lawyers write.

Meta’s legal team fired back the following day, filing their own letter with Judge Chhabria. This letter explains that the fair use argument for the direct copyright infringement claim is not new at all.

Meta pointed to the parties’ joint December 2025 case management statement, in which it had explicitly flagged the defense, and noted that the author’s own attorney had addressed it at a court hearing days later.

“In short, Plaintiffs’ assertion that Meta ‘never once suggested it would assert a fair use defense to the uploading-based claims, including after’ the November 2025 hearing, is false” Meta’s attorney writes in the letter.

Authors Admit No Harm, No Infringing Output

Meanwhile, it’s worth noting that Meta’s interrogatory response also cites deposition testimony from the authors themselves, using their own words to bolster its fair use defense.

The company notes that every named author has admitted they are unaware of any Meta model output that replicates content from their books. Sarah Silverman, when asked whether it mattered if Meta’s models never output language from her book, testified that “It doesn’t matter at all.”

Meta argues these admissions undercut any theory of market harm. If the authors themselves cannot point to infringing output or lost sales, the lawsuit is less about protecting their books and more about challenging the training process itself, which the court already ruled was fair use.

These admissions were central to Meta’s fair use defense on the training claims, which Meta won last summer. Whether they carry the same weight in the remaining BitTorrent distribution dispute has yet to be seen.

‘U.S. AI Leadership at Stake’

In its interrogatory response, Meta added further weight by stressing that its investment in AI has helped the U.S. to establish U.S. global leadership, putting the country ahead of geopolitical competitors. That’s a valuable asset worth treasuring, it indirectly suggested.

As the case moves forward, Judge Chhabria will have to decide whether to allow this “fair use by technical necessity” defense. Needless to say, this will be of vital importance to this and many other AI lawsuits, where the use of shadow libraries is at stake.

For now, the BitTorrent distribution claims remain the last live piece of a lawsuit filed in 2023. Whether Judge Chhabria will allow Meta’s new defense to proceed has yet to be seen.

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A copy of Meta’s supplemental interrogatory response is available here (pdf) . The authors’ letter to Judge Chhabria can be found here (pdf) . Meta’s response to that letter is available here (pdf) .

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

Last month, we reported on a new push from the Motion Picture Association and the ACE anti-piracy alliance, hoping to identify several pirate site operators.

They obtained DMCA subpoenas at a California federal court, requiring Discord and Cloudflare to share all personal information they have on customers associated with domains such as hdfull.org, sflix.fi, and pstream.mov.

ACE has used these subpoenas as an intelligence-gathering tool for years. While these efforts are often fruitless, as many site owners use fake data, they occasionally have some effect. That’s also true for the latest round, which has motivated P-Stream to shut down permanently.

P-Stream Shuts Down

A few hours ago, P-stream’s operator, Pas, informed TorrentFreak that they decided to shut down the website effective immediately. This decision is a direct result of the DMCA subpoena and the added legal pressure, which previously resulted in the loss of the Discord server as well.

People who try to access the site’s official domain are now redirected to a shutdown message . Pas stresses that P-Stream never hosted any infringing material, but the operator can’t afford to mount a legal defense if it came to that.

“Although P-Stream does NOT host, control, or guarantee any media or content, I can’t afford to fight that in court. So to be safe, P-Stream will no longer host a public instance,” the operator writes.

While the operator regrets the shutdown, Pas also mentions that the project was life-consuming and took its toll, so the decision to throw in the towel could be a healthy one on that front too.

Code Remains Public

P-Stream was launched in April 2024, when movie-web was shut down by legal pressure from Hollywood. It eventually grew into a popular project of its own with close to an estimated ten million visits last month.

However, two years after its predecessor’s demise, history is repeating, perhaps in more ways than we now know.

The P-Stream project was largely based on sudo-flix, which itself was a successor to the original movie-web code. Today, the (alleged) P-Stream code remains available as well, through publicly available GitHub repositories . Whether these repos are controlled by the site’s operator is unknown.

As always, there will likely be people who try to keep the project going, and once they become popular enough, these projects will come on Hollywood’s radar, repeating the same process.

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

Every year, the Office of the United States Trade Representative ( USTR ) publishes a list of ‘notorious markets’ that facilitate online piracy and related intellectual property crimes.

Drawing on input from copyright holders, the report includes a non-exclusive overview of sites and services that are believed to be involved in piracy or counterfeiting.

