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

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

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

IPTV Operator Ghosts Hollywood Lawsuit

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

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

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

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

Court Awards $9 Million + Domain Takeover

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

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

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

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

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

Court Applies the New Cox Standard

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

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

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

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

It’s Not Over Yet

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Fighting Piracy Without Breaking the Internet’

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

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

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

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

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

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

Rightsholders as ‘De Facto’ Piracy Regulators

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

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

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

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

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

Collateral Damage

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

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

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

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

The U.S. Finale

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Summary Judgment & Destroyed Boxes

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Failed Supplier Defense

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

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

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

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

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

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

Where Are the Damages?

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

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

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

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

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

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

In 2021, a group of film production companies including Millennium Media and Voltage Pictures sued internet provider WOW! at a federal court in Colorado, accusing it of turning a blind eye on piracy.

The stakes in this legal battle were incredibly high. After filing their original complaint, the plaintiffs recently expanded their claims to cover roughly 375 films, meaning potential statutory damages could be as high as $56 million.

WOW! previously tried to have the case dismissed, but a federal judge in Colorado rejected that attempt last year. After that, the case moved forward with both sides submitting cross-motions for summary judgment, hoping to get the matter resolved before trial.

DMCA Safe Harbor

The summary judgment requests focused on a single but important question: whether WOW! is protected by the safe harbor provisions of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.

Under Section 512 of the DMCA, an internet provider can avoid liability for pirating subscribers if it has adopted and reasonably implemented a policy to terminate repeat infringers in appropriate circumstances. This safe harbor is an affirmative defense, which means WOW! must show that it qualifies for this protection.

WOW! argued that it did , pointing to its documented policies and procedures for handling copyright complaints. However, the film companies argued the opposite, claiming WOW! failed to enforce its policy in any meaningful way and did not terminate subscribers who were repeatedly flagged for piracy.

Summary Judgment Denied

In March, Judge Daniel D. Domenico ruled on the competing motions. After reviewing the evidence in the light most favorable to each side in turn, he declined to rule for either party, finding that neither was entitled to win as a matter of law.

“I cannot say that WideOpenWest is entitled to the DMCA safe harbor as a matter of law. Nor can I say, construing the evidence in the light most favorable to WideOpenWest, that the plaintiffs are entitled to judgment as a matter of law that it is not. A reasonable juror could find for either side on a number of material fact issues,” Judge Domenico wrote.

This order was initially shielded from public view, but it was published a few days ago, after both parties informed the court that their legal battle was over.

Settlement Instead of a Verdict

Instead of going to trial, the parties filed a joint stipulation of dismissal, and the court terminated the case on May 28.

The dismissal is with prejudice, which means that the film companies can’t bring these claims against WOW! again. Each side agreed to pay for its own costs and attorneys’ fees. There is no mention of a settlement payment by either side.

Denying summary judgment left the safe harbor question unanswered. However, in light of the Supreme Court’s Cox decision earlier this year, that question matters less than it might seem. Cox had already lost its own safe harbor years earlier, but still won at the Supreme Court on the liability standard itself.

This means that even if WOW! would have ultimately lost its safe harbor, the film companies would still be required, under the new Cox precedent, to show that the Internet provider intended its service to be used for copyright infringement. This intent can be shown in only two ways: the ISP actively induced infringement, or the service it offers has no substantial lawful uses.

The new liability rules have significantly changed the legal playing field for copyright infringement cases and several lawsuits have been settled or voluntarily dismissed after the Cox ruling came out in March.

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A copy of the stipulation of dismissal is available here (pdf) . Judge Domenico’s order on the motions for summary judgment can be found here (pdf) .

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

Z-Library is one of the largest shadow libraries on the Internet, hosting millions of books and academic articles that can be downloaded for free.

The site has defied all odds over the past years. It continued to operate despite a full-fledged criminal prosecution by the United States, which resulted in the arrest of two alleged operators in Argentina.

These two Russian defendants remain wanted by the United States . According to the most recent information we have, the defendants escaped house arrest in 2024, while awaiting their extradition, and vanished into thin air .

By now, however, it is clear that these two defendants were not vital to the site’s survival. Z-Library continued to expand its reach, despite their legal troubles.

