YggTorrent was France’s largest torrent community, home to more than 10 million registered members before it shut down in March following a devastating hack.

The operators threw in the towel, and in July the French Gendarmerie arrested twelve people it accused of running the operation.

However, someone apparently still sees value in the brand.

Until recently, visitors to yggtorrent.org landed on a domain sale pitch. The domain name, bundled with 59 others into what the listing called a “comprehensive portfolio” and an “established brand with millions of users,” had a substantial $700,000 asking price. That’s just for the domains.

The twelve arrests came after the domain went up for sale, which might suggest the deal would fall through. We can’t confirm this either way, but new messaging on the official domain shows ‘someone’ is attempting to make a comeback.

‘Grand Return’

The yggtorrent.org domain currently redirects to yggtorrent.to, where a countdown clock ticks toward a relaunch on September 1 at midnight Paris time. An accompanying message explains that a ‘new team’ has taken over.

“YggTorrent rises from the ashes,” the (translated) page reads. “The largest French-language sharing platform is making its grand return. The catalogue, the community, the Ygg spirit: nothing has changed, everything is ready.”

The comeback announcement notes that the YggTorrent community still comprises 6 million members, who have access to over a million torrents. How many of the former users plan to return after the hack and the police arrests has yet to be seen, but the tracker suggests that YggTorrent’s remnants are still going.

‘Nothing Has Changed’

The comeback teaser notes that ‘nothing has changed’ and it points to a tracker status page which shows that many YggTorrent torrents are still being actively shared.

At the time of writing, it reported 455,300 torrents and more than 1.5 million connected peers, roughly 94% of them seeders. This suggests that the ‘new team’ that controls the domain also has a working tracker, or access to the old one.

Who’s in charge of the new team remains a mystery. The domain name WHOIS data shows no recent changes. This doesn’t mean that it didn’t change owners, as the registrar accounts might have been sold in full, but there are no public traces of that.

Whether the teased comeback is a true revival, a potential scam, or anything in between remains unclear. For now, the clock is ticking, and with the French police not ruling out further arrests, they might be keeping an eye on the comeback too.

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

While the U.S. doesn’t have a dedicated site blocking law yet, it is certainly possible to take out pirate sites and services through court-ordered injunctions.

A recent federal lawsuit filed in a Florida federal court, shows that this can result in a sweeping piracy blocking that does real damage to the targeted platforms.

The case was originally filed by the Mexican broadcaster TelevisaUnivision ( TU ) in early June. The case was relatively targeted, naming the IPTV services Thunder TV, Sunset TV, Pop TV, Kaelus TV, and Tele Latino, as well as their alleged operators.

The broadcaster argued that these pirate IPTV services threatened its business. TU holds the World Cup rights for sixteen Latin American territories, and its license with FIFA requires it to keep the Mexican broadcast signal from reaching the United States. The pirate services, it argued, put it in breach of that contract, exposing it to “termination and forfeiture of hundreds of millions of dollars in payments.”

To stop this immediate threat, the company requested a temporary restraining order, hoping to shut down the IPTV services effective immediately.

Judge Kathleen Williams granted the temporary restraining order on June 5, one day after the case was filed, without hearing from any of the defendants. The initial order prohibited the defendants from infringing TU’s own copyrighted works, which include telenovelas and other programming, and from using its trademarks, including all content linked to its licensed World Cup broadcast.

Importantly, the order also targeted third parties acting “in active concert,” including ISPs, hosts, CDNs, domain registrars, registries, app stores, ad networks, social platforms, search engines, and payment processors. These were ordered, on TU’s request and with notice, to disable the listed domains and IP addresses and unmask whoever was behind them.

The order specifically names various intermediaries such as Cloudflare, Namecheap, and GoDaddy, and directed financial players to take action. Mexican bank BBVA Bancomer and the payment channel Spin by OXXO were ordered to freeze funds and disclose the identities behind the accounts.

On July 24, Judge Williams converted the TRO into a preliminary injunction. By then the order had grown into something far larger than the case that started it, and that could only be the beginning, as the injunction appears to be self-expanding by nature, in multiple ways.

Injunction Covers Future Targets

While the injunction is noteworthy for many reasons, the most striking feature is that it’s specifically written to include things that don’t yet exist.

That starts with the content it protects. The order isn’t limited to TU’s current catalog or the World Cup rights, it covers the infringement of “any copyrighted works or broadcasts that Plaintiffs may in the future produce, license, or acquire rights to transmit.”

