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

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

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

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

Court Upholds DNS Blocking

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Evolving Blocklist with a 90-minute Clock

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

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

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

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

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

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

OpenDNS Exit Looms

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

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

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

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

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

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

—

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

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

Earlier this year, a wave of hypervisor bypasses allowed pirates to ‘crack’ Denuvo-protected games on the day of release.

However, those bypasses weren’t Denuvo’s only headache. For those who preferred a less invasive approach, an anonymous cracker going by the name “ voices38 ” continued to release many old-school cracks that patch Denuvo’s checks directly.

These traditional cracks don’t require users to disable Windows security features, which makes them quite popular. Catering to this demand, voices38’s output accelerated this summer, resulting in five Denuvo releases on a single day earlier this month. This didn’t go unnoticed at the Denuvo headquarters.

Denuvo Takes ‘voices38’ to Court

On Monday, Denuvo GmbH took legal action. In a complaint obtained by TorrentFreak, filed at the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, the Austrian company accuses voices38 of bypassing its Anti-Tamper technology on 26 games. This is a violation of the DMCA’s anti-circumvention provision, it argues.

Denuvo explains that the person using the ‘voices38’ handle has targeted the protection measures of a wide range of titles. This includes older titles such as FIFA 20 and PES 2020, as well as recent blockbusters including Hogwarts Legacy, Black Myth: Wukong, Resident Evil Requiem and Doom: The Dark Ages.

“Defendant is a computer hacker who is focused on reverse engineering, hacking, or ‘cracking’ video games employing Denuvo’s Anti-Tamper product,” Denuvo writes in the complaint, while mentioning that Reddit is one of their release channels.

“Defendant has bypassed DRM restrictions in copyrighted works, removing protections that allow copyright owners to restrict who may access their works, and allowing for pirated versions of those copyrighted works,” it adds.

Circumvention, Not Copyright Infringement

Denuvo doesn’t actually own the copyrights to any of these games. This means that Denuvo can’t sue “voices38” for traditional copyright infringement, as the game companies could.

Instead, Denuvo’s complaint relies on the anti-circumvention provisions of the DMCA. Under this section of US copyright law, it is prohibited to bypass a digital lock that controls access to a copyrighted work, or to distribute tools and instructions that help others to bypass copyright protections.

Importantly, the DMCA allows anyone that’s harmed by these bypasses to file a lawsuit. Denuvo argues that, since its entire business revolves around selling tamper protection to game companies including EA, Ubisoft, Capcom, and Sony, the cracks are directly hurting its business.

As far as we know, this is the first time Denuvo has sued a cracker in a U.S. court. While the lawsuit mentions game titles and their respective owners, none of the rightsholders are part of the lawsuit.

Reddit User, Steam Accounts and a Discord ID

The obvious problem is that nobody knows who voices38 is. The complaint names the defendant as “an unknown individual or entity,” together with ten unnamed Doe defendants.

Denuvo has done some homework, though. The filing lists a Discord user ID, a Reddit account and seven Steam profiles that it believes are linked to the cracker.

Denuvo hopes the information linked to these accounts will eventually unmask the cracker. Games have to be bought before they can be cracked, for example, and Steam purchases come with payment details.

With a case on file, Denuvo can ask the court for permission to subpoena Valve, Reddit and Discord for the associated account details. There’s no discovery request in the docket yet, but that will likely follow soon.

The complaint includes two DMCA anti-circumvention claims and requests damages, as well as an injunction that would bar voices38 from circumventing Denuvo’s Anti-Tamper protection in any games, including future ones that have yet to be created.

The ‘future’ part will be needed, as the list of 26 games was already outdated when the complaint was filed. In recent weeks, ‘voices38’ has released several new cracks, including Persona 3 Reload and Star Wars Outlaws.

What’s Next

Whether Denuvo will be able to identify ‘voices38’ has yet to be seen. Typically, these types of crackers take their precautions. But even if the subpoenas don’t deliver, the lawsuit is not necessarily pointless.

If Denuvo obtains a default judgment with an injunction, it will be easier to have accounts and download links removed.

A ruling in Denuvo’s favor could act as a deterrent, as confirmation that Denuvo can sue crackers directly may spook some people involved.

For now, the case is in its early stages. Time will tell what information Denuvo will request from Reddit, Discord and other third parties, and whether ‘voices38’ will make an appearance in court.

—

A copy of Denuvo’s complaint against voices38, filed at the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, obtained by TorrentFreak, is available here (pdf) .

