With nine Billboard 200 number one albums and stadium tours across three continents, Stray Kids ranks among the most successful K-pop groups.

This popularity also has its downsides. When the group or one of its members releases a new track, unofficial copies typically circulate within hours, and not only on the usual pirate sites.

Independent music distributors have made it surprisingly easy to get a song into legitimate stores. For a modest yearly fee, people can get access to services such as DistroKid, TuneCore, or Symphonic.

Uploading a file through these distributors gets it listed on official music platforms such as Apple Music, where it appears among the music industry’s biggest stars, complete with an ISRC code, a UPC barcode, and an auto-generated YouTube “art track.”

This system has democratized music distribution, but it also opens the door to potential abuse, as it can be used to distribute bootlegs or pirated tracks. Earlier this year, that is what happened to Stray Kids member Han.

Bootleg Shows Up on Music Platforms

On May 9, label JYP Entertainment published Han’s track “back to life” as a video on Stray Kids’ YouTube channel , as part of the group’s SKZ-PLAYER series. The song wasn’t available on streaming platforms at the time, which is typical for the series.

Despite the limited availability, the new track quickly gained traction. That was also the case for unofficial ripped releases, which started to spread on social media and various pirate sites. And it didn’t stop there.

JYP also noticed that the track appeared through official channels on YouTube, Instagram, TikTok, and Apple Music. The track appeared under the artist name “New Vibs,” published through distributor Symphonic .

From DMCA Takedown to DMCA Subpoena

Back in May, Stray Kids’ label already sent a DMCA takedown notice to the Tampa-based independent distributor Symphonic Distribution, urging it to take down the content. Similar notices were likely sent to the platforms as well.

The notice identified a release titled “Back to life” under the artist name “New Vibs,” delivered through Symphonic to YouTube, Instagram, TikTok, and Apple Music.

“If the infringing content is not taken down promptly, we will have no choice but to pursue legal action to protect our copyrighted material,” the label wrote.

Symphonic’s legal team acknowledged the notice and said that it would investigate the matter. Meanwhile, with demand for the track still growing, JYP eventually released “back to life” on streaming platforms itself, weeks after the bootleg.

While that official release could have ended the matter, the label is not willing to let “New Vibs” off the hook just yet.

Names, IP Addresses, and Bank Details

Last week, JYP’s lawyers at Arnold & Porter filed a DMCA subpoena application at a federal court in California, asking Symphonic to identify whoever is behind the “New Vibs” account.

These types of DMCA subpoenas are typically targeted at online intermediaries. They allow copyright holders to request information on alleged infringers from online platforms, without filing a lawsuit. A signature from the court clerk is sufficient.

JYP’s proposed subpoena seeks any and all information that can help to identify the New Vibs bootlegger.

Specifically, the label wants “the identities, including names, physical addresses, IP addresses, telephone numbers, e-mail addresses, payment information, account updates and account histories” of the Symphonic user or users involved.

This includes detailed payment records for the alleged copyright infringer, including bank routing and account numbers, and any associated addresses. The label hopes that this money trail will help to lead it to the culprit.

Whether Symphonic will simply comply, or whether the “New Vibs” account holder will appear in court to object, has yet to be seen. According to the information available to us, the clerk has yet to issue the subpoena.

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A copy of JYP Entertainment’s DMCA subpoena application is available here (pdf) and the proposed subpoena and additional details can be found here (pdf) .

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

Over the past three years, authors have filed a series of lawsuits accusing AI companies of training their models on pirated books.

Some of those cases have already produced rulings, with a bittersweet victory for Meta in California for example.

In New York, several other cases were bundled into a single proceeding where Judge Sidney Stein is overseeing claims against OpenAI and Microsoft.

This includes the Authors Guild’s class action, a case filed by a group of nonfiction writers who were the first to name Microsoft as a defendant, and the Tremblay and Silverman lawsuit , which started in California in 2023 and survived a partial dismissal before moving to New York.

This week, these authors filed a motion for summary judgment. Ahead of any trial, they want Judge Stein to rule that OpenAI copied their work without permission, and that this can’t qualify as fair use. The motion covers 194 titles and asks for a finding of liability, not damages.

“OpenAI’s GPT models pose an existential threat to those who write and publish books,” the brief states, while adding that “AI-generated books of all types are already flooding the market.”

Built on Mass Piracy

The authors start by accusing OpenAI of obtaining the book copies through unauthorized sources. While the filing is heavily redacted, OpenAI stands accused of using torrented copies downloaded from LibGen,

“OpenAI did not even buy the books it used. Instead, it began by torrenting [REDACTED] books from the notorious and illegal pirate library Library Genesis, also known as LibGen,” the motion reads.