For more than a decade we have covered the online section of the report. Traditionally, that includes prominent torrent sites, download portals, cyberlockers, and streaming services that offer copyrighted content without obtaining permission from rightsholders.

In recent years, the scope of the report has broadened significantly. For example, we have seen hosting companies, advertisers, and social media platforms being added. These don’t have piracy as their core business, but they allegedly facilitate infringing activity.

Issue Focus: Sports Streaming Piracy

Yesterday, the USTR published its 2025 Review of Notorious Markets for Counterfeiting and Piracy. Every year, the Office selects an ‘Issue Focus’; for 2025, the target is live sports broadcast piracy . This choice is in part triggered by the upcoming FIFA World Cup that’s hosted by the United States, Canada, and Mexico.

“With the United States co-hosting the FIFA World Cup, we are particularly attuned to sales of counterfeit merchandise and illicit streaming of sports broadcasts,” Ambassador Jamieson Greer said, commenting on the release.

The USTR report notes that the stakes are high. Pirate sites and services directly threaten the global sports broadcast rights market, which was reportedly valued at approximately $62.6 billion in 2024. Meanwhile, pirate site operators continue to get more sophisticated and evasive.

“When authorities shut down a pirate streaming website, operators can simply register new domain names, rebrand under different names, or migrate to alternative hosting providers,” the Notorious Markets report reads.

“This whack-a-mole dynamic frustrates enforcement efforts and requires sustained, resource-intensive campaigns that often exceed the capabilities of right holders and enforcement agencies.”

New Legal Frameworks

What further complicates the challenge is the fact that live broadcasts typically only have a small takedown window. This means that content removals and enforcement have to be swift and global. In some countries, this may require legislative updates.

“Current legal frameworks, while providing important protections, have not kept pace with the technological realities of modern piracy operations,” the USTR writes in its report.

These legislative measures may include expedited site-blocking powers, as we have seen in Italy and Spain recently, although these could introduce overblocking risks . The USTR does not mention these examples but notes that “traditional notice-and-takedown” frameworks are often “inadequate for live sports broadcasts.”

Interestingly, United States law does not support no-fault site-blocking measures yet . Nor are there broadly used legal tools to take livestreams down instantly. That said, USTR notes that preliminary injunctions and temporary restraining orders could help.

“For example, the United States has expedited provisions for copyright protection, primarily through temporary restraining orders (TROs) and preliminary injunctions, which a court can grant to immediately stop infringing activity,” USTR writes.

The Notorious Pirate Sites

USTR’s strong focus on sports streaming piracy is not immediately reflected in the list of notorious markets. While there are plenty of dedicated sports piracy networks, none is mentioned in the latest notorious markets report. Instead, it mostly highlights familiar targets.

Much of the list will look familiar to anyone who followed last year’s edition. ThePirateBay, 1337X, RuTracker, and YTS.mx return in the torrent category. Filehosting platforms Krakenfiles, Rapidgator, and 1fichier are also back, while Sci-Hub and LibGen remain listed in the publishing category.

The removals also make sense. These include the prominent torrent site TorrentGalaxy, which went offline last year, as well as NSW2U, the Nintendo Switch piracy site that had its domain names seized by the FBI and Dutch authorities last year.

Meanwhile, there are some notable newcomers too. MegaCloud, for example, which is the rebranded successor to 2embed, offers a piracy video library backend system that reportedly serves over 260 streaming sites and 600 million monthly visitors. MyFlixerz, which runs on that same ‘piracy as a service’ (PaaS) infrastructure, is also listed as a newcomer.

Another newcomer is MIGFlash, which offers piracy-enabling Nintendo Switch devices, and Fire Video Player, which offers video player software that’s linked to a video library, so people can easily start their own pirate sites.

Pirate Sports Streaming?

As mentioned earlier, dedicated sports streaming sites are not mentioned. The notorious markets list does include IPTV services that support streaming, including MagisTV, but does not list dedicated sites, which is odd considering this year’s sports focus.

In the positive developments section, the USTR report does reference the takedown of Streameast , one of the largest online sports streaming networks with 1.6 billion annual visits, of which 80 domain names were seized last year. However, the original Streameast operation or other surviving sports streaming brands remain unmentioned.