In other words, it covers future copyrights that did not exist when the order was signed.

The same applies to the pirate services themselves. The injunction defines its target as the named IPTV operations “and any comparable system,” whether “currently in existence or developed in the future,” and it applies “regardless of the branding, domain name, or technical configuration used.”

This effectively covers a pirate site or service that hasn’t launched, under a brand that is currently unknown, on a domain name that hasn’t been registered yet. As long as TU says it carries its pirated content, it can be targeted.

The injunction goes beyond pirate streaming targets too and specifically notes that the BitTorrent protocol and other content devivery categories are also included.

Self-Expanding Without a Judge

The injunction does have more novel characteristics. For example, one of the clauses allows TU’s lawyers to add these additional targets by filing a sworn declaration, without needing approval from a judge.

“Plaintiffs may supplement Schedule A by filing a verified declaration identifying additional infringing services, IP addresses, domains, applications, or platforms, which supplementation shall take effect immediately upon filing and service,” the injunction reads.

This effectively makes it a dynamic injunction, instead of a fixed one. Rightsholders have obtained dynamic blocking orders for years in the UK, Spain, and elsewhere in the EU, but for the United States this is new.

The broadcaster has already used the power twice. A first supplementation was filed on June 12. A second, filed on July 10, added an entire tier of piracy brands that were never named as defendants: XuperTV, Tarjeta Roja, Pirlo TV, Roja Directa, RBTV, Strikeout, and StudioMax.

Domain Registrars Suspend Domains

While the injunction covers a wide range of intermediaries, including Internet providers, it has not been used as a typical ISP site blocking order. Instead, it appears to be used mostly to target domain registrars and Cloudflare.

To get an idea of the effect this had, TorrentFreak ran a WHOIS check on many of the targeted domains this week.

Of 474 domains queried, 203 have a clientHold status , indicating that the registrars suspended these. One domain was suspended by the registry and the rest of the domains were not suspended.

Which registrars complied is largely explained by the location of the registrars. U.S.-facing registrars acted on nearly everything, with NameCheap and GoDaddy taking action on most domains.

Meanwhile, the domains that were left untouched are linked to foreign registrars, including Russia’s REGTIME-SU and the Dutch company Registrar.eu, which both hadn’t suspended a single listed domain according to our information.

This is the expected shape of the result rather than a failure of it. An order that binds “all persons in active concert” still depends, in practice, on whether the party served answers to a U.S. court. Where the registrar does, the domain goes dark. Where it doesn’t, it stays up.

The timing of the suspensions makes sense too. More than 90% of the suspended domains were updated during either the days around the June 5 restraining order, or the days after the July 24 injunction.

It is worth stressing that in addition to domain suspensions, the services may have also gone offline because other parts of their infrastructure were hit. That includes the hosting services that are listed in the injunction, as well as Cloudflare.

A Dedicated Cloudflare Section

Cloudflare stands out as the only intermediary to receive its own tailored rules, detailed in several pages of the order.

The company is directed to disable its CDN, reverse-proxy, and DNS service for a long list of domains within 24 hours. It must also hand over origin-server IP addresses, DNS records, account holder names, payment details, and 14 days of request logs for the targeted domains.

In addition, Cloudflare must check whether any other account in its system shares an email address or billing name with a flagged account, and to unmask those accounts too.

Cloudflare did secure some limits. It only has to produce data it already holds, it has no duty to monitor content, and its compliance is not an admission of liability. This is similar to the “no fault” injunctions we see in Europe.

Dropped Hosting Companies and More Intermediaries

When the complaint was filed early June, it also named the hosting companies Enzu, Dash Networks, DigitalOcean, and HostGator as defendants. All four were targeted by the restraining order, but they were voluntarily dismissed after less than two weeks.

Beyond these, the injunction named dozens of other intermediaries, from registrars and hosts in Russia, Bulgaria, Romania, Iceland, and Iran, to mainstream services such as GitHub, Akamai, and Linode. They are all named because they allegedly provided services to the pirate operations.

As far as we can see, none of the defendants, operators or intermediaries, ever appeared in court to object.

The broad injunction remains valid until the case is decided, and TU can keep adding names, brands, and domains to it for at least two years. Whether there will be any transparency regarding these seemingly unlimited expansions is not immediately clear from the legal paperwork.

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A copy of the preliminary injunction, issued by the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Florida, is available here (pdf) . Magistrate Judge Enjoliqué Lett’s Report and Recommendation can be found here (pdf) , and the original June 5 temporary restraining order here (pdf) .

