Every few years, rightsholders get the opportunity to tell the European Commission which pirate sites and services deserve a spot on its Counterfeit and Piracy Watch List.

These submissions traditionally focus on torrent sites, cyberlockers and pirate IPTV services. In recent editions, however, intermediaries such as hosting companies and Cloudflare have been added to the mix.

LaLiga takes this expanding reach a step further. In its submission for the 2027 edition, the Spanish football league asks for NordVPN, ProtonVPN, ExpressVPN and Surfshark to be listed.

The 14-page submission targets a wide range of sites and services, including traditional piracy threats, but the VPN section is new. The league notes that it doesn’t take offense with the technology itself, but with how these providers are marketed by others through their affiliate programs.

“The conduct that takes these services beyond neutral technical provision is the deliberate marketing of circumvention, conducted at arm’s length through affiliate programmes,” LaLiga writes.

Geo-Unblocking Free Football Broadcasts

LaLiga explains that publishers and influencers with affiliate deals publish guides, updated for the 2026/27 season, on how to watch its football matches for free using these VPNs. Those pages rank the providers and link to discounted subscriptions, while earning a commission on resulting sales.

Some of these guides point out that football fans can use the VPNs to circumvent geoblocking, allowing them to watch free or cheap broadcasts in other countries. This isn’t linked to pirate streams, but LaLiga notes that it harms the territorial exclusivity of its licensing deals.

Guides of this type are not hard to find. We came across several Spanish-language pages, updated for the new season, that recommend connecting to a foreign VPN server to watch matches on free broadcasts abroad.

These recommendations are published by affiliates, not by the VPN providers themselves. LaLiga’s submission doesn’t claim that the providers write the guides themselves, but it argues that the providers profit from them.

Circumventing Pirate Site Blockades

In addition to bypassing geo-blocking, the submission also flags guides that it sees as a more serious concern. These are affiliate pages that name pirate streaming sites and services, explaining that a VPN can bypass court-ordered site blocking measures.

LaLiga says that anyone can verify this affiliate marketing activity, but the submission doesn’t name or link to a single guide or influencer that’s crossing a line.

According to LaLiga, the publishers behind the guides are not always independent, linking the vpnMentor review site to Kape Technologies, which owns several VPN services.

“Publishers of the guidance are in some cases not independent. Within one of the corporate groups identified above, VPN review and ranking publications are under the same ownership as the products they rank, a relationship those publications disclose,” the submission reads.

Which of these publications include the guides LaLiga describes isn’t mentioned.

The submission also argues that some VPN providers have released marketing material timed around its match calendar. This is not backed up with examples, but in February a Spanish court in Córdoba reached a similar conclusion when it issued an ex parte site blocking order against ProtonVPN and NordVPN.

Without hearing the VPN providers, the court reportedly concluded that both NordVPN and ProtonVPN actively advertise their ability to bypass geo-restrictions, citing match schedules in their marketing materials, while describing the VPNs as active participants in the piracy chain.

The matter is not settled yet. In May, the same court refused to fine NordVPN for not complying, accepting that the targeted IP addresses of pirate streams changed frequently. The main proceedings are still ongoing.

VPN Technology is Fine

LaLiga asks the Commission to list the four providers because they allegedly facilitate access to blocked pirate sites and services. The league stresses that it’s not targeting the technology itself.

“This request is based not on the provision of VPN services as such, but on the commercial exploitation and active promotion of their ability to circumvent court-ordered blocking measures,” LaLiga writes.

The submission also opens with a disclaimer. “This submission does not assert any finding of legal liability against the entities named,” it reads.

The main allegation hinges on the affiliate promotion angle, without naming any specific guides. Whether that will be sufficient for the European Commission has yet to be seen, especially since it is still contested in courts and among lawmakers whether VPN providers should be required to implement blocking orders.

AFTVnews Downloader Short Codes

VPNs are not the only general-purpose tools in LaLiga’s submission. The league also targets Downloader by AFTVnews, a popular app for Fire TV and Android TV devices that lets users download files by entering a URL or a numeric short code.

LaLiga says it catalogued 341 of these codes, 262 of which lead to pirate apps. The league describes the codes as a curated catalogue, under the operator’s “exclusive editorial control.”

“The ease and simplicity with which applications can be discovered and installed through this catalogue is itself demonstrative of its nature as an editorially-curated platform, distinct from the underlying distribution infrastructure,” LaLiga writes.

AFTVnews, which boasts more than 100 million users, describes the codes as being “generated by the AFTVnews URL Shortener,” which suggests that they are created from links submitted by users.

Downloader has been targeted before. In 2023, Google removed the app from its Play Store following complaints from Israeli TV companies, and again after a DMCA notice from Markscan. The app was later reinstated.

Whether the Commission will mention Downloader or any of the four VPN providers in its 2027 piracy watchlist has yet to be seen. The latest Counterfeit and Piracy Watch List, released in 2025, did not include any VPN services, but did mention various hosting providers, IPFS, and domain name privacy service Njalla.

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A copy of LaLiga’s submission to the European Commission is available here (pdf).

