The new year can’t start without reflecting the current one, looking back at the major stories of the past 12 months.
For writers and readers, the news often passes by, with major headlines swiftly fading into the background.
At times like these, it’s good to realize that for people who are featured or closely involved, those events are often life-altering. But perhaps i’m getting sentimental.
Below is a compilation of some of the key stories this year. It’s by no means comprehensive or exhaustive, but a decent reflection of what can happen in a year. And it never stops.
RARBG Shuts Down
Pirate sites come and go, often without being noticed by the public at large. That was certainly not the case when RARBG said its goodbyes in late June.
The popular torrent site had millions of daily users spread across several domain names. This included the flagship .to domain, where the usual torrent index was replaced by a farewell message.
The surprise shutdown of RARBG and its tracker was made worse by the fact that RARBG was also one of the most used torrent distribution groups, which secured a steady stream of movie and TV-show releases across the broader piracy ecosystem.
As is often the case, others tried to hijack or take over the RARBG brand in the months that followed, but none come close to the original. Other torrent sites did notice a big traffic spike though.
Flawless IPTV Prosecution
In May, five men behind pirate IPTV service ‘Flawless’ were sentenced to more than 30 years in prison, the result of a private prosecution by the Premier League.
Operating from 2016 until 2018, the Flawless IPTV service served over 50,000 UK households while generating millions in revenue by selling cheap subscriptions.
Follow-up reports revealed that the service itself costs hundreds of thousands of pounds to run. It further showed that Flawless invested significant resources to circumvent the Premier League’s blocking program.
Z-Library’s Resilience
Z-Library’s very existence was put to the test last year when U.S. law enforcement seized over 200 domain names connected to the site. Two alleged Z-Library operators from Russia were arrested in Argentina as part of a criminal investigation.
The shadow library continued to operate from the dark web and made a full comeback on the clearnet in February. Since then, the site has launched a variety of new features and initiatives, including a dedicated desktop application.
The legal problems are not over though. The U.S. Government continued to seize Z-Library domain names through the year. Meanwhile, the two arrested suspects continue to fight the criminal copyright infringement allegations and their requested extradition.
IPTV Scaremongering
The past year has seen no shortage of IPTV-related news. All over the world sellers and operators of pirate IPTV services were arrested, signaling that this activity is not without risk.
Meanwhile, users are put on notice as well. This includes obligatory warnings that people may not get what they paid for. But there are more direct threats as well, some of which border on the ridiculous.
Several UK newspapers warned that police were knocking on the doors of 1,000 suspected pirate IPTV subscribers earlier this year. This massive exaggeration, paired with the suggestion that police used special pirate stream detector cars, falls firmly in the scaremongering camp.
Police car stream trackers?
While watching pirate IPTV streams in the UK is definitely unauthorized, the suggestion that offenders will be prosecuted and jailed en masse, was a bit much.
AI Copyright Troubles
Over the past year, artificial intelligence enjoyed its mainstream breakthrough. The instant success of ChatGPT and follow-up releases of other large language model-based tools kick-started what many believe is a new revolution.
The AI boom also triggered a host of copyright issues. Several lawsuits were filed against OpenAI, Meta, Google, and others who used copyrighted materials to build their AI models. In some cases, these companies stand accused of using libraries from pirate sites as training materials.
Meanwhile, lawmakers around the world are trying to figure out how to handle this rapidly evolving technology from a copyright perspective. These efforts, and the associated lobbying, will continue in the new year.
In addition to lawsuits and lobbying, rightsholders are also keeping an eye on individuals who tinker with artificial intelligence. This included a widely popular AI Hub server on Discord which was pulled offline after repeated copyright complaints.
Pikashow Stunt
In January, rightsholders pulled out all the stops to take down the popular piracy app PikaShow. This happened a few weeks after its operators pulled one of the biggest stunts in piracy history.
During Asia Cup 2022, a cricket tournament watched by hundreds of millions of people, PikaShow was the official sponsor of Afghanistan’s national cricket team. This resulted in hours of primetime pirate advertising, marketing the brand to a massive TV audience of millions.
PikaShow sponsoring
Fast forward nearly a year and PikaShow remains a problem today. According to the MPA, the application has been downloaded 10 million times across various app stores and Telegram.
IPTV Datacenter Raid
IPTV raids and arrests are nothing new but, last May, Dutch fiscal police (FIOD) was the first enforcement authority to shut down an entire datacenter.
Information obtained by FIOD showed that the pirate IPTV operation was run from the GLOBE Datacenter in Den Helder, where more than 1,200 servers were taken offline. Several people were arrested and the main suspect remains in custody according to the latest reports.
The authorities didn’t mention any specific IPTV services but the operation was massive. Local anti-piracy group BREIN reported that TVs in hundreds of thousands of homes went dark due to the raids. Europol, which also assisted in the operation, said that the service had over a million users across Europe.
GLOBE Datacenter (via)
Faced with an operation of this size, law enforcement initially failed to see that the websites of innocent companies were also taken down in the process. The problem was addressed after TorrentFreak requested clarification.
Zoro.to ‘Takedown’
The Alliance for Creativity and Entertainment (ACE) shut down numerous sites and services this year. Their biggest victory came in July when it took over the domain name of piracy giant Zoro.to.
The anime streaming site was arguably the largest pirate site on the Internet at that time, with over 200 million monthly visits. However, ACE would soon learn that they secured little more than a domain name.
A few days before ACE stepped in, Zoro.to had been ‘acquired’ by an unknown party that rebranded the operation to Aniwatch. Unsurprisingly, that site is now one of the most visited pirate sites on the Internet.
Omi, EVO, Mega
We’ll end this brief and selective overview with a few key cases that started earlier, but saw some (preliminary) conclusions in 2023.
In March, Bill Omar Carrasquillo, better known online as Omi in a Hellcat, was sentenced to 66 months in prison for several crimes related to his now-defunct pirate IPTV services. In addition, he was ordered to pay $11m in restitution while $30 million in possessions were forfeited.
Omi in a Hellcat
As mentioned earlier, this year we also learned that the alleged operator of piracy release group EVO was arrested in Portugal. This action is likely one of the main reasons why we haven’t seen any leaked movie screeners this year.
Finally, 2023 also brought closure for two of the Megaupload defendants; Mathias Ortmann and Bram van der Kolk. The High Court in Auckland, New Zealand, handed down prison sentences of 31 and 30 months respectively. The pair avoided extradition to the United States by pleading guilty, which didn’t help Kim Dotcom’s position.
From: TF, for the latest news on copyright battles, piracy and more.
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