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

The Cosmos portal is one of the most active corners of the European Space Agency’s website.

Run by ESA’s Science Program, it hosts mission-support pages and public data archives for Gaia, Euclid, XMM-Newton, and dozens of other missions, backed by a science archive that now runs to more than a petabyte of data.

European Space IPTV Recommendations

This valuable archive provides key information for researchers and, more recently, it also started to appeal to people who are looking for a cheap pirate IPTV subscription. This clearly isn’t official ESA material, but an exploit by scammers who uploaded hundreds of scammy PDF files to the site’s repository.

A simple site:cosmos.esa.int search shows the scope of the problem. In addition to genuine results, such as a notice that the Gaia satellite was switched off in March 2025, Google returns a series of documents with titles including “Top 10 IPTV Providers Right Now: The Definitive 2026 Rankings” and “Best IPTV Service Provider in the USA 2026…”

Because ESA’s .int domain has a good reputation and high authority, these scammy PDF files also rank well in regular search results. Those who search for the best premium IPTV subscriptions for Android will get the ESA domain as the first result through a featured Google snippet.

Google’s AI Overview is also picking up ESA’s recommendations for the top IPTV services, with information that comes straight from the scammers’ PDFs.

IPTV, Instagram Followers, and Free Robux

There are hundreds of these results, with many new ones being added while we write this article. The PDFs we checked don’t appear to be malicious. They function as advertisements for pirate IPTV services. Whether these indeed offer what they promise is unknown, but visiting these hyperlinked URLs is not advised.

The IPTV ads are only part of the problem. The same corner of ESA’s portal also hosts unrelated scam content, including a “Free Coin Master Spins Guide” aimed at mobile-game players, “ Free Instagram Followers ,” and “ Free Robux codes. ” These free offerings undoubtedly come at a cost and should be avoided too.

The broad mix of scammy offers shows that ESA’s website is being exploited more broadly. How these people gained access to the server is unknown. According to ESA’s documentation, uploading requires site-editor access to the Cosmos portal, but there might be a weakness in the system.

Known SEO Exploit

The goal of these PDFs is to rank high in Google search results for popular terms. This is a known SEO hack that we have seen numerous times before.

Last year, for example, the European Commission’s Eurostat portal was exploited in the same way, with scam PDFs climbing to the top spot for terms like “best IPTV providers of 2025.”

To find out more, TorrentFreak reached out to ESA yesterday, asking whether it was aware of the documents, how they were uploaded, and how long they had been online. We will update this article if we hear back.

At the time of writing, the IPTV documents remain live on the Cosmos portal. If history is any guide, cleaning them up won’t be the end of it. They will either come back, or they will resurface on another website, repeating the same trick.

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

In late 2022, several of the world’s largest music companies, including Warner Bros. and Sony Music, s ecured a key victory against Grande Communications.

A Texas federal jury found the Internet provider liable for willful contributory copyright infringement and ordered it to pay $46.8 million in damages , after Grande failed to disconnect pirating subscribers.

The verdict was a milestone in the recording industry’s campaign to hold ISPs responsible for their subscribers’ piracy. The ruling was later affirmed on appeal by the Fifth Circuit, which also vacated the damages award , sending that question back for a new trial.

That new trial might not come after Cox v. Sony changed the playing field. In March, the Supreme Court reversed a billion-dollar verdict against Cox Communications, holding that an Internet provider is not liable for contributory infringement simply because it keeps serving subscribers it knows have been flagged for piracy.

A few weeks later, the Supreme Court also wiped out the Grande verdict , ordering the Fifth Circuit to reconsider the case in light of the new standard.

Labels Offer to Walk Away

That reconsideration process was set in motion but, according to new filings submitted by both parties last week, it appears that the record labels are ready to throw in the towel.

In their supplemental letter brief, filed on Wednesday, the record labels effectively inform the court they are done.

“The Cox decision represents a material intervening change in law governing contributory copyright infringement by internet service providers. Plaintiffs do not
intend to litigate the merits of this case further in light of the new standard,” the labels write.

This offer to retreat is in line with earlier decisions in ISP liability cases. Since the Cox ruling, the labels have already dropped similar lawsuits against Altice and Verizon , for example.

The music companies say they informed Grande of their “willingness to dismiss the case voluntarily”. That would be with prejudice and with both parties paying their own bills. However, Grande does not agree.

Grande Wants More

Instead of simply dismissing the matter, Grande prefers to end the case with a clear win. In their own letter, the ISP asks the Fifth Circuit to “render judgment in favor of Grande” and declare that the labels cannot win under the new standard.