The 26 games listed in the complaint, with the publisher named by Denuvo:

1. Need for Speed Heat (Electronic Arts)
2. EA Sports FIFA 20 (Electronic Arts)
3. Star Wars: Squadrons (Electronic Arts)
4. Need for Speed: Hot Pursuit Remastered (Electronic Arts)
5. EA Sports FIFA 21 (Electronic Arts)
6. Hi-Fi Rush (Bethesda)
7. F1 2021 (Electronic Arts)
8. Dead Space Remastered (Electronic Arts)
9. Doom: The Dark Ages (Bethesda)
10. Mafia: The Old Country (2K Games)
11. LEGO Batman: Legacy of the Dark Knight (WB Games)
12. Hogwarts Legacy (WB Games)
13. Total War: Three Kingdoms (SEGA)
14. Starlink: Battle for Atlas (Ubisoft)
15. Shining Resonance Refrain (SEGA)
16. PES 2020 (Konami)
17. Shin Megami Tensei III Nocturne HD Remaster (SEGA)
18. Scott Pilgrim vs. The World (Ubisoft)
19. Anno 1800 (Ubisoft)
20. Sonic Frontiers (SEGA)
21. Assassin’s Creed Mirage (Ubisoft)
22. Pragmata (Capcom)
23. Resident Evil Requiem (Capcom)
24. Black Myth Wukong (Game Science)
25. Stellar Blade (Sony)
26. 007 First Light (IO Interactive)

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

Blocking foreign pirate sites at the ISP level has been off the table in the United States since the SOPA bill was shelved in 2012.

That changed in January last year, when Rep. Zoe Lofgren introduced the Foreign Anti-Digital Piracy Act (FADPA).

This proposal set the blocking wheels in motion and a last summer, Senators launched the Block BEARD draft. Meanwhile, Rep. Darrell Issa , who chairs the House IP subcommittee, continued working on a draft of his own blocking bill, the American Copyright Protection Act (ACPA).

Issa’s bill was being discussed among stakeholders but was not formally introduced in the U.S. House of Representatives, until now .

Congressional records show that Issa introduced H.R. 10364, describing it as a bill “to establish procedures for blocking access to foreign online locations engaged in copyright piracy, and for other purposes.” There is no name listed, but Issa previously used the “American Copyright Protection Act” title.

A Site Blocking Bill Without Text

At the time of writing, the text is not online yet. Congress.gov notes that the Government Publishing Office has not yet received it, and Issa’s office has not issued a press release. TorrentFreak contacted Issa’s office for a comment and a copy of the text, but we didn’t immediately hear back.

That leaves the 2025 discussion draft, of which we had previously reviewed a copy , as the best indication of what the bill might be. That blocking framework would let copyright holders obtain court orders, requiring both ISPs and DNS resolvers to block foreign pirate sites.

Unlike the other blocking proposals, Issa’s early draft stipulated that the Judicial Conference would maintain a roster of designated judges to hear all blocking cases, while the Copyright Office would publish a list of active orders.

Issa’s proposal also uniquely targeted overblocking. The draft included a provision stating that a third party whose site was wrongly blocked as the result of a rightsholder’s error could claim up to $250,000 in compensation.

Whether any of these provisions have made it into the recently introduced bill is unknown, we will update this article when the text becomes available.

Competing Site Blocking Bills

The bill doesn’t come as a surprise. On June 30, Issa told The Capitol Forum that his intention was “to introduce it this week before we go on this district work period.” That never happened, however.

Notably, Issa is retiring at the end of this term, which leaves a few months to get anything through the House. While that is not impossible, the bill does face some competition on the Hill.

There are currently three separate site blocking efforts in the US. Earlier this year, TorrentFreak reported that Senator Thom Tillis and Rep. Lofgren were merging FADPA and Block BEARD into a single bicameral bill covering both ISPs and large DNS resolvers.

Lofgren later confirmed she was negotiating a “ four corners agreement ” with Issa and Senators Blackburn, Coons, Schiff and Tillis.

A source previously described the two efforts as separate, uncoordinated tracks. Whether that changed since is unknown. If ACPA is the House half of a consensus deal, Lofgren’s name should appear among the cosponsors. If not, the House has two blocking bills, with the Senate version as the third.

Opposition

Interestingly, opposition already responded to the bill’s introduction before the text is published online. Specifically, Public Knowledge warns that the bill turns broadband providers into copyright police.

