Starting nearly a decade ago, the World Intellectual Property Organization ( WIPO ) launched a plan to cut off revenue streams to pirate sites.

WIPO is well-respected internationally and part of the United Nations, which ensured cooperation from a wide variety of countries.

In 2019, WIPO launched an advertising blocklist that lets member states flag infringing sites. This list can then be shared with advertisers, who can use it to make sure that revenues don’t end up going to these sites.

This “WIPO Alert” system has been running for years with thousands of domain names being added. While it still functions today, WIPO has quietly been working on a new “WIPO Alert Pay” system that targets the payment services that counterfeit and pirate sites rely on.

WIPO Alert Pay

At the WIPO Advisory Committee on Enforcement session in Geneva this month, WIPO’s Todd Reeves described it as the next iteration of the same follow-the-money approach. While it is not publicly announced yet, Reeves presented the setup and results of the initial pilot.

WIPO Alert Pay relies on voluntary cooperation between rightsholders and payment service providers (PSPs), such as Mastercard and PayPal. Rightsholders can use the alert system to flag instances where pirate sites use their payment services, for subscriptions or VIP access for example.

Rightsholders have to supply required information, which is checked by WIPO for completeness before a domain name enters the system. The PSPs can then decide what action, if any, to take against the merchant’s account under their own terms and conditions.

Report, Check, Notify, List

As with the advertising blocklist, WIPO stresses that its role is limited. It hosts the platform, receives the flagged sites, and aggregates the results for the PSPs. According to Reeves, it makes no infringement determinations of its own.

“We’re not making any infringement determinations. We’re simply securely hosting the platforms,” Reeves said.

“We receive the list of the flagged sites by the right holders and verify that the required information and attestations are provided for the flagged sites. So it’s more of a formalities check than anything else.”

The process runs on a notice-and-review timer. Rightsholders first notify the site owners. If there is no response after three working days, WIPO steps in to send a second notice. If another three working days pass without a response, the site is added to the WIPO Alert Pay list and the payment providers take it from there.

71% of Flagged Listings Removed

The new Alert Pay system ran as a manual pilot from November 2024 to August 2025. Six unnamed rights holders took part, together with two payment providers.

Over that period, WIPO processed 17 actions covering 35 sites of concern. Reeves said 71% of the flagged listings were removed, and that all participants reviewed the system positively and that it was ready to scale.

The slide below, which was shown by Reeves, specifically notes that “broad adoption could be highly disruptive.”

The pilot also uncovered that some sites were displaying a Mastercard or PayPal logo without actually offering those services, presumably to signal trustworthiness.

The mention of Mastercard and PayPal is notable, especially since these two providers are also named in the system’s online forms. This doesn’t make it hard to guess who the two unnamed payment providers were that participated in the pilot.

From Pilot to Platform

With the pilot closed, WIPO is now working on finalizing the development. A software engineer has spent the past few months turning the manual workflow into an automated platform, which Reeves said is close to completion.

The platform already covers PayPal and Mastercard, but WIPO wants to add support for more providers to broaden the coverage. After that, the system will be promoted to rightsholders and their representatives, as well as the member states.

To get more information on the system, TorrentFreak reached out to WIPO two weeks ago, but the organization has yet to reply to our request for comment. However, it is expected that more information will come out when the official launch of WIPO Alert Pay is near.

—

The update on WIPO Alert Pay was presented at the 18th session of the WIPO Advisory Committee on Enforcement on June 4, 2026. The supporting slide deck was not publicly available at the time of writing. All quotes and screenshots used in this article were pulled from the meeting’s webcast.

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

In May, thirteen major publishers won a massive $19.5 million default judgment against shadow library Anna’s Archive in a New York federal court.

This week, the same publishers, including Penguin Random House, Elsevier, and HarperCollins, filed a new complaint at the same court, this time with the relatively young pirate library WeLib as the target.

Again, the stakes are substantial, with the publishers seeking up to $19.5 million in potential damages for direct copyright infringement.

A New Entrant

The similarities don’t stop at the legal arguments and stakes. Anna’s Archive already highlighted the newcomer in a blog post last year, describing WeLib as a “new entrant” in the space that had copied both its collection and its code.

“They appear to have mirrored most of our collection, and use a fork of our codebase,” Anna’s Archive noted.

The same blog post was also critical of WeLib for not contributing back to the ecosystem and recommended that people avoid using the site.

This week, the publishers also warn against using the site, albeit for different reasons. Their complaint accuses WeLib’s unnamed and anonymous operators of widespread copyright infringement, while also confirming that connection to Anna’s Archive.

“Defendants’ entire business is the illegal copying and distribution of literary works,” the complaint notes, adding that “WeLib was created after its operators copied the source code and most of the contents of the Notorious Pirate Site, Anna’s Archive.”