“The Court should render judgment for Grande. Because the Labels cannot prove contributory infringement under Cox, there is ‘no clear benefit to remanding
this case to the district court’,” the ISP argues.

This isn’t just a matter of principle, there’s a significant amount of money at stake too. To postpone that payment of the $46.8 million judgment during the appeal, the company had to post a bond, and it says the premiums added up.

According to the labels, Grande previously communicated that it incurred roughly $4 million in bond premium costs.

The record labels are pushing back hard against this potential multi-million dollar bill. They accuse the ISP of needlessly inflating its own costs by waiting over nine months to discharge the bond after the initial damages award was vacated.

In addition, the labels argue that any potential payout should be offset by $191,618 in unpaid sanctions that Grande still owes them for filing a “meritless” motion earlier in the litigation.

It’s worth stressing that Grande has not mentioned an exact cost figure in its letter. The exact amount will likely be detailed later, if it gets that far.

It is now up to the Fifth Circuit to decide whether this case should end quietly, by simply vacating the earlier judgment and splitting the costs. Alternatively, it can grant Grande a formal win on the merits, with potential compensation for the costs it made.

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The record labels’ supplemental letter brief, filed last week, at the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, is available here (pdf) . Grande’s supplemental letter brief can be found here (pdf) .

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

Operation Offsides was the largest sports piracy crackdown ever carried out during a single event.

From the start of the FIFA World Cup through the final, U.S. authorities and their partners seized more than 1,000 domains , while close to 2,000 more were blocked across Latin America.

The Motion Picture Association, which coordinated the effort through its Alliance for Creativity and Entertainment ( ACE ), previously praised the operation as a massive success. However, in an op-ed published by RealClearMarkets yesterday, MPA’s leadership admits that domain seizures have their limitations.

“It Does Not Dismantle the Business”

The op-ed, titled “Blowing the Whistle on World Cup Piracy,” is written by MPA Chairman and CEO Charles Rivkin and IPR Center Director Ivan Arvelo . It celebrates the operation as a clear success, noting that the seized sites racked up more than 156 million visits in July alone before they were taken offline.

Indeed, disrupting millions of potential visits has an impact. However, the crackdown also had its limitations, as it does not take out the operations running these sites. These limitations are also recognized in the op-ed.

“A takedown is essential, and it can interrupt access for a moment. But it does not dismantle the business behind it,” Rivkin and Arvelo write.

This is not the type of admission you expect from the MPA or the IPR Center, who just completed the largest piracy domain seizure round in U.S. history. However, the framing does nicely set up the policy argument that follows. At the same time, it corroborates our earlier coverage.

The Russian and Iranian Domains That Survived

Two weeks before the op-ed appeared, we reported that several major pirate streaming brands had switched to fallback domains on Iran’s .ir country-code TLD, in an apparent effort to move to infrastructure that is harder for U.S. law enforcement to reach.

Iranian domains have significant drawbacks of their own, especially for those operations who want to run ads, so there is no mass exodus. However, many that migrated to the .ir TLD remain online today.

A check this week shows that Buffstreams, Footybite, Totalsportek, and Nflbite brands all remain reachable on their .ir fallbacks. None have been suspended or seized, which is no surprise since Iranian authorities are not eager to cooperate with the U.S.

Meanwhile, the largest sites were never dependent on U.S.-controlled infrastructure to begin with. A popular Futbol-libres domain, for example, operating on the Russian-run .su registry, was not among the seized domains and reportedly drew more than 200 million visits in July, according to Similarweb data . That is more than all seized domains combined.

MPA Sees More Attack Vectors

While domains are just part of a site’s infrastructure, it is clear that domain seizures have their limitations. This is not news to the MPA and ACE, who are constantly tracking these domain name migrations.

Speaking with TorrentFreak, MPA’s Executive Vice President and Chief Content Protection Officer Larissa Knapp notes that these familiar tactics are not without weaknesses.

“Piracy operators regularly move domains and infrastructure in an effort to evade enforcement. The migration to .ir domains is another example of that tactic, but changing a domain does not put an illegal operation beyond reach,” Knapp says.

“These services still depend on identifiable operators, hosting, distribution, payment systems, and other technical and commercial infrastructure. That is why ACE works closely with law enforcement and industry partners around the world to identify and disrupt the people and infrastructure that keep these criminal networks operating.”

