Rightsholders have linked piracy to terrorism and organized crime for several decades.

The framing first emerged in the late 1990s, when IFPI raised concerns about criminal networks smuggling pirated CDs across borders.

The terrorism angle was added in 2003, when the U.S. House held a hearing on piracy’s “ links to organized crime and terrorism .” Around the same time, Interpol chief Ronald Noble told Congress that IP crime had become “the preferred method of funding for a number of terrorist groups.”

The most cited connection appeared in 2009, when a movie industry-funded RAND report linked film piracy, organized crime, and terrorism. This report blurred the line between counterfeiting and piracy, but it has been widely referenced ever since.

“Never Forget”

More recently, the Digital Citizens Alliance , with support from the creative industries, has kept the tradition alive. In 2017, it bundled piracy with ISIS recruiting videos, malware and fake news. As recently as May this year, it linked pirate IPTV to drugs, weapons and the mafia .

Yesterday, the Washington group expanded the terrorist connection with a new angle. Titled “ Hostile Signals ,” the report argues that piracy does not only provide income, it can also act as a sanction-circumventing broadcasting channel.

To add extra weight, the report notes that the 25th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks “is days away” and closes with “Never Forget.” With the press release coming out yesterday, the timing is notable.

Pirate IPTV Services Carry Terrorist Channels

Researchers from Atlanta security firm risk3sixty signed up for 25 pirate IPTV services from U.S. connections between May and August. Seventeen of these carried at least one channel tied to a designated terrorist organization or a sanctioned state broadcaster.

Hezbollah’s television station, Al-Manar, was available on all seventeen. The Houthi-run Al-Masirah channel appeared on nine, Iran’s Al-Alam on seven, and Hamas’ Al-Aqsa TV on two.

“Al-Manar, the broadcast outlet of Hezbollah, which has a long history of attacking American targets and is responsible for at least 291 U.S. deaths over decades, is carried by all 17 piracy platforms identified to allowing carriage,” the report reads.

The report names several allegedly problematic services, including Lion OTT, Sansat VIP, OTTOcean, Belitvision and Wish IPTV, which could all be accessed from U.S. internet connections.

The U.S. banned Al-Manar’s satellite feed in 2004, and a Brooklyn man was later sentenced to 69 months in prison for providing material support to a terrorist organization after selling the channel to New York customers. Despite these crackdowns, pirate IPTV offers a “back door”.

“A piracy subscription has restored what two decades of federal action removed,” the report concludes.

Concerns & Nuance

The report’s conclusions are alarming, suggesting that pirate IPTV services could be used to radicalize people.

“National security officials, policymakers and citizens alike should be concerned,” it warns.

“Piracy platforms have created a new avenue for terrorist organizations and state adversaries to distribute recruitment messaging to U.S. audiences, including content intended to inspire acts of violence.”

At the same time, however, the report also recognizes that the findings say nothing about the viewership of these channels. Not just that, these channels are in Arabic and likely without subtitles. They are part of a much broader offering which can include thousands of channels.

Additionally, it is worth pointing out that many of these streams, including Hezbollah’s, are freely accessible through the broadcasters’ own websites. This includes Al-Manar.

The Justice Department seized 13 Hezbollah-linked domains in 2023, including seven that carried the channel’s name, but the station’s main site sits under Lebanon’s .lb domain. This domain falls outside of the U.S. jurisdiction and still streams to American visitors today.

The availability on the regular web may take away some of the report’s punch, but it actually sets up the payoff that follows.

Solution: Site-Blocking

The Digital Citizens Alliance report does not only signal the problem, it also offers a potential solution. It argues that site-blocking measures that are used against pirate sites can also be used to block terrorist content.

“These findings reinforce the need for the United States to adopt measures to prevent overseas piracy networks from operating in the country,” the report notes.

The timing for this request fits, as U.S. site blocking bills are on the agenda again. Rep. Darrell Issa’s American Copyright Protection Act (ACPA) and Rep. Zoe Lofgren’s Foreign Anti-Digital Piracy Act (FADPA) are both on the table, and Issa has signaled that a bipartisan, bicameral bill is close.

In August, MPA chief Charles Rivkin and the head of the IPR Center used the World Cup domain seizures to make the same site blocking request .

The site blocking discussions are ongoing in Washington and it is expected that stakeholders on the content-owner side will use the “Hostile Signals” report as further evidence that stopping piracy can potentially have a broader effect.

“‘Never Forget’ became the enduring rallying cry for those who experienced the 9/11 attacks. It’s also a reminder to never let the terrorists back in, in any form,” the report concludes.

—

A copy of the Digital Citizens Alliance / risk3sixty report “Hostile Signals” is available here (pdf) .

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

Dynamic site blocking orders that allow rightsholders to add new targets without returning to court have been common in Europe for years.

In July, Spanish-language broadcaster TelevisaUnivision (TU) obtained a similar order from a federal court in Florida.

This preliminary injunction, which started with five pirate IPTV services, expanded to cover hundreds of domains and dozens of intermediaries within weeks. After all defendants failed to show up in court, the broadcaster now seeks a permanent and even broader injunction.