Not a Library

WeLib describes itself as an “endless library” founded on the principle that “education and literature belong to everyone.” The publishers, however, clearly don’t agree with the library framing, noting libraries can be trusted; pirate sites not.

“Libraries are trusted institutions that serve the communities that fund them by lending books and other publications they have lawfully acquired. Using this label for WeLib explicitly misleads the public and allows WeLib to hijack the goodwill that libraries enjoy and have legitimately earned.”

“WeLib is no more than a pirate website that reproduces and distributes works of authorship owned by others to users for a profit, without authorization from or compensation to the copyright owners,” the complaint adds.

The complaint notes that WeLib’s operators made efforts to keep their identities hidden. However, the site itself quickly became a go-to portal for many book pirates.

The complaint notes that, by WeLib’s own account, its collection includes 43 million books and 98 million articles. The site reportedly has over 80,000 active monthly users who accessed more than 51.7 million books and downloaded 14.5 million files last month.

While the site can be used for free, users can pay for fast downloads and to skip the queue. Subscriptions start at $7 per month for 25 fast downloads and 25 fast reads per day; while the top tier costs $90 a month for 1,000 daily downloads.

These payments, or “donations” as WeLib calls them, can be made through cryptocurrency, WeChat, and Alipay. They are allegedly processed through a company called Malum.co, which offers payment services to high-risk vendors, without the need for any KYC identity checks.

Damages and Domain Seizures

The complaint lists a sample of 130 copyrighted works as evidence. This mirrors the Anna’s Archive lawsuit, where the court awarded $150,000 per work, which is the statutory maximum, resulting in a total of $19.5 million.

In addition to the monetary damages, the publishers are also seeking a permanent injunction that aims to take the site offline. They ask the court to order third-party registries, registrars, and hosting providers to disable WeLib’s domains and render them untransferable.

This also includes a specific request to disable the authoritative nameserver for the .st domain, registered through Njalla, a Costa Rica-based registrar that is not necessarily responsive to U.S. court orders.

The AI Training Conundrum

As with other recent publisher lawsuits, the complaint also mentions AI training. Specifically, it alleges that WeLib supplies copyright infringing data to AI companies.

“WeLib has also been an illegal supplier of stolen content to the AI industry. In a recent lawsuit, publishers alleged that Meta utilized WeLib to train their Llama models,” the complaint reads.

The recent lawsuit they refer to is Elsevier Inc. v. Meta Platforms which is filed by several of the same publishers through the same law firm, Oppenheim + Zebrak. However, what that complaint actually says about WeLib is more specific and not in line with the current case.

The Elsevier v. Meta complaint describes WeLib as a source found within C4 training dataset Meta used, but identifies it as “formerly known as PDF Drive.” This dataset was built years ago from a Common Crawl snapshot and predates WeLib and even Anna’s Archive.

More confusingly, the complaint against WeLib that was filed this week makes no mention of it formerly being known as “PDF Drive”, or the C4 dataset for that matter.

According to our knowledge, there is no evidence that content hosted by WeLib was included in the C4 database. All we can confirm is that the database does include “PDF Drive” data and that the pdfdrive.com domain redirected to the new WeLib site at some point.

PDF Drive is a long-running PDF hosting site that has operated for years, predating Anna’s Archive entirely. It has no documented connection to Anna’s Archive’s codebase or collection. Whether it shares more than a domain redirect with the WeLib now being sued is unclear.

The publishers’ framing of WeLib as an active AI training pipeline may be getting ahead of the evidence. For now, WeLib has yet to respond. However, since anonymous operators typically don’t show up in court, this case may also copy Anna’s Archive’s path, heading to a default judgment.

—
A copy of the complaint, filed by Oppenheim + Zebrak on behalf of the thirteen plaintiff publishers, is available here (pdf) .

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

In a complaint filed at a Nashville federal court in 2023, Universal Music, Sony Music, EMI and others, accused X Corp of “breeding” mass copyright infringement .

The social media company allegedly failed to respond adequately to takedown notices and lacks a proper termination policy.

In addition to the alleged legal shortcomings, public comments by X Corp’s boss Elon Musk were also referenced. Specifically, the complaint mentioned that Musk described the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) as a “plague on humanity.”

X Corp Books Early Victories

With hundreds of millions in damages on the line, X Corp fought the lawsuit tooth and nail. This resulted in an early win in 2024 , when the court dismissed the music companies’ direct and vicarious copyright infringement claims.

The labels’ contributory infringement claims were partially dismissed, but Judge Trauger allowed the music companies to continue the case based on this remaining claim.