Knapp suggests that pirate sites rely on a broader infrastructure than domain names alone, so MPA and ACE try to find other weak spots to bring them down. And that’s not all.

Pirate Site Blocking as Solution

This brings us back to the op-ed, which ends with a clear policy ask. Rivkin and Arvelo argue that domain seizures alone cannot solve live sports piracy, and that the U.S. needs “every tool” available to fortify its anti-piracy work.

“Chief among them would be judicial site blocking in the U.S.,” they write, describing it as an anti-piracy tool that’s already used in nearly 60 countries.

The MPA and IPR Center heads see domain seizures as part of a broader enforcement toolbox, which should be complemented with site blocking. While Iranian and ‘Soviet Union’ domains are not mentioned, these could be key site blocking targets.

The site blocking call comes at a time when U.S. site blocking legislation is high on the political agenda again. On June 30, the House IP subcommittee held a hearing on online copyright enforcement, where Chairman Rep. Darrell Issa signaled that bipartisan, bicameral agreement was near.

Thus far, such a unified U.S. site blocking bill has yet to be introduced, but it seems to be only a matter of time. That also applies to the overblocking concerns , which will undoubtedly come, as will the eventual evasive tactics of pirates.

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

Site-blocking orders are a routine tool for rightsholders in India, where the Delhi High Court has issued dozens against pirate platforms over the past several years.

These orders gradually expanded from basic site blocking orders that targeted just ISPs, to dynamic and updating blocklists, which also require global domain registrars to take action.

A new order, obtained this week by HBO and associated studios, follows the familiar template. It targets 30 “rogue website” operations as defendants, covering more than 120 pirate site domains. In addition to Indian ISPs, it also demands action from domain registrars including Namecheap, Porkbun, Tucows, and others.

This strategy is in line with previous court orders which have successfully taken down some of the largest pirate site domains. This latest order is no exception.

Pirate Streaming Giants

The order lists a wide range of pirate brands, including some heavy hitters. For example, it targets the popular streaming portal Streamzy.to, as well as other well-known pirate brands such as LordFlix, Watchseries, FMovies, YTS, KissKH, VegaMovies, MoviesMod, BollyFlix, MovieRulz, and FilmyZilla.

Justice Anup Jairam Bhambhani concluded that the 30 pirate operations appear to be “flagrantly infringing online locations.” Their registrant details are masked, no traceable contact information is available, and the content is overwhelmingly unlicensed.

“This is, therefore, not a case of incidental infringement, but one where the primary purpose of the websites appears to be to facilitate infringement of the plaintiffs’ copyright,” the order reads.

Based on these arguments, the court granted an ad-interim injunction restraining all 30 sites from streaming or making available the studios’ copyrighted works, and directed ISPs and registrars to block and suspend the listed domain names.

Suspended Within a Day

The order was handed down on Monday, and a day later it already had a global effect. For example, lead defendant, streamzy.to, was placed on both clientHold and serverHold, suggesting that action was taken at the registrar and registry level.

Streamzy’s registrar on record is the Government of the Kingdom of Tonga, which recently began suspending pirate site domains following an earlier Delhi High Court order, after years of .to being considered a safe haven for pirates .

This change coincided with a restructuring where the Canadian domain name company Tucows took over the technical registry backend for .to domains. This takeover made it possible to suspend domain names through EPP status codes such as clientHold and serverHold.

These suspensions also apply to the other .to domain names that were targeted, including f-moviesz.to, cinespot.to, cineplay.to, and bollyflix.to. Notably, several of these are only put on clientHold (not serverHold), suggesting the registrar acted alone, without registry-level action.

In addition to the .to domain names, all Namecheap-linked domains have also been suspended. These were put on clientHold on July 28th, a day after the Delhi High Court order was issued.

Registrars Pushed Back on ‘Carte Blanche’

The order also brings something new to the table. Domain registrars Namecheap and Porkbun said they had no problem blocking the listed sites, but pushed back against a blanket order requiring them to block any future domain name that rightsholders send in.

These follow-up suspensions are part of the dynamic blocking structure, but the registrars are not comfortable with additional blocks without the court’s supervision.

Justice Bhambhani agreed with this reservation. He ruled that rightsholders who discover a new mirror domain must submit an affidavit to the registrar with supporting evidence. The registrar then technically verifies whether it is in fact a variant of an already-blocked site, and if so, suspends it as a temporary measure. At the same time, the rightsholders must file with the court to formally add the domain to the case.