Private White Label Mirrors

Over the years, Z-Library lost control over many of its domain names, in part due to several interventions from U.S. law enforcement. In addition, the site’s domain names are blocked by court orders in many countries, including the UK, France, India, and Germany.

Z-Library has numerous domain names in use, which helps to address these blocking and seizure efforts. In addition, the site allows its users to operate their own mirror domains. This functionality was first announced last summer and earlier this month a major update was released.

The shadow library now allows people to run a mirror with their own branding, which can be password protected to add more exclusivity.

“Mirror sites […] now support branding customization and optional login‑only access. In practice, this means you can run your ‘own’ version of the library at a separate domain, with your visuals and your access rules,” Z-Library notes.

The new private white-label functionality allows anyone to launch their own custom-branded library. This is not without risk, as mirror operators could face criminal and civil repercussions.

Practically, the new functionality will also help to evade domain blocking efforts. After all, password-protected mirrors without any Z-Library branding are not easily detected by rightsholders.

20% Revenue Share, Paid in Crypto

The blocking circumvention feature was also mentioned as a key functionality when Z-Library first invited users to host their own mirrors last year. Interestingly, this also provided a revenue generating opportunity.

After registering the mirror domain, Z-Library promises to share 20% of the donation revenue through this site, which will be paid in crypto.

“As compensation, we will transfer 20% of all donations from your mirror to you to keep the mirror running. The funds will be transferred to your crypto wallet,” Z-Library’s mirror page announced.

This revenue share model is still on offer today, as shown above. The only major change is that Cloudflare-registered domains are not supported. Whether this is the result of an enforcement effort or a technical challenge, remains unknown.

Bracing for the Next Takedown

The mirrors are not the only sign that Z-Library is preparing for more enforcement actions. The site also rebuilt its main menu, which now lists every active domain in one place, alongside a downloadable file that contains the same links.

That offline file is noteworthy. By handing users a copy of its access points to keep on their own devices, Z-Library is hedging against the day many of its domains go dark all at once.

All in all, Z-Library is making access to its site as resilient as possible, while also turning its own users into a distribution network that is harder to seize or block than any central set of domains.

This expansion continues even as the U.S. criminal case remains frozen. The two indicted operators remain fugitives after fleeing house arrest in 2024, and the docket has shown no public movement in more than two years.

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

To protect rightsholders, YouTube regularly removes, disables, or demonetizes videos that contain allegedly infringing content.

For years, little was known about the scope of these copyright actions, but that changed in late 2021 when the streaming platform published its first-ever copyright transparency report .

This report and the subsequent updates have shown that roughly 99% of all copyright claims on YouTube are handled through the Content ID system . Since most claims are automated, without any human intervention, access to this powerful removal tool is restricted to a few thousand formally approved rightsholders.

2.5 Billion Claims

YouTube’s latest Transparency Report shows that the number of automated claims continues to rise. In 2025, the platform processed 2,502,941,368 Content ID claims, up 14% from 2.2 billion the year before.

Of the approved 7,626 rightsholders who currently have access to the system, 4,454 actively used it. These numbers are both slightly down from last year. YouTube doesn’t provide a specific reason, but notes that access can be revoked as part of regular evaluations.

“To keep the ecosystem safe, we regularly evaluate partners’ access to CID to ensure they demonstrate an ongoing need for scaled rights management. In some cases, these evaluations may result in removing a partner’s access to Content ID and matching them with a more appropriate copyright management tool,” the transparency report reads.

As clearly shown above, the number of rightsholders participating in the Content ID system pales in comparison to the 295,531 rightsholders who filed removal requests through the standard webform , or the 173,338 that used the automated Copyright Match Tool .

Nonetheless, Content ID’s 4,454 active rightsholders were responsible for 99.48% of all copyright actions on the video streaming platform. Compared to earlier years, the automated Content ID takedowns continues to increase, both relatively in percentages and in absolute numbers.

Millions of Disputed Claims

As with any takedown tool, uploaders and third-party rightsholders are not always in agreement. In fact, there are millions of Content ID disputes every year.

YouTube reports that of all Content ID claims, uploaders have disputed 12,840,608, or 0.51% of the total. That’s a relatively small percentage but still a rather large absolute number. For comparison, uploaders appealed 9.9% of all webform removals, which translates to little over 267,000 counter-notices.