We reached out to ProtonVPN, the VPN Trust Initiative and AFTVnews for comment, but they did not respond before publication.

Disclosure: TorrentFreak uses VPN affiliate links, but not in a circumvention context.

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

In October 2020, the RIAA used a DMCA notice to remove the popular YouTube download tool youtube-dl from GitHub.

The RIAA argued that the software circumvented YouTube’s rolling cipher technology. A few weeks later, GitHub reinstated the repository and set up a $1 million defense fund for developers facing similar claims.

The music industry had more success in Germany, where labels won a lawsuit against Uberspace, the hosting provider of youtube-dl’s official website. In November 2024, the Hamburg Court of Appeal rejected the host’s appeal.

While youtube-dl was never formally shut down, active development has been largely taken over by the open source fork yt-dlp. In fact, people who visit the original .org domain of youtube-dl’s former website are redirected to yt-dlp.

The yt-dlp project launched in 2021 and has more than 16,000 forks and more than 190,000 stars on GitHub, making it the 32nd most-starred project on the site.

IFPI Flags yt-dlp as “Major Problem”

The music business is well aware of these developments and continues to see this type of software as a problem. In a new policy submission, music industry group IFPI highlights yt-dlp as a major problem, naming four developers by their online handles.

The callout is part of IFPI’s submission to the consultation for the EU Counterfeit and Piracy Watch List. Among other things, it asks for yt-dlp to be added to the list of stream ripping services, alongside Savefrom.net and two Y2mate sites.

“YT-DLP is a major problem for the music industry as it provides freely available open-source software that enables users to download and permanently store music and audiovisual content from licensed streaming platforms, including YouTube, without authorisation,” IFPI writes.

IFPI’s overview describes the project’s history, its stream ripping capabilities, and the copyright-critical Unlicense it’s released under. The group also explains why the software is hard to stop.

“Its open-source nature, extensive developer community and its widespread distribution results in the tool being difficult to contain and/or remove, while continuing to facilitate stream ripping at scale and depriving right holders, artists and licensed services from legitimate streaming and downloads.”

Four GitHub Handles

The submission identifies the project’s founder as GitHub user pukkandan, who it says was lead maintainer from 2021 to 2024. It also lists three current core maintainers: coletdjnz, bashonly and Grub4K. These handles are publicly listed on GitHub.

This is the first time we’ve seen yt-dlp, or the original youtube-dl, named as a target in a Watch List or Notorious Markets submission.

Besides the listing, the yt-dlp callout doesn’t ask for anything concrete. There is no takedown request, call for blocking measures, or any action against the developers. The submission also doesn’t mention that the software can be used for lawful purposes.

Circumvention?

The yt-dlp description does not mention the word ‘circumvention’ either, but the general stream-ripper intro does. IFPI argues that YouTube uses technical protection measures to prevent downloads.

“Stream ripping sites are circumventing these measures that enjoy legal protections under the international treaties and EU law,” the submission reads.

The music group also cites the German youtube-dl ruling, where the court held the website’s host liable for aiding and abetting the circumvention of these measures.

However, the submission itself describes the tool as “parsing webpage and player data, and interacting with platform-specific playback endpoints.” How circumvention potentially fits in there is not mentioned.

Officially Hosted in the United States

The European Commission’s Watch List highlights marketplaces and services outside the EU that reportedly engage in or facilitate piracy and counterfeiting. While the location of the developers isn’t discussed, GitHub is called out as the hosting platform.

“Github is YT-DLP’s official source; it serves as the main platform for accessing the scripts latest updates, source code, pre-compiled binaries and installation instructions,” IFPI writes, while adding that forks and copies are also available elsewhere.

GitHub is a Microsoft-owned company, based in the United States, which would make the yt-dlp repository US-hosted.

AI ‘Ripping’ Threats

IFPI’s submission is not limited to traditional threats. It also flags a newer type of ripping tool. AI music apps Rythmix and MusiQ AI allow users to paste a YouTube link and turn the recording into an AI cover song with a cloned artist voice.

Both these tools are available in Apple’s App Store, and Rythmix is also on Google Play, where it was already downloaded more than five million times.

In the months to come, the European Commission will go over all submissions and decide which of the proposed targets make it into the 2027 edition of the list. Whether that includes yt-dlp or the AI apps has yet to be seen.

—

IFPI’s submission to the EU Counterfeit and Piracy Watch List consultation, which includes a variety of additional targets, is available here (pdf).

We reached out to the yt-dlp maintainers and GitHub for a comment on IFPI’s submission, but they did not respond before publication.

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

Last week, we reported that the American Copyright Protection Act (ACPA) puts virtual private networks on the list of intermediaries that could be ordered to block pirate sites.

This wasn’t the only bill in the works. As expected, there’s now competition from a unified bill, officially introduced by Senator Thom Tillis and Rep. Zoe Lofgren: the DEFEND IP Act.

Both lawmakers had already been working on similar legislation and the DEFEND IP Act merges Lofgren’s Foreign Anti-Digital Piracy Act (FADPA) and Tillis’s Block BEARD draft into a single bicameral bill.