“Any mechanism that requires an ISP or DNR to satisfy itself, upon its own assessment, that a subsequently identified website is a ‘rogue website’ engaged in infringement of the plaintiffs’ rights, would effectively cast upon such intermediary an adjudicatory responsibility that it is neither equipped nor authorised in law to discharge,” the order reads.

This effectively adds a new oversight layer to the blocking and suspension process.

Mixed Results

At the time of writing, most of the targeted domain names remain accessible outside of India. This includes domains using the popular YTS and KissKH brands. Interestingly, the main domains for these brands, which have over 100 million monthly visits, are not listed in the order.

Since the order was only issued a few days ago, it is possible that other domain registrars still have to take action. However, previous orders have shown that some registrars do not comply with Indian court orders at all.

Taking out domains with millions of monthly visits is still a notable result, with Streamzy.to as the main trophy.

However, the operators are not sitting still. Soon after the order was issued, they started to point their visitors to streamzy.org, as seen below.

At the same time, other .to domains from the same operation were all pointed to .org alternatives as well. And so, the game of whac-a-mole continues.

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A copy of the order in Home Box Office Inc & Ors. v. Streamzy.to & Ors. (2026:DHC:5967) is available here (pdf) . Via Livelawbiz . An overview of the defendants, domains, and registrars can be found below. There are 132 domain entries, including 10 subdomkains, excluding #116–121 which are skipped in the order.

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

Earlier this year, the U.S. Trade Representative (USTR) classified Vietnam as “ Priority Foreign Country ,” because of its lacking anti-piracy enforcement.

That designation, applied for the first time in over a decade, triggered a Section 301 investigation , opening the door to potential trade sanctions.

As part of this process, stakeholders were requested to provide input on Vietnam’s alleged shortcomings. This includes the piracy challenges and concerns, which were highlighted as the primary concern.

One of the key submissions came from the Motion Picture Association (MPA). As we reported earlier , Hollywood’s trade group called for tougher prison sentences and action against copycat pirate sites that swiftly take the place of ones that are shut down.

In total, there were more than 170 submissions from stakeholders. These include a massive 3,500+ page response filed on behalf of the Government of Vietnam, which we initially missed. It is worth highlighting separately, however, as the timing ties into the broader enforcement picture.

Vietnam Responds

Vietnam filed its response on July 2, before the USTR deadline. As expected, the country argues that it doesn’t belong on the priority watchlist, because its practices are not “unreasonable or discriminatory,” and they do not “burden or restrict U.S. commerce,” the two tests that matter under Section 301.

Instead, the country argues that any remaining problems are mostly capacity limitations, not policy shortcomings.

The submission closes by asking USTR to reconsider its stance, and remove Vietnam from the Priority Foreign Country List, without issuing any sanctions or imposing trade tariffs.

Piracy Crackdowns and Site Blocking as Defense

To back up its request, Vietnam cites a variety of anti-piracy efforts. The submission notes that more than 1,200 pirated websites were blocked in 2025, which is notable as the U.S. itself is still mulling its own site blocking legislation.

The report also cites other prominent enforcement actions. This includes the shutdown and prosecution of the Fmovies piracy ring , which was once the largest online piracy operation. This operation was dismantled in 2024 with intelligence from ACE, the MPA’s anti-piracy arm.

Meanwhile, Vietnam also mentions the shutdowns of Xoilac TV, Rophim, and Y2Mate. The latter operation was taken down in collaboration with music group IFPI , which should signal to Washington that it is cooperating on intellectual property matters.

The HiAnime Card

What stands out most in the submission is the timely mention of the HiAnime prosecution. This was publicly announced by the Vietnamese authorities on July 2, the same day that it submitted its USTR rebuttal.

The submission tells USTR that “on 1 July 2026, the Ministry of Public Security initiated criminal proceedings […] against 07 suspects” under Article 225 of the Criminal Code. It references more than 100 websites offering over 26,000 unauthorized films and roughly USD 12.85 million in advertising revenue.

While HiAnime isn’t mentioned in this description, we were able to pinpoint it as the key target in this prosecution , which was also confirmed by ACE .

Vietnam’s USTR submission does mention HiAnime.to by name elsewhere, among the sites and services that were “shut down or forced to terminate their operations.”

Crucially, the HiAnime operation already closed its doors in March, months before the prosecution was announced on July 2. This coincides with the USTR submission deadline, where that same prosecution is used in Vietnam’s defense.

Whether the timing is coincidence or tied to the deadline is unknown.