Proving contributory copyright infringement isn’t easy, however, and it became even more of a challenge when the Supreme Court raised the infringement bar in Cox v. Sony Music this year.

X Wants ‘Retrofitted’ Complaint Dismissed

After the Cox ruling, the music publishers filed a Second Amended Complaint under seal. While this copy remains outside the public eye today, X Corp filed a motion to dismiss it this week, which partly lifts the veil.

As expected, the music companies are trying to keep their case alive by reframing it as an “inducement” claim. That is the only surviving contributory liability claim in this case under the new standard.

X Corp clearly disagrees and the company filed a motion to dismiss the amended complaint a few days ago. The company notes that the music publishers’ attempt to “retrofit” an inducement claim is simply not supported by the provided evidence.

“Plaintiffs’ attempt to retrofit an inducement theory fails as a matter of law because the allegations suggest only insufficient action to prevent infringement, which Cox and other cases have held cannot support an inducement claim,” X Corp writes.

“[Truncated] DMCA Is a Plague On Humanity”

The music publishers’ inducement theory partly relies on a handful of public statements by Elon Musk, which they argue demonstrate that X encouraged its users to infringe. This includes the “DMCA plague” tweet.

While we don’t have access to the sealed complaint, X says that the music companies have included a truncated version of the tweet, which misses key context.

Musk was responding to reporting about Senator Hawley’s bill to cap copyright duration at 56 years, and expressing a political opinion that current copyright protection terms are too long.

“Plaintiffs truncate one of Mr. Musk’s posts to pretend that he called “the DMCA” itself a ‘plague on humanity.’ In fact, he said that “Overzealous DMCA is a plague on humanity”,” X writes.

“Plaintiffs’ excision is telling. No reasonable observer could read Mr. Musk’s full comment and think he was inciting infringement. Instead, he was expressing a political opinion – responding to reporting about Senator Hawley’s bill to retroactively cap copyright duration at 56 years.”

X further clarifies that Musk wasn’t flatly against all copyright protection. In a tweet posted a few months later he stressed that reasonable takedown requests are appropriate and will always be supported.

Understandable Frustration

The motion to dismiss adds more context than these tweets alone. It also references the music industry’s alleged threat to start a “massive” takedown notice campaign following a disagreement over licensing.

This is the same dispute that resulted in X’s antitrust complaint against the NMPA, Sony, Universal, and other major music publishers, claiming that they “ weaponized ” the DMCA to force licensing deals.

“Mr. Musk’s understandable frustration with such tactics was not inducement,” X writes.

No Inducement

The Musk tweet argument is colorful, but X’s motion to dismiss cites more arguments. For example, it counters the music publishers’ allegation that X’s platform features including display algorithms, and subscription and advertising systems, showed that X depends on infringing music.

X notes the court already dismissed this argument, noting that general platform features benefit all users equally and say nothing about intent to promote infringement specifically.

The publishers’ failure-to-stop-infringement allegations are not convincing either, X argues.

Much of the amended complaint allegedly returns to the original criticism that X was too slow to remove infringing content and too lenient with repeat infringers. The Cox ruling took away that argument.

As the Supreme Court made clear, contributory liability cannot rest on a provider’s knowledge of infringement and insufficient action to prevent it. That doesn’t qualify as inducement.

After 18 months of discovery, including the production of 150,000 pages and 21 depositions, X says the publishers found nothing that meets the inducement standard. As a result, they want the complaint dismissed.

For now, the motion sits with Judge Trauger. The music publishers will file their response, and the court will decide whether the Second Amended Complaint survives or whether Cox will effectively end this case.

—

X Corp’s motion to dismiss and supporting memorandum, filed at the U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Tennessee, are available here (pdf) and here (pdf) .

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

Stream-ripping services allow users to convert streaming audio and video into downloadable files.

That’s a useful feature for those who want offline copies of YouTube videos, but it also comes with copyright concerns.

Music labels have repeatedly taken legal action against stream rippers, both directly in court, and through site blocking actions. The latter have been effective throughout Europe, and in the UK, Brazil, Australia and elsewhere.

Canada can now be added to the growing list. A Federal Court in Ottawa, Ontario, issued the first ever stream-ripper blocking order in the country. This is also the first Canadian blocking order requested by music companies.

Labels Target Y2Mate, YTMP3 and SaveFrom

The case, filed last November by Sony, Universal, Warner Music and other labels, targets the unidentified “John Doe” operators of three well-known stream-ripping brands: Y2Mate, YTMP3, and SaveFrom.

After reviewing the paperwork, Justice Fothergill found that the operators infringed copyright. Among other things, the stream-rippers are liable for copyright infringement as they provide services with the ‘sole function’ to enable unauthorized reproduction, violating the Copyright Act.

