YggTorrent, the largest francophone torrent community, is no longer available as a public site. After going private, only registered users can access the site now. The change comes just a few weeks after new blocking measures were put in place in France. By going private and processing takedown notices, the site's operators hope to shake off their copyright troubles, at least as far as that's possible.
Most of the larger pirate sites serve a global audience, but many countries have their local favorites too. In France, that’s YggTorrent, Ygg for short.
The torrent site is not a typical torrent indexer. Ygg sees itself as a community instead, one with a dedicated tracker, something that’s quite rare these days. The site was founded in 2017, to fill the gap left behind when T411 shut down.
With millions of monthly visits, the site also made it onto the radar of rightsholders. Hollywood’s MPA recently listed YggTorrent in its annual overview of the most “not...
Japan-based publisher Shueisha is maintaining the pressure on sites distributing vast quantities of pirated manga content. A DMCA subpoena obtained at a United States court reveals around two dozen targets, some with relatively low traffic but many enjoying millions of visits per month. One stand out platform is currently ranked the 14th most popular site in Vietnam, period.
Any content that can be digitized is immediately vulnerable to being pirated. The speed and scale at which that happens is ultimately governed by two key factors; how easily the content can be obtained, copied, and distributed, and how popular the content is with consumers.
In this respect, Japanese comics, better known as manga, effortlessly earn top marks across the board. That has led to unprecedented levels of piracy on what appears to be a near perfect consumer product, one for which ongoing demand is relentless.
Based in Japan, the leading manga publishers are facing a m...
Several major music labels, including Capitol, Sony, and UMG, sued the Internet Archive last year over its 'Great 78' phonograph archiving project. With hundreds of millions of dollars in potential damages at stake, IA filed a motion to dismiss, hoping to end the matter swiftly. The court, however, was not convinced.
The non-profit Internet Archive (IA) aims to preserve history in a digital format for generations to come.
The organization literally archives key parts of the Internet, copying older versions of websites to preserve them for future generations. This information becomes more and more valuable as time passes by.
IA’s archiving work is not limited to websites either; it also helps to permanently archive video, software, games, and music. This includes efforts to digitally capture the unique sound of old gramophone music recordings, as its physical carriers are subject to d...
Italian tech website Giardiniblog.it usually receives around a million visits per month. As of today, the 18-year-old site appears to have lost around 36% of its traffic after being permanently blocked by ISPs for publishing site-blocking workarounds. Following a legal appeal, AGCOM nullified its own blocking order, but the basis for blocking the site in the first place has mission creep written all over it.
The Piracy Shield blocking controversy on the boil since February has shown that overblocking in Italy either doesn’t exist, is someone else’s fault, or was too brief to be considered important.
To that background, news this week that Italian telecoms regulator AGCOM has nullified one of its own piracy blocking orders is somewhat unexpected. The finer details reveal that the background to the original blocking order gives cause for concern for entirely different reasons than those that caused the retraction.
Tech Site Unblocked After Appeal to Regional CourtGiardi...
According to a new survey published by the Australian government, when internet users try to access any of the pirate sites blocked by their ISPs, six in every ten instantly give up looking for pirated content. Fifteen percent seek out content on legal platforms and a persistent one-in-ten dig in and attempt to bypass the blockade.
As reported yesterday, the Australian government has just released the 2023 edition of its Consumer Survey on Online Copyright Infringement.
The survey found that 41% of respondents consumed at least one item of pirated content (TV, movies, music, games, or live sports) from an illegal source in 2023, up from the 39% reported in the previous year.
When compared to how many citizens resorted to pirate sources in 2015, the figures for 2023 show improvement almost right across the board. That’s to be expected when considering how desperate many Australians were for new cont...
Internet provider Frontier Communications must share the personal details of subscribers with movie and music companies, as part of two ongoing piracy liability lawsuits. The ISP previously redacted the sensitive information, citing privacy concerns, but the court finds that, with proper safeguards, the interests of copyright holders weigh stronger.
In recent years, music and movie companies have filed several lawsuits against U.S. Internet providers, for failing to take action against pirating subscribers.
One of the main allegations is that ISPs fail to terminate the accounts of repeat infringers in ‘appropriate circumstances’, as the DMCA requires.
These lawsuits have resulted in multi-million dollar judgments against Cox and Grande. Meanwhile, more companies are at risk too, including Frontier Communications, which emerged from bankruptcy three years ago.
Frontier vs. Movie and Music CompaniesFrontier is...
Since 2015, the Australian government has commissioned research to understand the level of online infringement and how that changes over time. The latest survey covering 2023 shows overall online content consumption, whether from legal or illegal sources, reached 78% of the population in 2023, up 6% on the previous year. Of those surveyed, however, 41% consumed content from illegal sources in 2023, up from 39% in the previous year.
The Australian government has released the 2023 edition of its Consumer Survey on Online Copyright Infringement.
Commissioned by the Attorney-General’s Department, the research aims to better understand internet users’ consumption habits, across five key content types – Television, Movies/Film, Music, Video Games, and Live Sport – and track changes in behavior over time.
The 2023 survey was conducted online from June 27 to July 15 last year, and sought responses from Australian internet users (aged 12+) regarding their online content consumption habits over th...
Copyright holders are repeatedly flagging IMDb URLs for alleged copyright infringement. Historically, these DMCA notices were mostly sent in error, flagging legitimate IMDb listings. More recently, however, the takedowns are being triggered by a persistent 'piracy' spam problem that tricks both rightsholders and opportunistic pirates alike.
Founded in 1990, the Internet Movie Database, commonly known as IMDb, is one of the oldest online repositories.
The service predates the World Wide Web and was initially launched as the Usenet group “rec.arts.movies”. Three years later, it moved to the web in the form of the now widely known IMDb.com.
Ever since, the site has served multiple generations of video fans. Today, it is owned by Amazon and despite the many alternatives that currently exist, millions of people continue to use it regularly.
IMDB’s Piracy ProblemAs an information resource, I...
Google's lawsuit against two men who it accuses of 'weaponizing' DMCA takedown notices is entering its final stage. The defendants allegedly targeted tens of thousands of URLs with fraudulent notices. Since the defendants failed to respond, Google now requests a default judgment at a California federal court. The company doesn't seek any money, but wants to put an end to the abusive and fraudulent actions.
The DMCA takedown process gives copyright holders the option to remove infringing content from the web.
It’s a powerful, widely-used tool that takes millions of URLs and links offline every day. This often happens for a good reason, but some takedown efforts are questionable or even outright abusive.
Google Sues DMCA ScammersGoogle is no stranger to DMCA abuse. The company has processed more than 8 billion takedown requests over the years and while most notices are legitimate, scammers regularly try to game the process to gain an advantage.
Last November, the searc...
To avoid spending decades in a U.S. prison, last summer Megaupload coders Mathias Ortmann and Bram van der Kolk received sentences of 2.5 years in New Zealand as part of a plea deal. Kim Dotcom says the men are already free after providing "false confessions" for use against him. After eight years, the criminal case against him in the U.S. showed action recently, with secret orders handed down by the court. Dotcom predicts a new raid and revocation of his bail.
During a telephone call with Kim Dotcom, following the unprecedented raids that dismantled his Megaupload file-hosting empire in 2012, the tech entrepreneur insisted that this was no ordinary case.
It wasn’t just a massively scaled-up version of piracy raids we’d reported on dozens of times before either.
This prosecution had high-level politics not just at its core, but running so pervasively throughout that every twisted fiber had become inseparable from the corrupt corridors of power, Dotcom said. From the political goals of Joe Biden and the Democrats, to the i...