In 2024, uploaders won 70% of disputes. In 2025 that figure dropped slightly to 67.42%. However, those who decided to challenge the rejection though YouTube’s process, won their appeal 75% of the time.

The flow chart on the right illustrates the full appeals process.

Not all disputes are resolved though YouTube’s internal Content ID process. If uploaders persist that their content was erroneously claimed, while rightsholders argue the opposite, YouTube will reinstate the video, at which point rightsholders have to take the matter to court.

In 2025, 10,698 claims reached this stage, but fewer than 1% of these resulted in a lawsuit, YouTube notes.

Outside the Content ID system, YouTube also flags abuse of its DMCA takedown webform as a problem. In 2025, more than 6% of all these removal requests were believed to be “a likely false assertion of copyright ownership” by YouTube’s review team.

“The attempted abuse rate through the webform was more than 10 times higher than the attempted abuse rate across all other copyright removal tools,” the transparency report notes.

A $12 Billion Revenue Machine

While YouTube’s Content ID can be a significant source of frustration for uploaders, it has become a substantial revenue stream for rightsholders. Instead of removing infringing content, rightsholders chose to monetize over 90% of all Content ID claims in 2025.

YouTube reports that cumulative ad revenue paid to rightsholders through Content ID has now exceeded $12 billion since the system launched. That figure includes data up to December 2024 and will likely be billions higher today.

It is clear that not being present on YouTube at all is no longer an economically wise decision. On the contrary, for some rightsholders a viral infringing upload is no longer a problem, but a revenue opportunity intstead.

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

Last month, the U.S. Trade Representative ( USTR ) issued its annual Special 301 Report, signaling which countries can make improvements on the IP enforcement front.

In the most recent report, the USTR applied the “Priority Foreign Country” status for the first time in thirteen years, calling out Vietnam for persistent failures to deter online piracy and counterfeiting.

In recent years Vietnamese authorities reportedly helped to shut down several pirate sites, including the massive Fmovies network, which served billions of visitors. However, the criminal prosecution of Fmovies resulted in suspended prison sentences, which lack a serious deterrent effect by U.S. standards. Meanwhile, many piracy operations continue to link back to the country.

Under the Trade Act of 1974, the Priority Foreign Country designation triggers a 30-day window for USTR to decide whether to open a formal investigation. Late last week, Ambassador Jamieson Greer formally made that call.

USTR Opens Investigation

The Section 301 investigation will examine whether Vietnam’s policies and practices related to copyright protection and enforcement are unreasonable or discriminatory, hindering U.S. commerce. Judging from the comments released by the USTR, it believes that Vietnam’s shortcomings are serious.

“While Vietnam has recently taken some steps toward addressing IP concerns that the United States has chronicled over many years in USTR’s Annual Special 301 Report, IP infringement in Vietnam continues to impair the competitive position of U.S. innovators and creators,” Ambassador Greer said.

“We need to see Vietnam resolve these long-standing concerns, including on a range of IP enforcement issues, in a manner that is sustained and that deters future IP infringements,” he adds.

With the announcement of the investigation, USTR also opened a consultation round, asking stakeholders to comment on their trade-related experiences with Vietnam. This includes the piracy challenges and concerns, which are highlighted as the primary concern in the federal register notice.

Piracy First

The notice mentions that Vietnam’s failure to provide effective enforcement against online piracy is the primary reason why Vietnam is designated as a priority foreign country. The USTR wants to see significant improvement on that front.

“The United States has repeatedly raised strong concerns about Vietnam’s role in online piracy worldwide,” the notice reads.

“Vietnam remains a significant source of online piracy and continues to host popular English-language copyright infringement sites and services that target a global audience. Some of these sites provide piracy services, including extensive libraries of pirated movies and TV shows.”

The USTR notice doesn’t mention any sites and services by name. However, its earlier Notorious Markets report flagged HiAnime, Myflixerz, and MegaCloud as key threats . Interestingly, these sites all went offline in the days and week before the USTR’s Special 301 Report came out.

Whether the operators of these sites are targeted in criminal investigations in unknown. However, USTR’s notice mentioned that pirate site operators in Vietnam have had it relatively easy in recent years.