“More importantly, applying blocking orders to global DNS resolvers causes global blocks. This means that one court can cut off access to a website globally, based on a single individual’s filing and an expedited procedure,” says Meredith Rose, Senior Policy Counsel at Public Knowledge.

“Small businesses and nonprofits face the greatest risks for site blocking but have the fewest protections. In Europe, we’ve seen overblocking bring down digital infrastructure for hotels, car mechanics, retail shops, telehealth programs, and even a nunnery.”

Rightsholders have been quieter. The MPA, which gave Issa its Industry Champion Award last year , had not issued a statement when this article was published. We asked the group for a comment but it did not immediately reply.

—

Breaking story, updates may follow.

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

Last month, we reported that a copyright lawsuit targeting PassThePopcorn, BroadcasTheNet, HDBits, and three other private trackers may have been filed by an impostor.

Defense attorneys had tracked down the Canadian filmmaker whose name appeared on the complaint, who told the court under oath that he had nothing to do with the case.

The plaintiff responded by claiming to be a different Matthew Schneider , a UK filmmaker who had independently made three films with exactly the same titles as his Canadian namesake. This matter was scheduled to be discussed in an in-person hearing at the Illinois federal court last Thursday, but at the eleventh hour the plaintiff filed a notice of voluntary dismissal.

Dismissed, But Not Over

Responding to the notice, Judge Andrea R. Wood acknowledged the dismissal but made clear that the court retained jurisdiction over the pending motion for a rule to show cause. This means that, while the copyright claims against the trackers are dismissed, the alleged impostor still faces possible sanctions.

The hearing was converted to a telephone conference so that no one had to travel to Chicago. At the hearing, the person claiming to be the UK Matthew Schneider confirmed that he no longer wished to pursue the copyright claims.

That does not close the books on this case, as defense Attorney Erin Russell , representing Doe 1, confirmed that they were still seeking sanctions.

However, Russell flagged a practical problem related to the earlier “impostor” allegations. Any sanctions award would be uncollectible unless the court first establishes who the plaintiff actually is. That would also ensure that a judgment isn’t entered against the wrong person.

When asked by the judge to confirm his identity, the plaintiff confirmed that Matthew Schneider is his legal name and that he lives in London. The defense, in turn, said that their investigation pointed in another direction.

A Banned User With a Grudge?

If the plaintiff is indeed an impostor, the new question is why they would file a lawsuit against several prominent private trackers? Judge Wood asked defense counsel whether they had any ideas, calling it an odd situation.

This prompted Russell to propose a potential motive, which surfaced after investigating the matter, presumably with cooperation from a tracker operator. According to her, the person behind the email address that filed the lawsuit was no stranger to the private trackers.

Russell told the court it appeared likely that this person was caught selling or trading invites for these trackers. The person in question was allegedly blacklisted as a result and, in Russell’s words, “bears ill will” over it, which would make the lawsuit an act of revenge.

These allegations are presented as a theory, with no supporting evidence being filed yet, but it would explain the rather odd circumstances and bizarre twists and turns the case has seen so far.

More Evidence Needed

The plaintiff, however, maintains that he’s a UK filmmaker. Previously, he submitted a page with film metadata, but he promised to submit a copy of his own version of “Do Us Part” this week, when Judge Wood asked him at the hearing.

Judge Wood also noted that the plaintiff had not submitted a sworn affidavit with his response to the sanctions motion. Responding to this, the plaintiff offered to provide one.

Looking further ahead, Judge Wood said she expects a hearing at which the two Canadian declarants, including the ‘other’ Matthew Schneider, would testify by video. That video hearing would also require the plaintiff to appear on camera. The next status hearing is set for October 2.

For now, the private tracker operators can be relieved that the copyright claims against them are gone. However, the question of who filed this case is not resolved yet.

—

The court’s order on the voluntary dismissal is available here (pdf) . TorrentFreak attended the hearing via telephone and the coverage is based on our notes.

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

Over the past two years, rightsholders of all kinds have filed lawsuits against companies that develop AI models.

Meta is among a long list of companies now being sued for this allegedly infringing activity. This includes a class action lawsuit filed by authors including Richard Kadrey and Sarah Silverman, which accused Meta of training its Llama models on pirated books, and of sharing those books with other BitTorrent users in the process.

Last summer, Judge Vince Chhabria ruled that the AI training itself was fair use , leaving the BitTorrent distribution claims as the last live part of the case. Earlier this year, Meta added a new line of defense to those claims. In a supplemental interrogatory response, the company argued that any uploading of pirated books during its torrent downloads was “part-and-parcel” of a fair use purpose.

