After blocking several Pirate Bay clone sites following requests from rightsholders, T-Mobile in Austria has reported itself over a potential net neutrality breach. EU law says that pirate sites can be blocked but the ISP is concerned that doing so without a court order could be a breach of the Telecom Single Market (TSM) Regulation passed in 2015.
A new coalition of Canadian companies is calling on the local telecom regulator CRTC to establish a local piracy site blocking program. The plan is the first of its kind in North America, aimed at lowering local piracy rates. Opponents, however, believe the proposal goes too far and equate it to a censorship deal.
Online learning platform Udemy is taking on FreeTutorials.us, a site making available a wide range of paid courses and tutorials for free. A California court has ordered Cloudflare to hand over all the information it has on FreeTutorials' operators but the site says it will continue its mission to provide free education for everyone.
Researchers at Delft University of Technology have released a major update to their decentralized and pseudo-anonymous BitTorrent client. The new Tribler has its very own blockchain that tracks how much people are sharing, so users can be rewarded accordingly. This should ultimately improve the efficiency of the client's Tor-like protection.
The top 10 most downloaded movies on BitTorrent are in again. 'Thor Ragnarok' tops the chart this week, followed by ‘The Shape of Water'. 'Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle' completes the top three.
A new academic paper published in the Information Economics and Policy journal shows that piracy can help many artists to sell more music. Results from the peer-reviewed paper are consistent for both digital and physical sales and affect mid-tier artists. Top musicians are not so lucky, as they sell less.
As part of the national anti-fraud awareness campaign Take Five, this week the Federation Against Copyright Theft asked consumers to consider whether the site or service they're using is pirate or not. Their sound advice is to do research to find out, but there are actually plenty of tell-tale signs for those lacking clarity on the pirate high seas.
The operator of a Tor exit-node faces tens of thousands of dollars in potential damages because his connection was allegedly used to download a pirated copy of Dallas Buyers Club. The movie company used the operator's lack of response as proof, but the defendant is now striking back, questioning whether the company actually owns the proper copyrights.
Last weekend, after what appeared to be a pre-order blunder, Marvel's Thor: Ragnarok was leaked online in advance of its official release date. Interestingly, it now transpires that director Taiki Waititi is no stranger to piracy himself, after admitting that his showreel for the movie contained source material he'd "illegally torrented" on the Internet.