The permanent injunction issued by Justice Fothergill requires the operators to stop their infringing activities. In addition, they must deactivate the domains. This includes Y2mate.ws, YTmp3.lat, Savefrom.space and Spowload.cc, but also any other infringing domains that provide similar stream-ripping services.

Blocking Order

In addition to the permanent injunction, Justice Fothergill issued a companion blocking order. This order requires nine major Canadian ISPs, including Bell, Rogers and Teksavvy, to block the four domain names.

The order follows the same structure established by the GoldTV precedent , and the more recent Soap2Day blocking order . To implement the order, the ISPs must use DNS blocking, DNS rerouting, or equivalent technical means.

The order also requires ISPs to put up a notification for visitors of the domains, explaining why it is blocked. As with previous orders, it remains valid for two years.

Copycats of Copycats

While the blocked domain names use familiar brands, they are not the original sites that operated under these names. For example, Savefrom.space has nothing to do with the much more popular Savefrom.net, which has millions of visitors instead of hundreds.

The fact that the more popular site is not targeted makes sense, as Savefrom.net decided to proactively block Canadian visitors after pressure from rightsholders a few years ago.

The court order also acknowledges that the targeted domains are copycats, which gained popularity when the original sites became inaccessible.

Additionally, the order stresses that it targets “other similar platforms” operated by the defendants, which “appear” or “increase in popularity” once access to stream-rippers is blocked.

“[I]ndeed, the John Doe Respondents operate platforms that are themselves ‘copycats’ of similarly branded stream ripping services that were previously deactivated, and additional copycat platforms have already begun to appear on the Internet.”

While the current order only lists four domain names, Justice Fothergill clarifies that it can be expanded with new copycats or “similar platforms” in the future.

Preemptive Strike

The platforms named in the order are not particularly high-traffic targets today. According to Similarweb , Y2mate.ws has just shy of a million worldwide visits last month, while Spowload.cc had little over 130k.

Savefrom.space did not have any meaningful traffic, with Similarweb estimating a few dozen visits per day, globally. Ytmp3.lat, meanwhile, has no registered traffic at all and appears to be unreachable.

However, the record labels might partly use the blocking framework proactively rather than reactively. Since similar platforms and brands can be targeted going forward, it can use the current order to target sites that gain traction in the future.

To do so, rightsholders can file an affidavit identifying the new domain and confirming it meets the order’s conditions. If none of the nine ISPs object within ten business days, the court can expand the blocklist without further proceedings. A full hearing is only required if an ISP pushes back.

For now, however, this blocking order kicks off with four domain names.

—

A copy of the permanent injunction is available here (pdf) and the site-blocking order, also issued by Justice Fothergill, can be found here (pdf) .

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

Last summer, adult content producers Strike 3 Holdings and Counterlife Media filed a copyright infringement lawsuit against Meta.

The complaint accused the tech company of using adult films to assist its AI model training. Similar claims have been made by other rightsholders, including many book authors .

This latest case specifically focuses on Meta’s BitTorrent activity. That’s no surprise, as plaintiff Strike 3 is the most active copyright litigant in the United States, known for targeting thousands of alleged BitTorrent pirates .

Meta Wants Case Dismissed

In October 2025, Meta responded to the allegations by filing a motion to dismiss at a California federal court. Taking a page from the BitTorrent piracy defense playbook, Meta argues that the IP address evidence presented by the plaintiffs is meaningless without context.

The porn producers had linked numerous Meta IP addresses to unauthorized sharing activity. According to Meta, however, there is no evidence that the alleged activity on its corporate network was centrally orchestrated by the company. In fact, it countered that many alleged downloads predate Meta’s AI training activity.

In addition to denying the allegations, the tech company offered an alternative explanation. Meta suggested that employees or visitors may have downloaded the pirated videos for personal use.

Court: Torrenting is the Infringement

In an order released last week, U.S. District Judge Eumi K. Lee refused to throw the case out. In a 16-page order, she denied Meta’s motion and let all three of Strike 3’s direct, vicarious, and contributory copyright infringement claims proceed.

One of Meta’s lead arguments was that, in order to prove direct infringement, Strike 3 had to show its films were actually used to train a model. However, Judge Lee explained that this is not needed, as Meta’s alleged copying of the films via BitTorrent is copyright infringement.

“Because Plaintiffs have adequately pleaded that their exclusive rights under the Copyright Act were violated when their films were torrented, they have satisfied the second element, regardless of whether their films were used to train specific AI models,” the order reads.

Coordinated, Not Coincidental

Another key question was whether the torrenting activity can be attributed to Meta, or if the downloads came from employees, who downloaded content for personal use.

Strike 3 argued that the actions were coordinated by Meta, showing similar download patterns across 47 corporate IP addresses and seven hidden ranges. This includes files with the same keywords downloaded on the same day.