In a motion filed September 4, TU asked Judge Kathleen Williams to enter default judgment against the six named defendants behind Thunder TV, Sunset TV, and Tele Latino. The operators of Pop TV and Kaelus TV, the other two services named in the complaint, remain unidentified John Does.

Self Expanding Blocking Injunction

The request for a default judgment comes with a headline figure seeking $32.7 million in damages. However, it is the breadth of the associated permanent injunction that really stands out.

The preliminary injunction obtained this summer allowed TU to add new domains, IP addresses, and pirate services to the order, without requiring judicial approval. TU already used that power twice before the injunction was a month old.

The proposed permanent order keeps that mechanism but also extends it, shaping it into a broad and self-expanding order with several new powers. For example, it can add new defendants, not just domains.

“Plaintiffs may, without further leave of Court, supplement the caption of this action to add as John Doe Defendants any person or entity discovered to be engaged in any of the conduct prohibited by this Order,” the proposed order reads.

The second expansion is a “colorable similarity” carveout. Any service that provides unauthorized access to the broadcaster’s content, uses substantially similar technology, or targets the same subscriber base can be required to comply. This also applies to alter-ego and successor services.

That provision has a concrete target. According to a supplemental declaration, Thunder TV itself no longer carries TelevisaUnivision content, but its operators have launched a mirror application called “Black Eye” that does. Access to Black Eye “is obtained using the same credentials used for Thunder TV,” the declaration states.

Nearly 600 Domains, 121 Intermediaries

The legal paperwork lists nearly 600 unique domain names, covering the five original services and the seven brands that were added later, including XuperTV, Tarjeta Roja, Pirlo TV, and Roja Directa.

Thunder TV and Tele Latino alone account for more than 90 domains each. XuperTV, which TU describes as a white label built on the same Magis TV infrastructure as Tele Latino, adds more than 110 to the mix.

The intermediary list is also as broad as we have ever seen in this type of injunction. It lists 121 intermediaries, including 51 domain registrars, 58 hosting and CDN providers, five payment channels, and five app distribution platforms.

The intermediaries include U.S. companies such as NameCheap and GoDaddy, as well as Russia’s REGTIME-SU, Vietnam’s Mat Bao, Peru’s NIC.PE, and the Dutch Registrar.eu, Iran’s Aria Shatel and a Romanian state research institute, ICI Bucuresti.

Other platforms are also listed, including GitHub, Vercel, Canva, Wix, Squarespace, and Automattic, the company behind WordPress.com, with each linked to one or more pirate domains or services.

The proposed injunction also includes RIPE NCC and APNIC, the regional Internet registries for Europe and the Asia-Pacific. These are inaccurately described as a “web host / hosting provider,” as they allocate IP address space. These can’t block access to IP-addresses.

Cloudflare again gets its own dedicated section. For each of roughly 90 IP addresses tied to the pirate domains, it must produce the origin server behind its proxy and the account holder’s name and email.

Finally, Roku and the AFTVnews Downloader app are ordered to remove the pirate apps and block the numerical short codes used to install them.

$32.7 Million, On Paper

The requested permanent injunction comes in addition to the damages, which are made up of both copyright and trademark infringement claims.

The broadcaster seeks $26.7 million for willful copyright infringement, at the statutory maximum of $150,000 per registered work, and $6 million for willful trademark counterfeiting, at $2 million per defendant group.

When dealing with foreign defendants who are not responsive, it is unlikely that this money will ever be recouped. TU is well aware of this, using it as another argument why a permanent injunction is needed. That would help to block or shut down the domains and the associated infrastructure.

The multi-million damages demand is not new. Amazon and Netflix won $18.75 million against a Dallas IPTV operator in March, and Hollywood studios secured $9 million in Pennsylvania in June.

For now, the motion is pending before Judge Williams. Whether the proposed order’s most expansive provisions survive as written has yet to be seen.

—

A copy of the motion for default judgment is available here (pdf) . The proposed default judgment order can be found here (pdf) , and the proposed permanent injunction with updated Schedule A here (pdf) .

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

Last month, we reported that defense attorneys representing prominent torrent trackers told a federal judge that the case may have been filed by an impostor.

After they revealed their findings, Judge Andrea R. Wood put the case on a sanctions track and scheduled an in-person hearing. Since then, the case has taken some surprising turns yet again.

First, defense attorneys Erin Russell and Haley Finch asked the court to hold the plaintiff in contempt for misrepresenting his identity, falsely claiming copyright ownership, and filing under a mail-drop address.

The ‘Real’ Matthew Schneider Appears

Representing “John Doe” tracker operators, they submitted a declaration from Matthew A. Schneider of Ottawa, Ontario. He is the filmmaker on the IMDB credits for the three films cited in the complaint: “Split: A Film Anthology,” “Do Us Part,” and “Orlando Gloom, Always the Same.”

Under oath, the Canadian clarifies that he indeed created these films with school friends, but that he is not the person that appeared in the lawsuit.