There have been criminal prosecutions in high profile piracy cases, including the cases against the operators of BestBuyIPTV and Fmovies. However, these resulted in mild suspended sentences with relatively low fines. According to USTR, these lack a proper deterrent effect.

“Despite Vietnam having criminal laws that provide for substantial fines and years of incarceration for copyright infringement, the defendants in recent criminal prosecutions received suspended sentences and were only ordered to pay relatively low financial penalties,” USTR writes.

“The operators of these sites and services likely based themselves in Vietnam because Vietnam’s IP enforcement efforts have historically lacked the follow-through and substantial penalties needed to deter infringement.”

The problem runs deeper than lenient sentences alone. According to the federal register notice, rightsholders face informal pressure from Vietnamese enforcement authorities to file administrative complaints rather than pursue civil or criminal enforcement. These administrative proceedings carry no meaningful deterrent effect.

Tariffs are on the Table

The request for public comments asks stakeholders to weigh in on “what action, if any, should be taken, including tariff and non-tariff actions.” This means that different types of trade sanctions are now on the table.

The USTR must make its final determination within six months and right holders and other parties have a month to submit their comments.

Behind the scenes, USTR will also consult with the Vietnamese government to see if the concerns can be addressed before it makes a decision, in consultation with President Trump. If Vietnam engages, in order to avoid possible sanctions, we might see more enforcement actions taking place in the country.

In that sense, the recent disappearances of Myflixerz and MegaCloud , and the shutdown of HiAnime , may have been a primer for what’s to come.

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The Federal Register Notice is available here (pdf) . The USTR press release can be found here .

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

The Internet is full of cheap IPTV services that offer access to premium sports, films, and television content for a fraction of what legal services charge.

This has turned into a multi-million dollar business for several similar networks, which are typically more professional and organized than the ‘hobby’ pirate projects that emerged two decades ago.

The professionality of these services is matched by the severeness of the law enforcement response. The modern-day piracy networks, which are not easily threatened by a cease and desist notice, are now often targeted in international law enforcement operations. This includes KRATOS 2.

Operation KRATOS 2

The KRATOS 2 operation was coordinated by Bulgaria’s General Directorate for Combating Organised Crime ( GDBOP ), with operational support from Europol .

This wasn’t an isolated crackdown, but a months-long operation that ran from September 2025 to April 2026, Besides Bulgaria, it also involved Belgium, Croatia, France, Greece, Ireland, Italy, the Netherlands, Poland, Romania, Spain, the United Kingdom, and the United States.

The results, based on their sheer numbers, appear to be substantial. Press releases report that nine criminal organizations were dismantled, 29 people arrested, while another 86 suspects identified. In total, investigators carried out 148 house searches.

With 72 ongoing criminal investigations and 59 cases referred to judicial authorities, there may be further fallout in the future. However, while these numbers are significant, there is no concrete mention of any targets.

Reported Domains and Removed URLs

In the past, we have regularly reported on concrete actions, where domain names were seized, such as the Streameast and Fmovies crackdowns. However, the press release issued by Europol and others is more carefully worded.

There is no mention of domains that were seized or taken down. Instead, it mentions “169 reported domains”. Similarly, it mentioned that 27,332 URLs were removed, without disclosing where these URLs were removed from, and if these belonged to one or more domains.

The list of operational statistics adds that 722,961 infringing objects were identified since September last year. While that sounds impressive, we recently reported that Google removes nearly 10 million URLs from its index every day, following requests from the takedown outfit Link-Busters.

Private sector partners including ACE/MPA, LaLiga, UEFA, Friend MTS, beIN, and Irdeto, helped identify an additional 4,370 piracy-linked domains, 18,331 associated IP addresses, and 397,384 URLs that were flagged for suspension.

Again, these numbers are significant, but relatively modest compared to traditional DMCA removal campaigns.

No Names?

Interestingly, the press release does not mention any names either. There are no platforms mentioned, no operator names identified, and no seized domain names cited. This stands in sharp contrast to the exact figured that are reported on the broader operation.

It is possible that the authorities don’t want to interfere with ongoing investigations, but some more context on the targets and what was actually achieved in terms of deterrence, would be helpful.

With the information at hand, it is essentially impossible for journalists to independently verify the operation’s impact. Whether the 27,332 “removed” URLs represent meaningful anti-piracy disruption, or whether these links were immediately replaced is unknown.