Judge Lee found the coincidence theory implausible and pointed at a spreadsheet of addresses grabbing files with “teen” in the title, from “Teen Titans” and “Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles” through to explicit adult releases.

“The word “teen” appears in every file name. Similar patterns are shown repeatedly across the identified IP addresses. It strains credulity to suggest that these correlations are mere coincidence and the product of individual human selections,” Judge Lee noted.

“Instead, the many commonalities across files permit a reasonable inference that the downloads were operated by an algorithm using key terms, which accounts for why pornography was downloaded alongside children’s cartoons and sitcoms.”

Other download patterns also appeared to be illogical. For example, multiple IP-addresses from various ranges torrented eight episodes of Ted Lasso out of order, on a single day. Meta suggested that this could be coincidental download activity by several people, but Judge Lee believes this to be unlikely.

“But the odds that multiple people using the Corporate IP Addresses and the IP Ranges coincidentally torrented the same show, rather than simply streaming it, on the exact same day strains belief…”, Judge Lee writes.

Cox Doesn’t Save Meta

The contributory copyright infringement claim also survives. While the motion to dismiss was pending, the Supreme Court handed down Cox Communications v. Sony , raising the bar for contributory infringement. However, that wasn’t enough to help Meta at this stage.

Judge Lee recognized that, if Meta merely offered its infrastructure to copyright infringers, this would not be sufficient to trigger liability.

“Standing alone, Plaintiffs’ allegation that Defendant ‘provid[ed] access to its servers, data centers, IP addresses, computers, networks, [and] accounts’ would be insufficient under Cox Communications,” she wrote.

However, Strike 3’s allegation went further, alleging that Meta encouraged copyright infringement by offering specific tools and services for it.

“Plaintiffs plausibly allege that Defendant took active steps to encourage torrenting by implementing an algorithm and establishing VPCs – tools tailored to infringe copyrighted works using BitTorrent.”

The vicarious copyright infringement also survived the motion to dismiss. According to Judge Lee, Meta has a direct financial interest in amassing high-quality training data for its commercial AI products.

The Case Continues

While Meta’s motion to dismiss failed on all claims, the company’s defenses could still succeed further down the line, when the evidence is reviewed in detail.

For example, Meta argued that testimony in a related case shows that its torrenting servers went live in 2024, not 2018, so they cannot be the same infrastructure behind ranges active for years.

Additionally, Meta said much of the infringing activity in this case took place years before the company started training its video models. Those and other points will be contested in detail as the case proceeds.

For now, the case heads into discovery. Meta must answer the complaint, the parties are due to attempt mediation by early August, and a jury trial is set for February 2028.

—

A copy of Judge Eumi K. Lee’s order denying Meta’s motion to dismiss is available here (pdf) .

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

Korea’s Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism rarely names the pirate sites it helps shut down, and its June 12 announcement was no exception.

It redacted the three high-profile target domains as “Hari***,” “Manhwa***” and “Kun***.”

These match the names of three well-known manhwa aggregators: Harimanga, Manhwaclan and Kunmanga, all of which started having access problems in late May, right when Vietnamese police seized their servers.

Initially it wasn’t clear why the sites suddenly went offline, but the authorities confirmed that this was the result of a large enforcement operation that has been in the works for a long time.

The three sites have reportedly been operated by a Vietnamese couple since January 2023, serving unauthorized English translations of Korean webtoons to readers across Asia, North America and Europe, while paying the bills with banner ads and member donations .

The sites carried around 14,700 titles, about 70 percent of them Korean, and pulled in more than 1.1 billion visits a year by SimilarWeb’s count. Industry estimates put the damage to Korea’s content business at 207.2 billion won, roughly $136 million .

One Operation, Three Sites

Naver Webtoon, which did much of the early legwork, says a single operation ran all three portals, and it had been chasing these exact domains for years. We can independently confirm the latter, as Harimanga, Manhwaclan and Kunmanga all appear by name in a 2023 DMCA subpoena Naver sent to Cloudflare.

This time, the company mapped the network with open-source intelligence and handed the evidence to Korean officials, who passed it to Vietnamese authorities.

Vietnamese police questioned the couple on May 19 and seized the servers three days later . Prosecutors plan to charge them locally, with Korea’s copyright agency and Naver helping on the paperwork. Korea has also suggested extraditing the couple for trial and recovering their earnings, though that is a hope more than a plan.

A Broader Crackdown

The takedown did not arrive alone. Around the same time, Korea announced the extradition of a 37-year-old man suspected of running Newtoki, which is described as the country’s most notorious manga and webtoon pirate site.