All Eyes on the Sentences

The enforcement actions highlighted by Vietnam are not news. The MPA and USTR have acknowledged the same takedowns, but complained that the resulting sentences carry no deterrent. For example, the Fmovies operators previously dodged prison , which allegedly does little to tackle the country’s piracy image.

Vietnam does not dispute this. Its submission restates the U.S. view that enforcement has been “light, mainly suspended sentences and low fines,” and answers by asking Washington to “recognize the efforts undertaken” rather than defending the outcomes.

What it offers instead is to update the current legislation. The MPA previously noted that Vietnam’s Ministry of Public Security is drafting amendments to the Penal Code to better address high-tech crimes and cyber offenses.

Whether that will indeed result in harsher sentences and a deterrent effect that will make it less appealing for locals to run pirate sites has yet to be seen.

The HiAnime defendants are the next test. Four remain in custody awaiting trial, while the other three were placed under travel restrictions. At the time of writing, USTR has not issued a determination in the Section 301 investigation.

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A copy of Vietnam’s submission, filed through the Ministry of Science and Technology, is available here (pdf) .

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

France has been at the forefront of the fight against online piracy for years.

More recently, it has been one of the pirate site blocking pioneers. In addition to demanding action from ISPs, their orders also targeted DNS resolvers and VPN providers.

While the expansion of the blocking measures is still contested, French lawmakers have already prepared the next one.

The French Parliament has handed ARCOM , the country’s audiovisual and digital regulator, the power to block pirate sports streams in real time without checking each targeted piracy source manually. The change is part of a broader professional sports law that both chambers formally adopted on July 21.

Article 10 of the new law rewrites the section of the previous sports law, Article L. 333-10, which rights holders have used to block pirate streaming sites in recent years.

From Manual Checks…

Under the old system, a rightsholder would obtain a blocking order in court, targeting specific domain names. These orders would require ISPs, DNS resolvers, or VPN services to block access on their systems.

If new domains were spotted later, rightsholders would send these to ARCOM, whose sworn agents would confirm that each one is streaming matches illegally before ISPs are ordered to block these.

One of these older orders was issued on July 8 by the Court of Paris. In that case, the French football league (LFP) won a block against nine Internet providers, covering the full 2026/2027 season, with ARCOM having to approve each new site that’s added along the way.

The order lists 30 domains and their associated subdomains, including kzontop.com, ligue1live.xyz, iptvfrancai.com, euroiptv.fr and sportsurge100.is.

…To Automated Blocks

Under the old system, it can take days before a new target is added. That’s a problem when dealing with live-streaming piracy, one that the new law aims to fix.

The new law strips out the pre-check of domain names (or IP addresses) that are added after the initial order is issued. It lets ARCOM run an automated system that pushes freshly identified targets straight to providers during a live broadcast. The providers then have to take action “without delay”.

ARCOM’s agents no longer approve each block in advance, but they keep an oversight role. They will now audit the new additions afterward, and a blocked party can appeal to ARCOM’s president, even while the targeted sports event is ongoing.

The new law is expected to significantly increase the volume of blocked sites and services, with the goal to further deter live-streaming piracy.

The judicial process leading up to the blocks barely changes, with one significant exception. Foreign entities that organize or hold rights to competitions abroad can now bring these actions in French courts themselves, opening the door for Spain’s LaLiga and England’s Premier League.

The groundwork for the blocking scheme was already laid. Under a private 2025 agreement between rights holders and ISPs, first revealed by L’Informé , the parties tested real-time IP address blocking during the 2026 World Cup, with ARCOM involved.

Italy’s “Piracy Shield” as Inspiration

French officials have not hidden the inspiration for the new law. In a study delivered to the Assemblée nationale in December 2025 , the regulator recommended this automated real-time system, citing foreign precedents including Italy’s “Piracy Shield”.

The head of Italy’s own regulator AGCOM, Massimiliano Capitanio, publicly welcomed the vote on Instagram , describing it as France adopting a version of its “Piracy Shield” model.

That comparison is sensitive. Italy’s system has been heavily criticized for overblocking, at one point knocking Cloudflare and countless unrelated sites offline . European ISPs have since demanded that rightsholders be held liable for overblocking damage .

This critique is one of the reasons why ARCOM keeps a human supervision element in the takedown process. This is to avoid overblocking, which the regulator considered as being potentially unconstitutional in France.

Not Live Yet

With the new French law, yet another country moved to a more automated site blocking process. This follows the example of Italy and other countries, with support from rightsholders including the Motion Picture Association .