While the bill’s title works on its own, it’s actually an acronym for “Deterring Extraterritorial Foreign Exploitation of Networks Damaging Intellectual Property.” Senators Chris Coons, Marsha Blackburn, and Adam Schiff are co-sponsors of the Senate bill, while Rep. Ben Cline co-leads the House effort.

“I am proud to work across the aisle on this smart, targeted approach to crack down on foreign piracy while protecting Americans’ free speech and access to a free and open internet,” Rep. Lofgren says in her announcement.

The Senate version of the bill, S. 5529, is now with the Judiciary Committee. Congress.gov has yet to publish the text, but Lofgren’s office has posted a copy of the House version of the bill, which allows us to take a closer look.

VPNs Are Exempt

Like Issa’s ACPA, the DEFEND IP Act allows copyright holders to obtain court orders that require intermediaries to block foreign pirate sites. The key difference is which intermediaries can be targeted.

The DEFEND IP Act covers broadband providers with at least 50,000 subscribers, as well as public DNS resolvers with more than $100 million in annual revenue. The latter would likely include Google and Cloudflare.

VPN services are not on the list, however. The bill’s definition of a service provider explicitly excludes “an entity that exclusively provides virtual private network services or similar service that encrypt and route user traffic through intermediary servers.”

This is different from the ACPA bill, where VPNs are included. The word “exclusively” leaves some room for interpretation, however. The bill doesn’t explain how the exemption applies to companies that offer a VPN alongside other services.

DNS resolvers get a similar exemption, but only if they provide their services “exclusively through encrypted DNS protocols,” such as DNS over HTTPS. This is a high bar and it likely means that major public DNS resolvers including Cloudflare and Google, which also handle unencrypted queries, would have to block on their encrypted services as well.

Designate First, Block Later

The blocking process itself follows the same two-step approach as Issa’s ACPA bill. The first step is for a federal court to classify a website as a “foreign digital piracy site.”

To qualify, the site must be primarily designed for piracy, have no commercially significant purpose other than piracy, or be intentionally marketed as a piracy destination. Operators have 20 days to respond, but the court doesn’t have to wait for them and can issue an ex-parte order when the requirements are met.

With the designation in hand, the rightsholder can return to the same judge and request a blocking order. The court then has to decide whether blocking is “technically feasible and effective” or whether there are less burdensome options available.

Blocking orders remain valid for a year and can be renewed. When a pirate site moves to a new domain or IP address, rightsholders can ask the court to update the order.

As with ACPA, the DEFEND IP Act also covers live streaming events, including sports. Rightsholders can request a court order when a live transmission “will likely violate” their rights, which means that a site can be flagged before the match starts.

Hollywood Applauds, Public Knowledge Objects

As with earlier proposals, service providers get several safeguards. Blocking orders can’t prescribe specific blocking techniques, providers are immune from liability when they comply in good faith, and they can ask rightsholders to cover part of the costs.

Websites that are blocked by mistake can ask the court to modify the order. However, unlike Issa’s bill, which offers up to $250,000 in compensation, the DEFEND IP Act has no payout for collateral damage.

The unified bill has broad industry support from the start, with more than a dozen organizations backing it, including the MPA, RIAA, Copyright Alliance, SAG-AFTRA, and the Directors Guild.

“By enacting this legislation, our country can deploy a highly effective tool to protect creators and consumers from overseas digital piracy, all while safeguarding free speech and preserving the open internet,” MPA Chairman and CEO Charles Rivkin says.

Public Knowledge, which also opposes Issa’s bill, sees it differently. The group views both site blocking proposals as part of the same push.

“For the second time in as many weeks, rightsholders have convinced Congress to build out an expansive infrastructure for censorship rather than go after the root of the problem: operators of overseas piracy websites,” Public Knowledge writes.

“Let us repeat: Applying blocking orders to global DNS resolvers causes global blocks,” the group adds.

More than fourteen years after SOPA was shelved, two site blocking bills are now competing for support in Congress.

Time is limited, however. Both bills expire when the current Congress ends in January. Rep. Issa is retiring and Senator Tillis is not seeking reelection, so neither will be around to reintroduce their proposals next year.

Whether either proposal will get further than SOPA did remains to be seen.

—

A copy of the DEFEND IP Act, as published by Rep. Lofgren’s office, is available here (pdf).

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

Nintendo is doing everything in its power to prevent gamers from playing pirated games on its Switch console.

This involves sending a steady stream of cease and desist letters and takedown notices. If those don’t work, the company is prepared to take action in court.

In June 2024, it filed a lawsuit at a Washington federal court against Arizona resident James C. Williams, known online as ‘Archbox’. Nintendo accused him of operating several ‘pirate shops’ that offered large libraries of pirated Switch games to the public.

According to Nintendo, Williams promoted these shops on the SwitchPirates subreddit, where he was a leading moderator. He also allegedly helped users install circumvention software and asked for eShop gift card “donations” to buy games that were then decrypted and added to the shops.