At the time, LibGen had already been featured in the U.S. Trade Representative’s list of notorious piracy markets . According to the authors, OpenAI was well aware of the controversial nature of the site.

OpenAI “took steps to conceal their piracy from the public,” the motion notes, pointing to the paper that introduced GPT-3. In that paper, OpenAI relabeled book compilations it previously called “Libgen1” and “Libgen 2” as the more “nondescript” “Books1” and “Books2.”

“OpenAI employees understood at the time that they had sourced books from an illegal site,” the filing reads.

The renaming was not the end of it. OpenAI “deleted its LibGen files in the summer of 2022 due to legal concerns,” the motion notes, adding that these are “the only two training corpuses OpenAI has ever deleted.”

Before deleting the books, OpenAI allegedly used them to train the early GPT models. Or as the authors write, the company “built the foundations of its business on mass piracy.”

Replacing George R.R. Martin

The torrenting and piracy angle is one part of the filing. The motion also alleged that OpenAI built its models to replace the human writers it copied, and as evidence it highlights controversial tweets from a key employee.

In 2022, OpenAI hired Tarun Gogineni to lead its work on the writing quality of its models. According to the motion, Gogineni knew the models he was training would displace authors but considered that “acceptable economic disruption.”

This is notable because Gogineni specifically mentioned one of the plaintiffs, author George R.R. Martin, known for writing A Song of Ice and Fire which the HBO series Game of Thrones was based on.

In 2025, nearly two years after Martin sued, Gogineni tweeted that his “research mission” was to have GPT models write the “last two books of [Martin’s] A Song of Ice and Fire.”

Even if Martin “dies early, GPT-5 will autocomplete his series,” he added, suggesting that AI can replace the author.

Not Fair Use

OpenAI and other AI companies argue that training models on books is fair use. Courts have partly agreed with this, but with an important caveat.

The authors cite Bartz v. Anthropic, the 2025 California ruling that classified model training as potentially fair use, while stressing that downloading from a pirate library was not. Pirating books that can be purchased legally is “inherently, irredeemably infringing,” that court found.

The authors also argue that the copying was avoidable for training purposes, as their books were not per se necessary to create a general-purpose model.

Broader Claims

The motion is not limited to OpenAI. It also asks the court to hold that Microsoft is vicariously liable for OpenAI’s copyright infringement, since Microsoft could supervise the conduct and profited from it.

Microsoft invested roughly $13 billion across three agreements signed in 2019, 2021, and 2023, the authors stress.

OpenAI has yet to respond to the authors directly, but it clearly believes that the evidence points in its favor.

In a cross-motion for summary judgment, filed on the same day, the company argues that its use of the books was fair use as a matter of law and that any regurgitation is vanishingly rare.

The filings highlighted here are part of a much broader push. Over the past days, plaintiffs including The New York Time s, Daily News, and the Center for Investigative Reporting all submitted a combined summary judgment motion of their own against OpenAI and Microsoft.

With many millions of dollars at stake, as well as the future of AI training, these cases will be fought tooth and nail, so we certainly haven’t heard the last of it.

—

A copy of the authors’ redacted motion for partial summary judgment is available here (pdf) , filed at the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York.

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

Every new Premier League season starts with a warning about the cost of piracy, and this year is no different.

BeStreamWise , the anti-piracy campaign backed by Sky, the Premier League, FACT, the BBC and the UK Intellectual Property Office, among others, released a new report this week to highlight the ongoing challenge.

The campaign commissioned consultancy WPI Economics to put a number on illegal streaming. This resulted in a report titled “The Price of Piracy,” which estimates that illegal streaming results in £1.35 billion in missed revenue by UK broadcasters every year. That figure is then translated into 10,400 lost jobs and £366 million in missing tax income.

To stress the point, the report highlights that missed taxes could pay for a variety of public services. The £366 million could pay 9,400 qualified NHS nurses, for example, or it could provide 140 million free school meals to children.

A £1.35 Billion Poll

The billion-pound estimate is based on a poll of 2,501 UK adults, conducted in February. In this survey, almost a third (31%) said they had used illegal streaming in the previous three months. Extrapolating this percentage to the entire population suggests that 16.8 million people could be video pirates.

To find out how this then resulted in £1.35 billion missed revenue, we reached out to BeStreamWise, which informed us that it is based on a scenario where piracy is no longer an option.

BeStreamWise explained that the respondents who admitted to pirating were asked which services they would be willing to pay for, if they were no longer able to access pirate services. WPI Economics then multiplied these answers by the average cost of the services, before extrapolating it to the entire population.

