Covers piracy in all its forms, from the high seas to the download folder, and insists the two beats have more in common than either will admit. Has sailed in all weathers. Has pirated nothing, on the record.
The Piracy desk →Our correspondents are fictional. The facts are not. Meet the rest of the masthead.
In a rebuttal to the US Trade Representative's notorious markets review, Meta described an AI tool that predicts unauthorised broadcasts and takes them down in real time. It published no figures.
MBIE offered the National Business Review $68,481.45 for 1,371 shared articles. An Official Information Act response put the count at 8,221 unlicensed recipient-months, which at the same rate is $410,638.95.
A peer-reviewed study of Z-Library credits the news site TorrentFreak with an article it never published. The authors disclose that they used AI tools.
An internet infrastructure coalition has published a report arguing against making neutral services enforce copyright. One of the bills it examines sets a user threshold.
A Paris court set a penalty of 1,000 euros a day after the Swiss resolver blocked none of the domains in a beIN Sports order. It leaves the country on 24 November.
The International Maritime Bureau logged 51 incidents in the first nine months of 2026, against 116 a year earlier. The Singapore Strait fell from 73 to 13.
Meta told a publisher it could not identify anyone who formally approved acquiring the shadow library datasets, describing the decisions as team consensus. The judge has ordered it to name everyone in the team.
Four justices took no part in BMG v. Vetter, leaving five and no quorum. A rarely used statute then affirms the judgment below as though the court had split down the middle.
A Florida judge refused to transfer a pirate streaming site's domains on the grounds that an injunction must be narrowly tailored. The remedy she chose instead is page by page.
The deputy minister also asked for reports on what became of his earlier directives. The book fair that heard him is in its thirty-third year.
beIN Sports asked for 10,000 euros a day for every domain still reachable. Two rulings found the companies had complied at least in part, and that the penalty would not be proportionate.
The RIAA has filed its annual notorious markets submission to the US Trade Representative, naming a shadow library and an AI voice-cloning service. Both numbers appear in the same round of filings.
Thirteen publishers have asked a New York court for a default judgment against WeLib. The sum is identical to the one awarded against Anna's Archive, whose brief parts of this one reproduce.
The Motion Picture Association's annual submission to the US Trade Representative names AnimeFLV and Cineby among its enforcement successes. Both now have copycats.
The Entertainment Software Association's submission to the US Trade Representative counts 15,484,145 swarm users and multiplies.
TorrentClaw's TrueSpec feature joins swarms and inspects what is actually inside a torrent. Fewer than 0.2 per cent were deceptive. Rather more came with subtitles nobody had mentioned.
A Madrid court approved measures against the streaming portal Series.ly covering search engines, internet providers, Cloudflare and any future domain name. The .ly address went dark, then came back as a history page.
The ReCAAP Information Sharing Centre counted 50 incidents from January to September, against 120 a year earlier. Twenty-nine of them were Category 4.
The notice of inquiry opened on 7 October. The royalty unit it sets out to defend is defined without reference to anybody hearing the song.
The Motion Picture Association and Canal+ have reported MovieBox to the European Commission for its 2027 Counterfeit and Piracy Watch List. The Commission says a listing is not a finding of wrongdoing.
A Roblox games developer and a French agency are fighting over an AI-generated meme character. US copyright protects human authorship, and the court record states exactly how much human there was.
beIN Sports has asked the Paris court for 10,000 euros per domain per day across 58 domains. Quad9 says it has no lawful way to tell which of its users are in France.
A 14-page submission names NordVPN, ProtonVPN, ExpressVPN and Surfshark. The complaint is not what the services do; it is that they say so.
The American Copyright Protection Act and the DEFEND IP Act both let federal courts order blocks on foreign pirate sites. They part company over VPNs, subscriber counts and how much lawful use a website is allowed.
India's Supreme Court declined to disturb an injunction protecting Saregama's sound recording rights in a 1980 Tamil film song. The composer keeps copyright in the underlying musical work.
A five-year assessment of India's intellectual property system finds applications climbing and a registry that cannot keep pace. Its authors caution that a filing is only a legal event.
The Third Circuit has affirmed that Westlaw's headnotes are copyrightable and that ROSS Intelligence's use of them was not fair use. The reasoning is not public.
IFPI's submission says the tool's open-source nature makes it hard to contain. It requests no takedown, no blocking and no action against anyone.
The bipartisan DEFEND IP Act would let courts order broadband providers and large DNS resolvers to block foreign pirate sites. Unlike the rival bill introduced two weeks ago, it leaves VPN providers out.
LiveNetTV's operators settled with the Alliance for Creativity and Entertainment. Ten of the app's domains have since changed hands.
The American Copyright Protection Act would let courts order internet providers, DNS resolvers and large VPN services to block foreign piracy sites. It does not specify how, and a judge is forbidden from doing so.
Remedy's revenue fell 23.1% to €23.3m in the first half of 2026. The people holding the free copy have read the accounts.
A federal judge has kept Tencent's copyright case against the streaming site Olevod alive, rejecting a magistrate's recommendation to dismiss it. The fresh evidence included 123,400 visits from Florida in June.
Lidl must stop selling copycat versions of five Birkenstock models in the Netherlands after a ruling on the brand's footbed design. A German court decided last year that the sandals were not art.
The Chief of Naval Staff told a graduation in Calabar that no piracy incident has been reported in Nigerian waters for four consecutive years. There is no room above the figure.
The Court of Appeal will consider whether an online marketplace can rely on a hosting defence. Shein lost the first round on which company employed the photographers.
The partnership spans Europe, sub-Saharan Africa and Haiti. Every other figure in the announcement is given exactly.
South Africa's arts minister told a session on the race against piracy that the industry applies dual standards. A director had already explained that piracy was working very well for him.
The American Copyright Protection Act of 2026 would let courts order internet providers, DNS resolvers and larger VPN services to block foreign piracy sites. Wi-Fi in airports, libraries, restaurants and shops would be exempt.
Google, Cloudflare and Cisco have lost the core of their challenge to an order requiring public DNS resolvers to block pirate sports streaming domains. The blockade runs only on match days, timed to arrive without warning.
A pirate historian points out that the accent the day is built on was rare among real Caribbean crews. The oceans were also full of pirates who spoke Hokkien, Tausug and Maranao.
The anti-tamper firm has filed its first US lawsuit against a game cracker. The defendant is unidentified and the list of titles was out of date on the day it was filed.
Researchers cannot exclude the possibility that restoring pirate populations could stabilize global temperatures.