Williams never responded to the complaint. This prompted Nintendo to request a default judgment last October, asking for $4.5 million in statutory damages as well as a permanent injunction.

Judge Grants Default Judgment

This week, U.S. District Judge Lauren King granted Nintendo’s motion in full. She stressed that the defendant was aware of the case, as he hired a lawyer to object to a Google subpoena, but he failed to answer the complaint.

Williams’ activity on Reddit didn’t help his case and is cited in the court order. These posts suggest that the defendant knew that the games were copyrighted and that he distributed them anyway.

In one post cited in the order, Williams calls himself a “pirate” who “[is]n’t going to give Nintendo $50 for a game.”

$4.5 Million Damages Award

Nintendo requested the statutory maximum of $150,000 per title for 30 games, including The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, Mario Kart 8 Deluxe and Super Smash Bros. Ultimate.

The judge agreed. At roughly $50 per game, lost sales could easily run into the hundreds of thousands of dollars, making the maximum damages request “not an unrealistic estimate” of Nintendo’s actual damages, the order reads.

This and other posts made clear to the judge that the infringing activity was willful. She therefore found the $4.5 million award appropriate, partly as punishment.

“Williams’ egregious infringement activities merit substantial punishment here,” Judge King concludes.

As a “gesture of reasonableness,” Nintendo didn’t request DMCA damages or attorneys’ fees. This did not go unnoticed by the judge, who notes that this worked in favor of granting the maximum copyright infringement damages.

Shops and Reddit Account Already Gone

In addition to the damages, Judge King also issued a permanent injunction. This prohibits Williams from distributing any pirated Nintendo game, not just the 30 listed titles, as well as any software that circumvents the protections on Nintendo’s games and consoles.

He is also barred from encouraging others to download pirated games or circumvention tools. To enforce the ban, the order requires Williams to disable his pirate shops and the accounts he used to distribute or promote them.

The order covers his Reddit account, as well as accounts on Instagram, X, TikTok, Discord and Telegram that were used for the infringing activity.

It appears that, in practice, there is little left to disable. The ‘archbox’ Reddit account is already self-deleted, and the shops named in the complaint were shut down long ago, most of them after Nintendo’s cease and desist letter in March 2024.

By filing the lawsuit, Nintendo said it wanted to “put a stop to” Williams’ activities, and presumably send a deterrent message to others. Recouping the $4.5 million will likely be hard, particularly since the defendant is unresponsive.

Although the judgment goes in Nintendo’s favor, none of the legal claims were tested. Because Williams failed to respond, the court took the allegations in the complaint as true, resulting in an uncontested win.

This outcome differs from Nintendo’s parallel lawsuit against Modded Hardware, which was filed on the same day. That case ended last year when its operator agreed to a $2 million judgment to settle.

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A copy of Judge King’s order granting default judgment and a permanent injunction is available here (pdf). The judgment can be found here (pdf).

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

Pirate streaming sites that cater to a Chinese-speaking audience are typically not a priority for Hollywood’s anti-piracy forces.

This also applies to Olevod. The site, which operates from a .com and .tv domain, has appeared in a batch of DMCA subpoenas obtained by ACE, as well as an Australian blocking order. However, it never showed up in the annual USTR lists of key foreign piracy threats.

In recent years the site continued to serve a stable audience, specifically targeting Chinese-speaking people outside of China, including many U.S. residents.

Tencent Sues ‘Chinese’ Pirate Site in Florida

In an effort to stop the site, Tencent filed a copyright complaint against Olevod at a federal court in Florida last October. Tencent Video is one of China’s streaming giants, and the complaint lists more than 150 of its shows, including hits that have reportedly been streamed as many as 30 billion times.

According to the complaint, Olevod.com and Olevod.tv offer full-length copies of Tencent’s films and series. Visitors can watch these for free with ads, or pay for a VIP membership that removes them.

“Olevod’s websites include full-length copies of Tencent content, including the Tencent Exclusive Shows. This content includes newly released movies, archived movies, and television show episodes—all available at the click of a button and often made available immediately after the original premiere,” the complaint read.

Tencent points out that Olevod advertises itself in Google search results as an “online video media platform for overseas Chinese.” In fact, it blocks visitors from mainland China to avoid issues with local rightsholders, Tencent argues.

$100 Million in Potential Damages

In addition to accusing it of direct copyright infringement, Tencent also alleged trademark infringement, while noting that ads for gambling, pornography and counterfeit diplomas appeared next to its name and logos.

The complaint lists 670 registered episodes, with Tencent seeking up to $150,000 in statutory damages for each, putting the theoretical maximum in damages at more than $100 million.

Since pirate site operators typically don’t pay damages in full, Tencent also requested a broad injunction, asking the court to order ISPs, hosting companies, DNS resolvers, VPN providers, banks and payment processors to cut the site off within seven days.

Olevod Fights Back

Where many alleged pirate sites choose not to appear in court, Olevod lawyered up, hiring Florida lawyers. In January, they asked the court to throw the case out, arguing that a U.S. court has no jurisdiction over it.

The company behind the site identified itself as Jiayi Network Technology SL, which is a Spanish company without a U.S. connection.

