u/LighteningOneIN

France's Gendarmerie nationale announced that it dismantled the organization behind YggTorrent, France's largest torrent site.

Twelve people have been arrested on charges including money laundering.

The site itself, however, was already destroyed months ago by a hacker who leaked its data and drained its cry.pto wallets.

Meanwhile, the arrests are sending shockwaves through the wider French piracy scene.

After more than fourteen years of legal battles, Kim Dotcom has lost his latest attempt to avoid extradition to the United States.

New Zealand's Court of Appeal dismissed the Megaupload founder's challenge to the Justice Minister's surrender order, concluding that a likely U.S. prison sentence of at least 30 years does not amount to shockingly severe punishment.

For years, rightsholders have pushed for broader site blocking orders, with no direct liability if these result in overblocking.

EuroISPA, which represents over 3,300 European internet service providers, is now asking the EU Commission to change that.

The association points to a series of overblocking incidents in Italy, Spain, and elsewhere, where rightsholders were not held accountable.

The U.S. Department of Justice announced the seizure of nearly 400 pirate streaming domain names that offered access to FI.FA World.Cup matches.

This enforcement action, dubbed "Operation Offsides", targets popular brands including "rojadirecta", "koora", and "futbollibre".

TorrentFreak tracked down several dozen domain names, which reveal that some of the largest streaming sites were not directly hit.

DNS4EU is a relatively young DNS provider that launched last year with European Commission funding.

The company is pitched as a privacy-first alternative to Google and Cloudflare, but it also comes with site blocking in mind.

DNS4EU has shown an interest in pirate site blocklists, including the one that's maintained by Dutch anti-piracy group BREIN.

After looking into it, however, DNS4EU decided not to use them, because BREIN isn't a government authority.

A new report published by the EU Intellectual Property Office shows that the share of major brand advertising on pirate sites increased 80%.

The problem is the worst on court-adjudicated pirate sites, where top brands account for more than half of all ads.

The data further shows that anti-piracy blocklists don't always work as intended.

After 180 days, Comcast can no longer say which customer was linked to a given IP address.

This retention limit has kept old piracy accusations out of reach for years, but that's beginning to change.

A series of BitTorrent lawsuits from film companies targets alleged pirates whose identities Strike 3 Holdings, an adult-content producer, had already obtained in earlier suits over the same addresses.

For years, WIPO has tried to starve pirate sites of advertising money. Now it wants to cut off their payments too.

A new system called "WIPO Alert Pay" lets rightsholders flag pirate and counterfeit sites to payment providers such as PayPal and Mastercard, who can then act under their own rules.

In an initial pilot, 71% of flagged sites were removed.