The campaign stresses that the report only counted people who said they were willing to pay in this hypothetical scenario.

Put differently, the £1.35 billion does not measure lost sales. It is the extrapolated subscription fee that pirates said they would pay, at full price, if piracy ceased to exist tomorrow. That is then translated to tax revenue, which can pay for the 9,400 nurses.

Pirate’s Pinky Promise

The calculation is straightforward on paper, but it’s not without caveats. While self-proclaimed pirates may be just as trustworthy as the general population, behavioral research has shown that people generally say they would pay more than they actually do .

There are ways to correct for this gap, which economists refer to as a hypothetical bias, but BeStreamWise’s spokesperson informed TorrentFreak that the WPI study did not apply any correction. The survey answers were taken as given.

The lack of a discount factor is not unique in piracy research, and previous studies have sometimes put pirates in a positive spotlight because of it. However, it definitely signals that the £1.35 billion is far from guaranteed

In fact, the same poll shows that many pirates are still primarily driven by saving costs. The most common justification for pirating was that it’s cheaper than paying (38%), followed by convenience (31%) and a desire to avoid subscriptions (24%). Over half (52%) said they are likely to continue pirating regardless.

Social Media as Primary Piracy Source

One of the most surprising findings of the survey is that social media is the top source to access pirated content. This covers all forms of video piracy, not just streaming.

“[The research] shows that a majority (54%) of active illegal streamers access illegal content via social media platforms, compared to just 26% who access using purchased devices and illegal subscription services, and 28% streaming or downloading via unofficial websites.”

“Less popular methods included downloading content via torrents or cloud sharing services (15%), and illegally buying logins or passwords for legal services (7%),” the report adds.

The survey’s definition of piracy is quite broad. It includes “Watching via social media platforms” as a separate category, next to using a VPN to access content only available in other countries.

This means that someone watching a single clip of a goal or TV-show on X or Instagram is considered an illegal streamer. How the questions were worded is not known to us, because BeStreamWise has not made the polling data available to us.

An ‘Oven-Ready’ Solution

Putting a price on the piracy problem is only part of the report, as it also offers solutions. The first recommendation is for the UK Government to amplify existing consumer awareness campaigns through its official channels.

The prime candidate for this, according to the BeStreamWise-commissioned report, is BeStreamWise. These awareness campaigns could also focus on the estimated £270m in harms consumers face through malware, fraud and identity theft.

“Amplifying BeStreamWise’s data and insights would be an ‘oven-ready’ move that would be game-changing in signposting the risks of piracy, including the potential fraud and data security risks, and would begin to combat the £270m of financial harms illegal streamers face each year,” the report reads.

The second recommendation calls for a voluntary cross-sector framework, in which online platforms, connectivity providers and content services work together to combat online piracy. These efforts could be overseen by the UK government.

The report does not propose new legislation or blocking powers. Instead, it argues that current enforcement has failed because consumers are not aware of the risks.

While awareness campaigns and voluntary agreements may help to nudge some people in the right direction, rightsholders should not count on getting a significant share of the £1.35 billion pirates promised anytime soon.

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A copy of The Price of Piracy report, produced by WPI Economics for BeStreamWise, is available here (pdf) .

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

For well over a decade, copyright holders have used U.S. federal courts to unmask anonymous BitTorrent users.

Adult film producer Strike 3 Holdings has turned this into an industry of its own, filing thousands of John Doe lawsuits every year.

In most of these “John Doe” cases it subpoenas the Internet provider for the subscriber’s name, offers the alleged pirate a settlement, which effectively ends the case. This process is then repeated over and over.

Last summer, the company took aim at a much larger target. Together with Counterlife Media, Strike 3 sued Meta , accusing the tech giant of downloading thousands of its films via BitTorrent to train AI models. With 2,973 films at stake, the case could be worth up to $446 million.

This multi-million dollar case is now running into one of Strike 3’s routine “John Doe” lawsuits.

According to a motion filed last week, an anonymous pirate behind a residential AT&T connection is an executive at Meta’s Reality Labs division , which develops the Quest VR headsets.

From John Doe to Reality Labs Exec

The John Doe case started in March, when Strike 3 filed a complaint against the subscriber of IP address 162.192.7.34 at the same California federal court. In April, Magistrate Judge Virginia K. DeMarchi granted a subpoena to AT&T, noting that the name should not be publicly disclosed.

After AT&T shared the information, Strike 3 says its investigation revealed that the subscriber is an executive in Meta’s Reality Labs division. Citing his LinkedIn profile, the company notes that he has worked at Facebook and Meta for more than a decade.

The executive’s name and title are redacted, as shown below. Meta has asked the court to keep them under seal, as it did earlier for two other individuals named in the Meta case.