The site’s servers are in Germany and France, the defense said, adding that its prices are in yuan and euros, with most payments running through Alipay and WeChat Pay. The site has no employees, offices or contracts in the United States.

Tencent countered with evidence that the site accepts U.S. dollars through PayPal, sells advertising space, and uses IP addresses managed from a mail drop in Destin, Florida.

In June, Magistrate Judge Panayotta Augustin-Birch issued a report and recommendation, siding with Olevod. While Tencent had shown that Floridians could reach the site, it failed to show that a single one had actually watched a Tencent show there, she concluded.

If access to a website would be sufficient to invoke jurisdiction, that would “subject every company or individual that has a website anywhere in the world, and whose website can be accessed in Florida, to suit in Florida,” she wrote, citing an earlier ruling.

Judge: Olevod Can’t Escape Florida Lawsuit

Last week, District Judge David Leibowitz rejected the magistrate’s recommendation, denying the motion to dismiss, keeping the case alive.

The ruling comes after Tencent shared fresh traffic data from Semrush, showing that Olevod.com attracted 123,400 visits from Florida in June alone, making the state its fourth-largest source of U.S. visitors.

These numbers may have helped Tencent’s case, but the advertisements and premium subscriptions it offered turned out to be crucial. These show it does business with Floridians. For the judge, that was enough to compare the site to an online seller of counterfeit Louis Vuitton bags, who previously lost a similar jurisdiction battle.

“The core of Tencent’s claims is that Jiayi traffics in pirated Tencent content. And the record shows Jiayi has built a business doing just that in Florida—both by selling ad space visible to Florida residents and by selling premium subscriptions to U.S. consumers, including Florida residents,” Judge Leibowitz wrote.

That pirate streams are digital and designer bags physical does not matter, he added. Olevod is not a hobbyist running a one-man business from home, but “a sophisticated company running interactive websites.”

Roadmap for Chinese Rightsholders?

Tencent is not the only Chinese platform to try its luck in Florida. Last year, rival streaming service iQIYI sued the pirate site Aiyifan TV at the same court, using the same legal team.

The anonymous operators of Aiyifan TV never showed up and a default was entered within months, but when iQIYI asked for $196.55 million in damages and a broad injunction, the judge slammed on the brakes.

The court granted a liability judgment but requested additional evidence for both the damages and the domain-transfer request, criticizing the rightsholders for seemingly pulling its per-work damages figures “out of thin air.” This damages request remains pending.

Unlike Aiyifan TV, Olevod chose to fight in court where it just lost the first round. However, the ruling says nothing about the copyright claims themselves. The court only found that it has the authority to hear the case; whether Olevod actually infringed Tencent’s rights, and what that should cost, remains to be decided.

Olevod has until October 2 to file its answer to the complaint. Whether it will continue to defend itself or follow Aiyifan into default is unknown. At the time of writing, both Olevod domains remain online.

For Chinese rightsholders, the order confirms that a foreign pirate site with ad-supported streams and paid subscriptions can be sued in Florida, even without a U.S. plaintiff, U.S. servers or a U.S. office. Whether more cases against Chinese-language pirate platforms will follow has yet to be seen.

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A copy of Judge Leibowitz’s order, issued at the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Florida, is available here (pdf).

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

Pirate streaming apps have been popular on Android-based devices and Amazon’s Fire TV stick, which in itself became a go-to tool for pirates.

Responding to the pirate stigma and pressure from rightsholders, last year Amazon stepped in and disabled several popular pirate apps that were sideloaded onto users’ devices.

Amazon’s targets included LiveNetTV, a popular TV streaming app that had been around for a decade. This ad-supported app offered access to hundreds of channels in dozens of countries and was one of the most popular of its kind.

The block didn’t stop the app though. The developers released new versions that slipped by Amazon’s countermeasures and LiveNetTV was still working as usual at the start of the year.

Then, in late February, LiveNetTV’s channels went dark for another reason. The app still opened and the thumbnails were still there, but the streams were dead. The operators never offered an explanation but many people simply assumed that the developers had quit, possibly under legal pressure.

With the developers remaining silent for months, the shutdown of the popular app remained a mystery, until now.

LiveNetTV Shutdown and Settlement

In a press release shared with TorrentFreak, the Alliance for Creativity and Entertainment (ACE) takes partial credit for the app’s demise. The anti-piracy coalition identified and tracked down the two operators in Istanbul, Turkey, and reached a settlement that shut it down for good.

The two operators are identified only as A.B. and R.B., and the release notes that the settlement followed “legal proceedings,” without going into detail. It does highlight a mea culpa from the two, which they agreed to share after signing the settlement.

“What started as a way to make money online quickly got out of hand. We didn’t fully appreciate the legal consequences or the impact our actions would have.”

“Looking back, the financial gains were simply not worth everything we’ve lost,” they conclude.

Police Raid in February

The public statement reads as a cautionary tale. What it doesn’t say is what prompted it, and the press release doesn’t either, besides thanking the authorities in Türkiye and mentioning “legal proceedings.” However, ACE filled in the blanks when we asked.