Meta stated that BitTorrent was “a more efficient and reliable means of obtaining the datasets,” and in the case of Anna’s Archive the only way to get them in bulk. Since torrent users upload to each other by design, any sharing was simply “an inherent characteristic of the BitTorrent protocol.”

Both of Meta’s torrenting claims are now being tested in three related lawsuits , filed by Chicken Soup for the Soul, academic publisher Cognella, and John Carreyrou’s Cambronne Inc. These three cases are all assigned to Judge Chhabria and target the same shadow library torrenting activity.

Ask Torrenting AI Rivals

Instead of waiting for Meta to document the technical details of its torrent client setup, the publishers went to the two AI rivals that could potentially disprove the seeding requirement.

In August, they subpoenaed OpenAI and Anthropic for the identity, versions and configurations of every torrent client the companies have used since 2019. This specifically includes any records of efforts to prevent seeding.

In similar lawsuits, both companies have admitted that they used books from shadow libraries. If they configured a torrent client not to upload, Meta’s “necessity” argument would be in trouble.

“If OpenAI torrented but configured its clients to suppress uploading, then the redistribution Meta calls an ‘inherent characteristic’ of the protocol was a setting Meta declined to change,” the publishers told the court.

That argument builds on an earlier finding in the legal battle, which revealed that a Meta engineer wrote a script to prevent seeding, but apparently not leeching.

OpenAI and Anthropic Won’t Talk

Instead of insisting on all requested documents, the publishers also offered an alternative. If OpenAI or Anthropic would simply explain how they acquired the shadow-library data and whether they tried to prevent uploading, the torrent document demands would be dropped.

The AI companies didn’t take the offer, however, and they pushed back instead. Both companies informed the court that examining the technical features of the relevant torrent client directly would be better, adding that their own practices say nothing about Meta’s.

“Clients are not interchangeable, they differ in their default upload settings, in whether those defaults can be reconfigured, and in their capacity to suppress uploading during and after a download,” Anthropic’s lawyers wrote.

“What Anthropic’s client allowed shows nothing about what Meta’s did.”

OpenAI made the same point, noting that there is no evidence that it used the same torrent clients or “built ‘comparable corpora’ to Meta.”

Judge Sides With AI Rivals

In a new order released last week, Magistrate Judge Thomas Hixson sided with the two AI companies. Without deciding on Meta’s seeding arguments, the court concluded that the torrent logs of AI rivals are not the best place to gather evidence.

“To the extent Meta’s fair use defense hinges on the assertion that its use of BitTorrent was the only way BitTorrent can be used, that assertion can be tested by examining the BitTorrent client itself,” Judge Hixson writes.

Asking OpenAI or Anthropic for their logs says little about Meta’s technical setup or the technical capabilities of torrent clients.

“Any user of a torrent client would be relevant in that sense. Why can’t Plaintiffs’ expert use the torrent clients to show how torrent clients can be used?” the order adds.

Similarly, the claim that shadow library data could only be downloaded in bulk through torrents, would be something the publishers can check with the libraries directly, instead of trying to get that information through other AI companies.

Meta’s Own Server Data

In these three cases, the court decided that getting data from AI rivals is off limits. However, the same doesn’t apply to data from Meta’s own servers.

On September 11, Judge Hixson granted a motion in the related class action case filed by Kadrey and other authors. This order covers the command history files for every server Meta used to torrent, including its virtual machines and AWS instances.

Command histories are the logs a server keeps of every command an operator types. For a torrenting machine, that presumably includes how the torrent client was installed and any changes made to its upload settings.

The order goes back to early 2025, when Meta admitted that it had held back relevant documents until after the discovery deadline had passed. To make up for that, Judge Chhabria gave the authors extra discovery, including records showing how Meta’s torrent clients were set up and used.

Meta argued that the log files it had already handed over were enough. Judge Hixson disagreed, however, ordering Meta to hand over the command histories as well.

The authors hope these command histories will also reveal exactly which copyrighted works Meta torrented. Whether the data will show any of that has yet to be seen.

For now, whether Meta could have downloaded the books without seeding is a question for the plaintiffs’ experts, who will have Meta’s own server records to work with. Their opening reports in the Meta cases are due later this month.

—

A copy of Judge Hixson’s order on the OpenAI and Anthropic subpoenas is available here (pdf) . The joint letter briefs can be found here (pdf) and here (pdf) . The command history order in Kadrey v. Meta is available here (pdf) .