However, Strike 3 argues that this is no ordinary home pirate, using the timing of the downloads as evidence. On March 20, 2025, the porn producer’s general counsel first emailed Meta’s lawyers with forensic evidence of BitTorrent activity on the tech giant’s corporate IP addresses.

“Just hours later, Strike 3 first recorded BitTorrent infringement on John Doe’s residential IP Address,” the motion reads.

“This may suggest that Meta desired to shift infringing activity to this hidden residential IP Address in order to prevent further detection,” Strike 3 adds.

Strike 3 sued the John Doe a year later. Only then, it says, did it find the alleged connection to the Meta case, which brings us back to the present day.

Nearly 20,000 Files

In addition to the timing, Strike 3 uses the number of downloads in the John Doe case as an argument. The company logged all BitTorrent activity detected from the executive’s connection, which was nearly 20,000 files.

This includes VR adult titles made for Meta’s Quest headset. Strike 3 suggests the downloads are consistent with work to make the headset compatible with adult films.

As recently as August 25, Strike 3 says it recorded more than 150 daily downloads, from multi-language “Mega Packs” of TV shows, movies, software and books to what it describes as AI-generated pornography and VR adult films. That included nearly a dozen of its own titles.

“In short, this is a lot for one person to torrent on an average day, particularly one who has a demanding job,” Strike 3 writes. The company believes the pattern makes more sense as AI training data or research.

This is not the first time a Reality Labs employee has surfaced in the case. Earlier this summer, Meta confirmed that a former data engineer at the division was behind a Comcast connection linked to 97 films.

With its latest motion, Strike 3 asks U.S. District Judge Eumi K. Lee to relate the John Doe case to the Meta lawsuit, so that both proceed before the same judge. On paper, the request is about efficiency, to avoid duplicate depositions and discovery.

However, the motion also makes the broader goal clear. Relating the cases would turn one executive’s home downloads into evidence in the $446 million suit.

If the cases are related, Strike 3 plans to amend the John Doe complaint to name Meta directly, argue that the executive is jointly liable, and move to compel Meta to appoint a Reality Labs custodian and hand over its torrenting records.

Meta: ‘Nothing Ties’ Downloads to Company

This week, Meta responded to the motion to link the cases. Officially, the company takes no position yet, as it can’t investigate whether the subscriber is even an employee without knowing his name. However, even if the subscriber is who Strike 3 claims, Meta argues that nothing ties the downloads to the company.

“They simply assume that the Subscriber is responsible for everything done on the IP address, and then leap to the additional, similarly unsupported assumption that he did it for Meta,” Meta writes.

The tech company leans on a common defense in BitTorrent piracy lawsuits, stressing that an IP address doesn’t identify the infringer. Judge DeMarchi flagged the same point when she allowed the subpoena.

Meta also flags a contradiction in Strike 3’s theory that downloads were switched to the home connection hours after the March 2025 warning. Strike 3’s own complaint alleges that Meta’s “off-infra” activity started in 2018, and that downloads on corporate IP addresses continued long after the notice.

“Plaintiffs’ new theory cannot be logically reconciled with those it is already pursuing,” Meta writes.

Meta has used the personal use explanation before. When a different Reality Labs worker, a former contractor, surfaced in the Kadrey case, Meta said its investigation showed his downloads were personal and unrelated to his work.

Whether Judge Lee agrees to link the John Doe case to the $446 million Meta lawsuit has yet to be seen. For now, the Reality Labs executive remains anonymous, even to Meta.

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A copy of Strike 3’s motion to relate the cases, filed at the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, is available here (pdf) . Meta’s response can be found here (pdf) .

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

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

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

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

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

No Inducement, No Claim

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

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

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

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

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

The ‘Last’ Case Standing

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

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

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

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

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

A Four-Year Standoff

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“A Cute Little LibGen Babysitter”

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

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

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

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

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

“A Popular (and Illegal) Library”

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

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

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

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

Rewriting Pirate Library History

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

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

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

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

One Torrenting Spree, Three Lawsuits

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A Sealed Second Discord Subpoena

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Rapidly Evolving” Investigation

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

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

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

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

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

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

YouTube Subpoena Dropped

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

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

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

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

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

—

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Two Discord Servers

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

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

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

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

The Servers are Gone

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

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

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

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

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

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

The 49 domains named in the Cloudflare subpoena are:

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

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

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

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

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

Domain Registrars and a Registry

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

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

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

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

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

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

Bank Details, Crypto Wallets, and Server Logs

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

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

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

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

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

Gag Order

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

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

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

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

Can it be Enforced?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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