“A search & seizure was executed in February by the local police and a court appointed expert,” an ACE spokesperson informed us. The shutdown that followed “was the operators’ decision after the search & seizure was executed and before settlement discussions.”

The raid was the result of a criminal complaint that MPA member companies filed at the prosecutor’s office in Istanbul, ACE says. The eventual settlement was signed in late June, four months after the operators were raided.

This means that the app wasn’t shut down by the police or ACE directly. Instead, the operators pulled the plug back in February, after the police came knocking on their doors.

Domain Name Takeovers

The LivenetTV Domain records fill in the rest of the timeline. Most of the transferred domains were originally registered in 2016, when the app first entered the scene. Ten years later they were signed over to the Motion Picture Association, which manages the ACE coalition.

The domains no longer point to an APK but instead they refer visitors to ACE’s Watch Legally page. The first domains were signed over late June, some others followed in August, and livenettv.xyz eventually switched earlier this month.

The press release notes that the domains had 2.4 million annual visits at the height of their popularity. That’s a small number compared to streaming sites, but ACE confirmed that this only counts website traffic, not the app’s actual usage, which was likely much higher.

ACE could not say whether the settlement involved financial compensation. That said, for a coalition whose press releases often include a million-dollar damages figure, the mea culpa from two pirate operators may be worth more than the money.

—

The ten domains transferred to the Motion Picture Association, as shared by ACE, with the date each record was last updated according to WHOIS:

– livenettv.net (June 29, 2026)
– livenettv.info (June 29, 2026)
– livenettv.pro (June 29, 2026)
– livenettv.cc (June 29, 2026)
– livenettv.co (June 30, 2026)
– livenettv.org (August 12, 2026)
– livenettv.me (August 13, 2026)
– livenettv.us (August 24, 2026)
– livenettv.tv (August 24, 2026)
– livenettv.xyz (September 8, 2026)

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

Last week, Rep. Darrell Issa formally introduced his long-awaited site blocking bill: the American Copyright Protection Act.

The text wasn’t public when TorrentFreak first reported on the filing, but an earlier discussion draft suggested that only ISPs and DNS resolvers would be covered. That has changed.

The full text of the bill surfaced online after Public Knowledge shared a copy with Ars Technica. This shows that the final version of the bill goes further than the draft did, explicitly covering ISPs, DNS resolvers, and VPN providers.

VPNs Join the Blocking Parties

The bill allows copyright holders to ask a federal court to determine that a website is a ‘foreign piracy site’. With that declaration in hand, they can then petition for a blocking order that requires specific service providers to prevent people from accessing the site.

These providers exclude domain name registries and root nameservers, but virtual private networks are explicitly covered.

“The term ‘service provider’ includes providers of broadband internet access services, providers of domain name resolution services, and virtual private networks, but excludes root nameserver operators and top level domain registries,” the bill reads.

This VPN category is new. The discussion draft TorrentFreak reported on in June last year stated that “both internet service providers (ISPs) and DNS resolvers” would be covered, nothing more.

The bill doesn’t explain why VPNs were added, but it follows a European trend, including orders in France and Spain, where a broader set of intermediaries is required to block pirate sites.

Smaller services are exempt, as the proposed bill excludes “any entity that provides services to fewer than 100,000 monthly users or subscribers in the United States.” That means that it will target the larger providers.

Blocking ‘From the United States’

When an order is issued, providers have 14 to 30 days to “take all commercially reasonable steps to prevent users or subscribers from using its systems or networks to access the foreign piracy site from the United States.”

For a regular ISP, that requirement is pretty straightforward. However, for a VPN provider with servers in dozens of countries, it can be interpreted in more than one way, with varying consequences.

A VPN could block the pirate site on its U.S. servers only. That would mean that American subscribers are free to connect through servers in Amsterdam or Toronto, while a Canadian user who connects through New York would be blocked.

Alternatively, a VPN could block the site for everyone who connects from an American IP address, regardless of the server they choose. That should be technically possible without logging a user’s IP address.

The bill doesn’t explain how the technical implementation should work and a judge has no say in it either. The blocking orders can’t prescribe or require any specific blocking techniques, so this choice is left to the providers.

VPN providers can contest their inclusion in a blocking order. Before naming a provider, the court has to weigh several factors, including the “technical feasibility and efficacy” of the blocking.

VPNs raised similar objections in France, with little effect. Among other things, the Paris court concluded that a no-log policy doesn’t prevent VPNs from blocking sites.

Live Sports Fast Track

Not all blocking orders have to wait 14 days before being implemented. The court can shorten any deadline in the bill if it finds good cause. This includes blocking measures that target “time-sensitive events.”

Issa previously made it clear who this is for. At a House hearing in June, he said that enforcement has to be fast enough to make a difference during live sports broadcasts, which lose their value quickly.

“[W]hat is the reasonable speed? Can we do it at the speed of sound? Can we do it at the speed of light? More importantly, in a 45 minute or sometimes a fraction of that live sports broadcast, can we do it soon enough to make it no longer profitable for those who pop up and sell their clandestine wares?” he said.