“I am not involved in, nor have I ever appeared in, this case. Furthermore, I do not know and am not associated with the person purporting to be “Matthew Schneider” in this case,” the declaration reads.

The films were created under the high-school filmmaking group “Dirtbag Films,” which also included Solmund MacPherson. He also filed a sworn declaration, confirming that they never sold the rights to the films, and that he didn’t recognize the “matthew.schneider94” email that was on every filing in the federal lawsuit.

MacPherson also tracked down a copy of “Do Us Part.” The real Schneider appears on screen in a speaking role. This should help the judge to compare his voice to the defendant’s. The same is true for an Instagram post, with a photo of the Canadian Schneider, who has since left filmmaking.

A Different Matthew Schneider

Presented with the new evidence, the plaintiff did not give up. On the contrary, in a response filed in court late last week he argued there are two Matthew Schneiders.

The plaintiff writes that he “consistently identified himself in this action as Matthew Schneider, an independent filmmaker and creative professional from the United Kingdom.” He never claimed to be the Canadian and never mentioned Dirtbag Films.

“The existence of another person with the same or similar name is not evidence of impersonation,” he wrote.

The identical names are not the only coincidence, it appears. The self-described UK filmmaker claims to have independently created films with the exact same titles as the Canadian Dirtbag Films productions.

Identical Film Titles

As evidence, he filed an exhibit with metadata for his own alleged versions of the three films, all created in the UK. The dates he lists are 2011 for “Split: A Film Anthology,” 2012 for “Do Us Part,” and 2012 for “Orlando Gloom, Always the Same.”

That puts his versions five to six years before the Dirtbag films, which were created in Canada in 2017. He argues he could not have copied works that “did not yet exist.”

The exhibit lists the films’ filenames, resolutions, and frame rates. However, there are no copyright office registration numbers, no cast members, no crew, no stills, and no IMDb listings.

The chances of two filmmakers with the same name creating three movies with exactly the same titles are slim. Particularly since one title includes “Orlando Gloom,” the name of the musician for whom Dirtbag made the associated music video.

A Procedural Counterattack

The person litigating as Matthew Schneider also went on the offensive. In his response, he accuses defense attorneys Russell and Finch of improper ex parte contact with Judge Wood, pointing to the call defense counsel made to chambers before the August hearing.

Russell described that call as an extraordinary step at the time. The plaintiff now argues that it violated the ban on one-sided communications with a judge, citing the ABA’s professional conduct rules and a Seventh Circuit ruling that allows courts to sanction such contact.

The plaintiff wants the court to disclose the dates and substance of the communications, and to disregard anything that was said outside his presence. He also asks the court to consider sanctions against defense counsel.

In addition, he notes that both declarants and attorney Finch have ties to the same Winnipeg high school, suggesting that the declarations should not be treated as independent corroboration without further explanation.

Whether the pre-hearing call was improper, or a legitimate and justified alert to a potential fraud on the court, is a question Judge Wood will have to answer.

Questions Remain

The response also defends only three of the ten works listed in the complaint. The five other short films and two literary works, which the defense says have no verified creator, are not mentioned.

Later this week all parties are scheduled to attend the first in-person hearing in this case. This is expected to shed further light on the case.

For now, the attorneys representing the torrent tracker operators don’t believe the plaintiff is who he claims to be. If true, that raises the question what this person’s motivation is.

The alleged impostor is clearly interested in uncovering the identities of the tracker operators, but none of the subpoenaed companies, including Reddit, GoDaddy, Cloudflare, PayPal, Stripe, Namecheap, and X Corp, have produced any records. All productions were placed on hold by the court in May and remain frozen.

—

The defense motion for a rule to show cause is available here (pdf) . The plaintiff’s response can be found here (pdf) .

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

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

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

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

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

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

Bootleg Shows Up on Music Platforms

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

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

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

From DMCA Takedown to DMCA Subpoena

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

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

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

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

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

Names, IP Addresses, and Bank Details

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

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

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

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

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

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

—

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Built on Mass Piracy

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Replacing George R.R. Martin

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

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

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

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

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

Not Fair Use

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

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

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

Broader Claims

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

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

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

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

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

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

—

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

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

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

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

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

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

A £1.35 Billion Poll

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

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

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

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

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

Pirate’s Pinky Promise

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

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

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

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

Social Media as Primary Piracy Source

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

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

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

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

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

An ‘Oven-Ready’ Solution

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

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

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

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

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

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

—

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

From John Doe to Reality Labs Exec

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Nearly 20,000 Files

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Meta: ‘Nothing Ties’ Downloads to Company

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

—

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

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

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

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

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

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

No Inducement, No Claim

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

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

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

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

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

The ‘Last’ Case Standing

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

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

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

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

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

A Four-Year Standoff

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

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

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

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

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

—

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“A Cute Little LibGen Babysitter”

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

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

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

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

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

“A Popular (and Illegal) Library”

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

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

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

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

Rewriting Pirate Library History

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

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

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

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

One Torrenting Spree, Three Lawsuits

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

—

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

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