The USTR’s mention of the FIFA World Cup is notable, however. In the past, the U.S. Government has launched several domain seizure campaigns close to the start of major sporting events, such as the Super Bowl, so it’s possible that we will see similar action this summer.

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A copy of the USTR’s 2025 Review of Notorious Markets is available here (pdf) . The full overview also includes offline markets.

A list of highlighted sites and online services, including those listed for counterfeiting, is included below. The sites mentioned are categorized by TorrentFreak for clarity purposes and listed below.

Torrent Sites

– 1337X
– RuTracker
– The Pirate Bay
– TorrentGalaxy
– YTS.mx

File-Hosting/Cyberlockers

– 1fichier
– Krakenfiles
– Rapidgator
-Savefrom

E-Commerce

– Baidu Wangpan
– Bukalapak
– DHgate
– Douyin Mall (new)
– Indiamart
– Pinduoduo
– Shopee
– Taobao

PaaS

– 2embed
– Fire Video Player (new)
– MegaCloud (new)
– Streamtape
– WHMCS Smarters

Advertising

– Avito

Streaming/IPTV

– Cuevana
– GenIPTV
– HiAnime
– MagisTV
– MyFlixerz (new)
– VegaMovies

Hosting/Infrastructure

– Amaratu
– DDoS-Guard
– FlokiNET
– Private Layer (new)
– Squitter
– Virtual Systems

Social Media

– VK

Gaming

– FitGirl-Repacks
– MIG Flash (new)
– NSW2U
– UnknownCheats

Music

– Y2Mate

Publishing

– Libgen
– Sci-Hub

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

In recent years, YggTorrent was France’s largest and most active torrent community, serving millions of users.

The torrent site was not a typical torrent indexer. The community is powered by a dedicated tracker, something that’s quite rare these days.

This thriving community was severely tested last December when its operators introduced a paid ‘Turbo Mode’. This triggered a revolt, with users and uploaders actively looking for alternative French torrent trackers.

Just as the storm appeared to have calmed, YggTorrent’s operation was shaken up by a final blow this week, after unknown people breached the site, stole data and funds, and exposed the entire operation.

YggTorrent Shuts Down Following Hack

Today, YggTorrent decided to close its doors for good. This decision comes after the torrent site was severely compromised through an elaborate hack.

According to a statement published by the site’s operators, a secondary pre-production staging server was the entry point. From there, the attackers used a privilege escalation exploit to delete and then exfiltrate the site’s database.

In addition to large amounts of site data, the hackers also stole cryptocurrency wallets. YggTorrent’s operators note that these wallets were used exclusively to fund server costs.

The hack bears signs of a targeted attack. YggTorrent notes that there was no warning or attempt at a dialogue before all its data was exposed.

According to YggTorrent, all stored user passwords were hashed and salted. However, the leak suggests that millions of legacy accounts were still stored in MD5 without salts, offering significantly weaker protection.

YggLeak

The hacker has shared a detailed summary of their achievements and findings on a dedicated leak site .

This website explains that the hackers entered YggTorrent’s infrastructure through a series of critical configuration errors by the administrator, starting at the search engine service (SphinxQL) that was left exposed on the staging server without a password.

The YggLeak site portrays YGGtorrent as a high-revenue “cash machine” rather than a simple sharing community. It claims that the site made millions of euros in revenues in 2025 alone. This revenue was reportedly converted to cryptocurrency.

According to the leak, this conversion was not straightforward. The site allegedly used a plugin called CardsShield to route payments through dozens of fake e-commerce storefronts to disguise the true nature of transactions from PayPal and Stripe. The proceeds then went through a circuit involving USDT, Monero and Ethereum, with funds passed through Tornado Cash to reach anonymous wallets.

While TorrentFreak can’t immediately verify any of these claims, the author of the YggLeak website suggests that the 11+ GB in data archives may be useful for law enforcement

“[N]ow that this data is public, professionals will be able to examine it, gather additional evidence, and perhaps even take legal action against those responsible for the site, as well as against hosting providers or other identified third parties,” the YggLeak author writes.

Fin.

For YggTorrent, this is the end of the road. The site’s operators note that there is a backup of all data, so it would be possible to put the site back online. However, facing a rather hostile environment, the team has chosen to shut down permanently.

“A platform can shut down. A community, however, leaves a lasting legacy. Thank you for these nine years. Thank you for your trust. Thank you for all these shared moments,” YggTorrent says in a closing note.

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