The man reportedly left Korea in 2017 and took Japanese citizenship in 2022, which normally puts a person out of reach. Officials say it is the first time Japan has handed one of its own nationals to Korea under a treaty the two signed in 2002.

The Korean piracy crackdown coincides with a new emergency blocking power , which has been live since May 11. This enables the government to order internet providers to block pirate sites without first clearing it with a review committee. The ministry blocked 34 sites on day one.

Newtoki and its sister sites shut themselves down on April 27 , just before the power took effect.

On Washington’s Watchlist

There is also a bigger backdrop in Hanoi. In May, the U.S. Trade Representative branded Vietnam a “Priority Foreign Country” over online piracy, its harshest label and the first in thirteen years, then opened a Section 301 investigation that put tariffs on the table.

Washington’s complaint is that Vietnam rarely makes piracy hurt. Even in its biggest cases, against the operators of Fmovies and BestBuyIPTV, courts handed down suspended sentences and small fines with little deterrent effect.

This Korea-driven case now tests exactly that. Police seized the servers and pulled the couple in for questioning, firmer than the usual response. Whether that will continue has yet to be seen.

For now, Harimanga, Manhwaclan and Kunmanga are unlikely to come back in their original form. That said, sites like these have a habit of returning under new names, and at the time of writing, several clones remain online.

https://claude.ai/chat/818e0d6e-a99a-45ec-8381-0e43d403e857

https://x.com/kakaoent_pcok/status/2065358465820934643

https://gemini.google.com/app/db2adf824248b950

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

The Internet is littered with cheap IPTV services that offer access to a lot of content, for very little money.

These deals often seem too good to be true, and in most cases they are, at least for those who prefer to stay on the right side of the law.

The operators of these services often remain in the shadows, but anti-piracy groups are actively trying to pin them down. For example, members of the Alliance for Creativity and Entertainment ( ACE ) identified Mechanicsburg resident Brandon Weibley as the alleged operator of several commercial IPTV services offering pirated streams.

IPTV Operator Ghosts Hollywood Lawsuit

In a complaint filed in March 2025, Amazon, Netflix, Disney, Paramount, and other major studios accused Weibley of large-scale copyright infringement across a string of IPTV brands.

His alleged activity dates back to 2017, when he registered beastmodebuilds.com and began selling subscriptions to services including Beast Mode Live, BTV, Viking Media, and GreenWing Media. After the studios confronted him in 2023, he moved to a new domain, vonwik.com, and rebranded the operation as ‘Shrugs’ and ‘Zing’.

Weibley was personally served but never answered the complaint or appeared in court. With the defendant absent, the studios requested a default judgment , $9 million in damages, and a permanent injunction.

The services’ public front stayed online through the Vonwik.com domain, even after Weibley was served. That left the rightsholders relying on the court to shut the operation down.

Court Awards $9 Million + Domain Takeover

This week, U.S. District Judge Jennifer Wilson granted the studios’ motion in full. With a sample of 60 copyrighted works at stake, multiplied by the maximum award of $150,000 per infringement, that adds up to a total of $9 million in statutory damages.

The judge found the infringement willful on several grounds. Weibley continued to operate the services after the studios demanded he stop, and simply moved them to a new domain once the rightsholders applied pressure.

In addition to the damages, Judge Wilson also granted a permanent injunction, which prohibits Weibley from operating the six named services or anything substantially similar.

Importantly, the injunction also orders the registrars and registries for the associated domains, beastmodebuilds.com and vonwik.com, to transfer these to a registrar appointed by the studios. In addition, hosting providers are required to suspend the associated sites and lock their content.

At the time of writing, the permanent injunction has yet to be applied, as Vonwik.com remains online and accessible. Whether the associated IPTV services also remain active is unknown.

Court Applies the New Cox Standard

In addition to the multi-million damages award, the judgment memorandum stands out for how it handles the movie companies’ secondary liability claims.

To hold Weibley liable for contributory infringement and inducement, the court applied the Supreme Court’s recent Cox v. Sony framework. Under Cox, a provider’s mere knowledge that subscribers infringe is not enough. The provider must intend its service to be used for infringement, or the service must be tailored to it.

Wilson navigated that standard carefully. In a footnote, she declined to rest liability on Weibley’s knowledge alone, grounding it instead in inducement, noting that he promoted the services, tried to conceal the purpose of subscriber payments, and rebranded under pressure.

To reach those conclusions, the court leans heavily on a similar IPTV case. Judge Wilson cited the California case against ‘Outer Limits IPTV’ , which resulted in a $15 million default judgment last August, throughout her analysis.

It’s Not Over Yet

The Motion Picture Association’s enforcement arm, the Alliance for Creativity and Entertainment (ACE) coordinated the legal effort and takes credit for the win.