In addition to sports, the “time-sensitive” carveout can also be used to protect movies and TV shows that leak online “not more than 24 hours after” their first authorized release in the United States.

To Be Continued

VPNs are not the only change since the first draft appeared last year. There are other nuances as well, which will be highlighted in future coverage.

For now, most commentary on the bill has come from opponents, including Public Knowledge and Re:Create. Rightsholders have been quiet so far and the MPA informed TorrentFreak that it will share a statement once Issa’s office issues its press release.

Whether Rep. Issa will get the bill across the finish line is uncertain. He retires at the end of this year, so he won’t be around to reintroduce it if it doesn’t pass during the current session.

Notably, this is not the only U.S. site blocking bill that’s being prepared. As previously reported, Senator Thom Tillis and Rep. Zoe Lofgren are working on a bicameral site blocking bill of their own.

This means that, after the SOPA-ghosts were defeated, there’s now some internal site-blocking competition on the Hill.

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A copy of the American Copyright Protection Act of 2026 (H.R. 10364) is available here (pdf).

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

Earlier this month, French President Emmanuel Macron and South Korean President Lee Jae Myung hosted a one-day gathering of studio bosses, ministers and filmmakers in the south of France.

This Lumière Summit closed with the signing of several thematic declarations, including one on international cooperation against piracy.

Representing Hollywood, Motion Picture Association (MPA) CEO Charles Rivkin was scheduled to give a keynote before a session on “the race against piracy,” but was held up in a presidential meeting. While MPA’s EMEA president Emilie Anthonis filled in briefly, the tone was already set by a minister, who put the piracy talk in perspective.

Gayton McKenzie, South Africa’s Minister of Sport, Arts and Culture, shared the stage with the chair of French regulator ARCOM and a deputy director general of WIPO, who outlined their anti-piracy track records.

As a representative of the South African government, McKenzie said he agreed that piracy is bad. However, he took issue with almost everything else.

“We need to define what is piracy,” he said. “There’s a failure by the people tasked to fight piracy not to define it definitively,” the minister added, before going into more detail on an alleged double standard.

His first example came from the same summit. That morning, McKenzie said, a filmmaker had told the audience that his film was banned in Egypt but that people could still see it there thanks to piracy.

The filmmaker said he was glad people could see it “and then people clapped,” McKenzie said.

He gave a second example, a Canadian production about a gay hockey player, apparently the series Heated Rivalry, which he said is now being pirated in the countries where it is banned, to add that “everybody in the industry is clapping.”

From personal history the minister also recalled that, during South Africa’s apartheid regime, several films were not allowed to be distributed, leaving piracy as the only option.

When dealing with this type of banned content and censorship, piracy is put in a different light, apparently with filmmakers praising it. However, when poor people pirate, they face legal issues, McKenzie said. He called the industry’s approach “a bit schizophrenic” with “dual standards.”

‘Egyptians Love Piracy’

The filmmaker that McKenzie referred to was Tarik Saleh, the Swedish-Egyptian director of The Nile Hilton Incident and Cairo Conspiracy. These movies are set in Cairo, but they are banned in Egypt.

At the opening session of the summit, Saleh said he was told to leave the country before shooting his first film.

“I was going to shoot my first film in Egypt and I was asked to leave. Uh, I’m putting it nicely. I mean, they said, ‘Get the f*ck out of here,'” he said, after which he chose to make the films in Morocco.

Saleh added that Egyptians can still see his films thanks to piracy, which he doesn’t mind.

“[H]ere is where piracy come into the picture in a little reversed way. Egyptians love piracy, which is working very well for me,” he said with a laugh.

There was no applause though. Instead, the moderator jumped in noting that the regulators on the afternoon’s piracy panel could be asked about it. Nobody asked them. Instead, McKenzie is the one who brought it up.

‘We’re Not Children’

McKenzie’s second point was addressed to the people sitting next to him. ARCOM chair Martin Ajdari just said they issued more than 22,000 blocking and delisting injunctions in five years, with 10,000 alone in 2026, while the piracy audience was slashed in half since 2018.

McKenzie said that was impressive, but he stressed that successes in one country are less effective if other countries do little to nothing. He compared it to two people in a boat that is leaking on only one side.

“We on the same boat. We both hate piracy,” he said. “The boat is leaking on our side and you are praising, like, where we are sitting we’ve done this.”

The minister also criticized that developing countries are being pressured into compliance. This came after WIPO’s Sylvie Forbin listed some of the conditions that came with WTO membership in the 1990s. This appeared to strike a nerve with McKenzie, who pushed back.

“Don’t try to punish us like we are children, because we are not children,” he said, not directly aiming at his fellow panelist.

South Africa has more recent experience with that kind of pressure. In 2020, U.S. copyright groups asked Washington to review the country’s trade preferences over the fair use provisions in its copyright bill, which U.S. copyright groups considered too broad.

‘We Are Not Beggars’

Money also came up at the end of the session, when the moderator asked Forbin whether the cooperation network the summit’s declaration envisions will bring the Global South on board. Forbin said WIPO already works with many countries, stressing that participation in its efforts such as WIPO Alert, remains voluntary.