Many news outlets repeat the headline figures, without giving any context or asking any questions. While that may be what’s intended by the authorities, it’s not particularly helpful from a news providing perspective.

Bulgaria’s Removal from the U.S. Piracy Watch List

The KRATOS 2 operation follows the original operation, conducted during the summer of 2024. That action targeted a piracy network that catered to 22 million users. It resulted in 11 arrests, the seizure of 29 servers and 270 IPTV devices, and the takedown of 100 domains.

TorrentFreak covered that operation under its Italian name, Operation Takendown . No piracy platform name was disclosed in that case either but Bulgaria also had a leading role there.

Most Bulgarian coverage on KRATOS 2 cited the name figures and details that were covered by the Europol press release. However, they also add a specific note that went unmentioned by the official communication channels.

A few weeks ago, the United States Representative ( USTR ) removed Bulgaria from its Special 301 Piracy Watch List due to “ significant enforcement actions ” and “criminal prosecutions.” This included a torrent tracker crackdown, but the KRATOS operations likely played a key role as well.

According to Europol, KRATOS 2 as part of an ongoing enforcement campaign so it’s possible that a third phase will follow. Whether that will include names in addition to numbers, has yet to be seen.

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

Link-Busters is the preferred anti-piracy partner for many of the world’s largest book publishers, including Penguin Random House and HarperCollins.

The Dutch company is also the most active DMCA sender at Google by a wide margin, flagging billions of ‘pirate’ URLs in the search engine, mostly from shadow libraries.

6.5 Billion and Plateauing

Google recently updated its search transparency report, showing that Link-Busters now accounts for more than 6.5 billion delisting requests. This is more than a third of the nearly 18 billion requests Google received in total.

The 6.5 billion is also more than four times the volume of the next-largest reporting organization, Rivendell, which sits just under 1.5 billion. MG Premium, the enforcement arm of Pornhub parent Aylo, follows with roughly 1.26 billion removal requests.

These mind-boggling numbers are all the more impressive when you realize that the company only started ramping up its takedown efforts less than three years ago. In record time, its output dwarfed that of all competitors. However, its takedown activity no longer appears to be growing.

Looking at Link-Busters’ takedown activity shows a near-vertical rise through 2023 and into 2024, which flattened into a plateau in the 60 to 70 million weekly range about a year ago. The volume is enormous, but it is no longer growing.

The shape of the data suggests a hard ceiling rather than a coincidental drop in infringing material to report. To find out what is keeping these URL reports on a plateau, we reached out to Link-Busters, but the company did not respond to a request for comment.

“The Quantity They Need”

TorrentFreak asked Google directly whether it enforces a daily cap, and if so, why. A spokesperson for the search engine did not confirm or deny the existence of a hard cap. Instead, they pointed out that trusted rightsholders get what they need.

“We offer a Trusted Content Removal Program (TCRP) that provides a path for bulk submissions from trusted partners, and work to ensure the accuracy of these submissions and that these partners can submit the quantity they need,” a Google spokesperson said.

The response did not directly answer our question. It is, however, more reserved than the response we received in 2013, when Google said there was “no limit on the number of DMCA notices” rightsholders may send in.

At the time, Google was accused of enforcing a cap of 10,000 URLs per day per rightsholder, which anti-piracy group BREIN was trying to raise to 40,000 . In that context, a ceiling of roughly 10 million reported URLs per day for a single reporter would be a 1,000-fold increase.

3.5 Billion Reported URLs a Year….

At the current rate, Link-Busters is reporting roughly 3.5 billion URLs per year. The company has a good standing when it comes to the accuracy of its notices, with less than a percent being duplicates or other errors. That’s well below the average error rate.

Finally, it should be noted that nearly 8% of the reported URLs were not indexed by Google, yet. Google removed these URLs proactively to accommodate rightsholders.

Whether the 70 million weekly figure is a deliberate limit, a technical bottleneck, or simply the point at which Link-Busters’ own crawling capacity tops out, remains a mystery for now. What is clear is that the line was drawn nearly a year ago and appears to be holding.

Ceiling or not, Link-Busters remains comfortably the largest DMCA sender Google has ever seen. No other company comes even close to hitting the same 70 million ceiling.

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