“We commend Judge Wilson’s ruling holding Weibley accountable for copyright infringement,” says Jesse Martin, the MPA’s Senior VP and Associate General Counsel for Global Litigation and Intermediaries.

ACE’s press release does appear to contain a key error, however. Its headline described Weibley as the operator of “Outer Limits IPTV.” That was a different defendant in a separate lawsuit, one that resulted in a $15 million judgment last year.

Finally, it’s worth pointing out that this is not a final conclusion of the case, because the claims against ten unnamed ‘Doe’ defendants tied to the two domain names remain pending. The studios have until June 15 to tell the court whether they intend to pursue or drop them.

The $9 million default judgment against Shrugs and Zing operator Weibley is confirmed. Whether the defendant will pay this massive damages amount is uncertain, however, which is why the movie companies tried their best to obtain that permanent injunction, including the domain takeover power.

—

A copy of Judge Wilson’s memorandum is available here (pdf) and the accompanying order can be found here (pdf) .

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

Today, the 2026 FIFA World Cup officially kicked off with the opener between Mexico and South Africa.

With a record number of 48 participating countries and 104 matches in well over a month, the high-profile tournament is the largest live broadcasting operation the sport has ever seen.

The FIFA World Cup is also the most valuable sports event, with roughly $4 billion in broadcasting rights on the line for a single tournament. Rightsholders do everything in their power to protect these exclusive broadcasts, in part through piracy blocking efforts.

While sports broadcasters believe that far-reaching anti-piracy measures are needed to protect their financial interests, critics warn that piracy countermeasures should not be disproportionate.

‘Fighting Piracy Without Breaking the Internet’

To mark the start of the World Cup, the Computer & Communications Industry Association (CCIA) Europe, a trade group that represents major tech players including Amazon, Cloudflare, and Google , published an explainer detailing piracy blocking risks.

The document, “Fighting Piracy Without Breaking the Internet,” criticizes blocking efforts based on IP addresses and the DNS. CCIA argues these methods are too blunt to separate legal from illegal content, since a single IP address or domain name can be used by thousands of unrelated services.

The result, it says, is that many lawful businesses and public services are taken offline alongside the pirate streaming targets.

Charlotte Dantin, CCIA Europe’s Intellectual Property and Audiovisual Policy Manager, cautions against the slowly expanding private and automated site blocking efforts.

“Major sporting events must not become a testing ground for private, automated censorship of internet infrastructure. Illegal streaming can and should be addressed, but enforcement must remain lawful, proportionate, and subject to independent judicial oversight.”

“The mistakes already visible in national blocking experiments should not be allowed to proliferate across the EU. When IP addresses are added to opaque blocking lists without continuous court review or meaningful redress, innocent businesses and users suffer. Piracy enforcement must target pirates, not the basic infrastructure that underpins the internet.”

Rightsholders as ‘De Facto’ Piracy Regulators

CCIA is not alone in its concerns about privatized blocking measures, and it points to independent backing. A study published in April by two copyright researchers, João Pedro Quintais of the University of Amsterdam’s Institute for Information Law and Miquel Aznar of the University of Valencia, reached similar conclusions.

Their paper, “ Between Effectiveness and Fundamental Rights ,” does not dispute that blocking works. On the contrary, it accepts that blocking measures meaningfully reduce piracy.

According to the authors, the main concern is that this effectiveness is increasingly achieved by handing over public enforcement powers to private actors, turning them into “de facto regulators of internet traffic.”

The researchers found that courts increasingly let private rightsholders compile their own blocklists, with an order from Barcelona, Spain, as the clearest example.

As we previously covered, a December 2024 order from a Barcelona court allows LaLiga and its partners to identify the IP addresses that providers should block, without clearly defining how those addresses are chosen or how wrongly blocked parties can appeal.

Collateral Damage

Both CCIA and the researchers ultimately warn that the expanding piracy blocking efforts are not without risk. In fact, recent blocking efforts in Spain and Italy have resulted in several overblocking incidents.

The research, for example, points to the temporary blocking of the Redsys payment platform in Spain and of Google Drive in Italy as cases that were anything but hypothetical.

In addition to directly disrupting third-party services, CCIA’s explainer notes that blocking requirements are expanding to more intermediaries, including CDN and VPN providers, which puts these companies in an ‘impossible’ position.

“CDN, DNS, and VPN providers face liability, for both failing to block quickly and for overblocking lawful content. Moreover, obliging VPNs to enforce copyright undermines the privacy-by-design and cybersecurity of the VPN ecosystem,” CCIA notes.

The U.S. Finale

Site blocking is now established in dozens of countries, and in most it operates under some form of judicial or administrative oversight. That oversight, however, varies widely in quality, and transparency is limited. With increased calls for tighter measures, concerns are growing.