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

For many years, Vietnamese football fans who wanted a free Premier League stream with local commentary knew exactly where to go.

‘Xoi Lac TV’ and its sister sites offered pirated streams featuring all major leagues, switching to new domains each time a blocking order caught up with the last one.

For the operators involved, these free streams became serious business. Betting banners were shown with every match and generated substantial revenue. That lucrative business model also drew Vietnam’s cybercrime police, who raided the operation in February and charged 30 people a month later.

However, that was only the opening chapter in a story that carries international weight today. Last week, police in Hung Yen province closed their investigation and asked prosecutors to charge 74 people.

Massive Piracy Operation with its Own Commentators

The investigation’s conclusion, as reported by Dan Tri and VnExpress , describes two linked piracy operations.

The first pirate site, ’90 Phut’, was founded in late 2018. Investigators say Hanoi technology entrepreneur Pham Nguyen Dung put up the money, programmer Nguyen Cong Dinh wrote the code, and the two split the profits.

When the operation was shut down in February, it ran XoilacTV, 90PhutTV, VeboTV, ThapcamTV, BanhkhucTV and CakeoTV, while Dinh also ran the ‘Cakhia’ network with another defendant.

The 74 suspects are allegedly part of the operation’s staff. This includes more than 30 Vietnamese commentators who were paid 200,000 to 500,000 dong per match, roughly $8 to $20. The other defendants managed servers, streams and the financial side.

The commentary was the brand, and its best-known voices used names such as ‘Batman’ and ‘Scarecrow’. ‘Batman’, it turned out, was Dinh himself, who investigators say made more than 12 billion dong, roughly $470,000, from the operation.

The investigation also found that the sites streamed 1,529 matches without permission, infringing the rights of the Premier League and local broadcasters, while generating revenue from betting brands including 8XBET, LU88, Man88 and HBET.

Police estimate that these ads brought in more than 130 billion dong, roughly $5 million, between April 2025 and January 2026. Rightsholders, meanwhile, claim losses that are much higher.

Vietnam’s pay TV service K+ preliminarily estimates its losses at more than $83 million, and the Premier League, which licenses its rights to K+ for Vietnam, at more than $4.6 million. The figures have yet to be confirmed at an eventual trial.

Gambling Charges Carry the Weight

The 74 defendants face a variety of charges, including copyright infringement, organizing gambling, gambling, and distributing obscene material. Fifty-one , including Dung and Dinh, are recommended for prosecution on both the copyright and organizing gambling counts.

Whe sites are known for piracy, but the gambling charges carry more weight. Vietnam’s Penal Code caps copyright infringement at three years in prison, no matter how profitable it is. Meanwhile, organizing gambling as a professional operation carries up to ten years in prison.

This means that the betting ads, which are illegal in Vietnam, could make up the bulk of the sentences. For now, however, nothing is final yet.

In Vietnam, police close an investigation with a written conclusion and a proposal to prosecute, which is the stage this case is at now. The prosecution now has up to 30 days to indict, send the file back for more work, or drop the case.

Thanks From London, Pressure From Washington

The ‘Xoi Lac’ crackdown has not gone unnoticed outside of the country’s borders. In May, Vietnam’s Ministry of Public Security announced that the British Embassy in Hanoi had sent a letter thanking it for the takedown. According to the ministry, the letter praised the enforcement effort that protected copyright holders.

Washington was not immediately convinced. At the end of April, the U.S. Trade Representative designated Vietnam a ‘Priority Foreign Country’ over its failure to tackle online piracy, the first country to receive that label in thirteen years.

A month later, USTR opened a formal Section 301 investigation into Vietnam’s intellectual property enforcement, a process that can end in widely feared tariffs. USTR said that Vietnam has taken some steps, but added that infringement “continues to impair the competitive position of U.S. innovators and creators.”

While the original Xoi Lac raids came weeks before the USTR’s decision, Vietnam is now using it as a defense, mentioning it in tandem with the takedowns of Rophim and Y2Mate in its July response to the investigation, asking to be taken off the priority list.

Vietnam’s response also cited the HiAnime case . The Ministry of Public Security only announced criminal proceedings against seven HiAnime suspects on July 2, the same day Vietnam filed its rebuttal in Washington.

Whether the 74-defendant recommendation is in any way influenced by the international pressure is unknown. It is now up to the prosecutor to decide what steps to take next. Meanwhile, a search for ‘xoi lac’ and its related brands still returns a long list of copycats, whose operators are unknown.

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

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.

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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.

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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.

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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.