The updates to the French sports law still have to be implemented formally, which isn’t expected to happen until later this year.

Whether existing orders like the LFP’s will migrate to the automated system once it goes live, or whether only future orders will, is not yet clear. For now, however, France’s pirate sports blocking still runs the old, manual way.

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The Sports Law, adopted on July 21, can be found via the Assemblée nationale dossier here . A copy of the Court of Paris ruling in the LFP blocking case, issued on July 8, is available 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, alleging that the tech company downloaded thousands of their films via BitTorrent to train AI models.

After Meta’s motion to dismiss was denied last month by U.S. District Judge Eumi K. Lee, Strike 3 filed an amended complaint expanding its claims to 2,973 films, up from the original 2,396.

With that many works at stake, potential statutory damages could reach a massive $446 million.

This week, Meta filed its answer to the amended complaint at the California federal court, denying all allegations while raising several affirmative defenses. At the same time, the company also gave further insight into the piracy allegations.

Meta’s Data Engineer

The original complaint identified a then-unnamed Facebook employee who allegedly used a residential Comcast IP address to download content, while also sharing files through Meta corporate IPs and what Strike 3 described as “stealth” IP addresses.

According to the amended complaint, that single address was linked to the infringement of 97 of Strike 3’s works.

Meta’s answer offers a straightforward explanation that has nothing to do with an organized data collection effort. The company admits that “the subscriber’s adult son was a Contingent Worker at Meta from October 2022 to October 2024.” It further confirms that the same person became “an employee at Meta with the title Data Engineer from April 2025 to May 2026.”

This phrasing is careful. By referring to “the subscriber’s adult son,” Meta positions the alleged torrenting as personal activity on a family member’s home Internet connection, unrelated to Meta.

Strike 3 apparently identified this person through their LinkedIn profile, which Meta says “speaks for itself”. In any case, Meta flatly denies that any employee’s BitTorrent activity was connected to its AI research or data collection.

The amended complaint, however, alleges that the infringement from the subscriber’s account stopped when the son’s contract with Meta ended.

Denials and a Fair Use Fallback

The broader answer follows a standard pattern of denials, which is common at this stage of a lawsuit. Meta denies downloading or uploading any of Strike 3’s adult films.

The tech company does admit downloading “portions of certain publicly available text datasets through direct download and by torrenting for purposes of developing and training some of its LLaMA models,” but insists these did not include adult films.

The company also acknowledges that it tried to prevent distributing any of the text files it had downloaded via BitTorrent for developing and training its language models. This shows that Meta admits sharing other content via BitTorrent, while explicitly denying Strike 3’s torrenting allegations.

In its affirmative defenses, Meta explicitly reserves fair use without asserting it. The company denies sharing any adult content, so fair use is not relevant, but it keeps it as an option just in case.

In the related Kadrey v. Meta lawsuit, where Meta admitted torrenting books for AI-training, fair use is the central defense, and Meta wants to keep that option open here as well.

Seeding Was “De Minimis”

As America’s most prolific copyright litigant, Strike 3 has built tens of thousands of lawsuits on the premise that sharing files via BitTorrent is copyright infringement. In those cases against individual defendants, a typical defense is that an IP address doesn’t identify a person.

Meta takes a different route. The company’s ninth affirmative defense doesn’t deny that data was uploaded from its IP addresses. Instead, it argues that any uploads during the torrenting process were “de minimis and did not result in the creation of an identifiable or usable copy of any copyrighted work.”

In other words, the fragments exchanged during BitTorrent transfers don’t amount to a meaningful copy. As far as we know, this argument has not been tested in court before, so it will be interesting to see how this will fare.

Meta also takes aim at Strike 3’s copyrights themselves. The tenth affirmative defense alleges that the adult films may incorporate others’ works without permission and may be “derivative of or copy preexisting works, including works undisclosed in Plaintiffs’ copyright filings with the U.S. Copyright Office.” Strike 3, Meta suggests, may have overstated its own copyright claims.

The remaining defenses include a statute of limitations argument, uncertainty about Strike 3’s copyrights, and a constitutional challenge arguing that the statutory damages would violate the Fifth Amendment’s Due Process Clause.

With potentially hundreds of millions of dollars at stake, it is clear that Meta will fight the matter tooth and nail. Alternatively, an early settlement is also an option. The case now moves forward, with mediation due by early August and a jury trial set for February 2028.

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A copy of Meta’s answer to the amended complaint, filed at the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, is available here (pdf) . For full context, Strike 3’s amended complaint is available here (pdf) .

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