The research and CCIA’s report warn that there’s a slippery slope when it comes to expanding blocking powers. And with rightsholders requesting tougher enforcement measures, caution is warranted.

With the FIFA World Cup underway, it will be worth watching whether new site-blocking stories unfold before the final kicks off in New York on July 19. In India, they already have: days before kickoff , the Delhi High Court handed rightsholder Zee a dynamic injunction to block pirate streams of the tournament in real time.

That brings us to an interesting parallel. After well over a decade of site blocking expansion around the globe, the ‘final’ blocking battle is set to take place in U.S. Congress later this year.

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

In December 2023, DISH Network filed a copyright infringement lawsuit in New York targeting the pirate IPTV service Glo TV, along with an alleged reseller known as Massive Wireless.

This reseller is a brick-and-mortar electronics store operated by Khaled Akhtar in Jackson Heights, Queens. According to DISH, this store was used to sell “Glo TV”/”Rays IPTV” pirate IPTV services.

This accusation was backed up with hard evidence, as DISH used a private investigator to buy a pirate IPTV box in the store. The owner of the small store purchased these boxes in bulk from co-defendant Mumtazur Rehman Daud, who is the CEO of the California-based Rays IPTV LLC.

In the grander scheme, Massive Wireless is a small player. The store is just one of many resellers in the broader pirate IPTV ecosystem. Where wholesalers can earn millions of dollars and the top players even more, the store’s owner said that he only made $5,000 in gross proceeds from selling the boxes.

These relatively modest proceeds pale in comparison to the $25 million in statutory damages that’s at stake in this case.

Summary Judgment & Destroyed Boxes

While the story may just be a smaller player, DISH was determined to send a message. Last year the company moved for summary judgment against Massive Wireless and its owner Khaled Akhtar, asking the court to find them liable for willful contributory and vicarious copyright infringement.

This request was granted this week. In an order handed down on June 9, 2026, U.S. District Judge Orelia Merchant granted DISH partial summary judgment.

In her order, U.S. District Court Judge Orelia Merchant noted that, by selling the pirate IPTV boxes, the store and its owner materially contributed to the copyright infringements of others.

“Massive Wireless admits that it, with the purpose of enabling customer access to the Service, sold set-top boxes preloaded with the Service and with a one-year subscription to the Service.”

“Akhtar and Massive Wireless provided the mechanisms for Service Users to access and view the Works and therefore materially contributed to the infringing activity,” Judge Merchant adds.

A separate permanent injunction, signed the same day, orders Massive Wireless and its owner to stop their infringing activities and to destroy any infringing hardware that is still in their possession.

Notably, the injunction also requires the defendant to file a report under oath, detailing which IPTV devices were destroyed and how.

The Failed Supplier Defense

Massive Wireless and Akhtar did not lodge a detailed defense in response to DISH’s motion. Their opposition consisted of a three-page affidavit from Akhtar, which, as DISH pointed out, did not contest the legal arguments.

Instead, Akhtar’s affidavit pointed to the wholesaler who, like himself, speaks Bengali. He said that after receiving a warning letter from DISH, Daud told him it was a “scam” and that there was “nothing to worry about and to continue selling the boxes.”

DISH cited the same cease-and-desist notices as evidence to show that the store continued its infringing activity.

In the order, Judge Merchant noted that Akhtar’s claim that he was misled by his supplier was legally irrelevant. Vicarious liability is a strict liability doctrine that does not require the defendant to have knowledge of the infringement.

For the contributory infringement claim, the court found that Akhtar’s attempt to ignore six cease-and-desist letters constituted willful blindness, which legally satisfies the knowledge requirement.

“Regardless of whether Daud informed Akhtar that he did not need to worry about the cease-and-desist letters, willful blindness or objective knowledge is sufficient to show knowledge of infringement,” Judge Merchant wrote.

Where Are the Damages?

Unlike Massive Wireless and its owner, wholesaler Daud and his company Rays IPTV did not show up in court. They previously defaulted and will be targeted with a default judgment later.

In a footnote, the court explained that DISH is holding its damages claim back. The willfulness finding against Massive Wireless and Akhtar will be folded into a later motion for default judgment against Daud and Rays IPTV, which aims to hold defendants jointly and severally liable for willful infringement of 170 registered works.

At the statutory maximum of $150,000 per work, 170 works can lead up to $25.5 million in damages. According to DISH, these works are just a fraction of the total infringements, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that the court will approve it in full.

What DISH’s exact demand is has yet to be seen. The same applies to a request for attorneys’ fees and costs, which the Queens-based store will face later this summer.

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The summary judgment order, issued by the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of New York, is available here (pdf) and the permanent injunction here (pdf) .

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