McKenzie stressed that his position has nothing to do with money. South Africa is not short on funds to pay for anti-piracy efforts. It could pay as much as Sweden or the UK, but it mostly wants to be taken seriously.

“We don’t lack the money. There are countries that lack the money,” McKenzie said. “But we don’t want to be treated like, here’s money for you, do one, two, three. We want you also to listen to our ideas.”

“We are not beggars,” he added. “We want a partnership of equals.”

McKenzie said his government is already in touch with Canal+ about football piracy and that anti-piracy warnings now run before every match in South Africa. South Africa wants to help address piracy, as long as it is treated as a serious partner.

The Lumière Summit closed with a formal declaration to strengthen international anti-piracy cooperation.

This voluntary agreement does not include any hard commitments, and for now it has not been signed by any South African representative either.

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The videos for all the sessions are available through the summit website. The quotes used in this article were transcribed by TorrentFreak from these recordings.

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

Belgium was relatively late to the site blocking party, but since a dedicated anti-piracy department opened its doors, the country has caught up quickly.

The first blocking order under this new regime, obtained by sports rightsholder DAZN in April 2025, started quite aggressively. In addition to major ISPs, it required Cloudflare, Google and Cisco to stop resolving pirate streaming domains through their public DNS services, under threat of €100,000 in fines per day.

Cisco’s response was also aggressive, as the company pulled its OpenDNS service out of Belgium entirely. Google and Cloudflare, meanwhile, complied in their own ways, but all three companies challenged the order.

In July 2025, the court suspended the DNS blocking requirement against Cisco pending a final ruling, after which OpenDNS returned to Belgium. This also put additional DNS blocking orders on hold. However, that may very well change in the near future.

Court Upholds DNS Blocking

That final ruling has now arrived, and it’s not what the DNS providers were hoping for. On August 20, the President of the French-speaking Business Court of Brussels rejected the core of their challenge. The DNS blocking requirement stands.

The order itself hasn’t been published, but a new implementation decision from Belgium’s anti-piracy department summarizes the outcome and explains how the blockade will work in practice.

According to the decision, the court ruled that it’s technically possible for alternative DNS resolvers to block domains, and that the companies failed to show that the costs would be disproportionate. Worries that some users near the border could be caught by geolocation overblocking errors did not change that decision.

“Imposing a blocking measure on the main alternative DNS resolution service providers helps strengthen the effectiveness of the blocking injunction imposed on ISPs, which is regarded as a relevant measure,” the decision reads.

“The combination of these measures is intended to discourage users seeking access to unlawful content, as their experience as consumers of football matches, which they are very attached to watching live, will be disrupted,” it adds.

The court order also included some small wins for the DNS providers. For example, it scrapped the requirement to redirect users to a warning page, noting that this measure can’t be imposed on DNS resolvers.

The penalties for non-compliance were also softened. The €100,000 per day fine remains, but it only counts on days that DAZN matches are broadcast live. There’s a €20 million maximum per company, and fines don’t apply to under-blocking caused by “an exceptional geolocation error.”

Evolving Blocklist with a 90-minute Clock

The department’s decision also explains how the blocking will work in practice. The order covers matches from Belgian football competitions, including the Jupiler Pro League. As the season continues, DAZN can submit one blocklist update per week, with a maximum of 100 new domains.

There’s no fixed schedule. Instead, DAZN tells the department which matchday it wants the blocklist updated for, at least seven working days in advance. The DNS resolvers then get five working days to implement the changes.

The actual blockades should go live 90 minutes before a match starts, to catch pirates off guard.

“It is also with this effectiveness of the blocking measure in mind that it was decided that it should operate intermittently, and that it should only be implemented one and a half hours before the start of matches,” the implementation order reads.

“In this way, users find it more difficult to anticipate the blocking and plan around it in advance.”

The evolving nature of the blocklist is apparent from the publicly shared data, which shows that the domains blocked under this order have grown from 58 to 258 after it was first issued.

OpenDNS Exit Looms

As reported last year, Google and Cloudflare complied with the original order. The latest order doesn’t change anything for them. However, for Cisco it’s a different story.

During the hearing, Cisco informed the department that it will pull OpenDNS out of Belgium again.

The company stated that the public DNS system “does not allow for the implementation of selective, geolocated and dynamic blocking as required by the order,” and that enabling it “would compromise the performance, stability and security of that service.”

Pulling out of Belgium is the only concrete measure Cisco is “technically able” to implement, the company added. The Belgian anti-piracy department accepts this drastic measure as compliance with the order.

The DNS resolvers have three months to implement the blocking measures. For now, OpenDNS remains available in Belgium and Cisco indicated it intends to appeal the ruling. TorrentFreak was told that a formal statement was still being finalized at the time of publication.

Unless the appeal changes anything, OpenDNS users in Belgium can expect the service to go dark for a second time later this year.

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A copy of the Belgian anti-piracy department’s implementation decision of September 7 is available here (pdf).

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