On Friday America's Department of Justice announced: Two leaders of one of the world's most notorious videogame piracy groups, Team Xecuter, have been arrested and are in custody facing charges filed in U.S. District Court in Seattle... The indictment alleges the defendants were leaders of a criminal enterprise that developed and sold illegal devices that hacked popular videogame consoles so they could be used to play unauthorized, or pirated, copies of videogames. The enterprise targeted popular consoles such as the Nintendo Switch, the Nintendo 3DS, the Nintendo Entertainment System Classic Edition, the Sony PlayStation Classic, and the Microsoft Xbox.

"These defendants were allegedly leaders of a notorious international criminal group that reaped illegal profits for years by pirating video game technology of U.S. companies," said Acting Assistant Attorney General Brian C. Rabbitt of the Justice Department's Criminal Division. "These arrests show that the department will hold accountable hackers who seek to commandeer and exploit the intellectual property of American companies for financial gain, no matter where they may be located."

"These defendants lined their pockets by stealing and selling the work of other video-game developers — even going so far as to make customers pay a licensing fee to play stolen games," said U.S. Attorney Brian Moran for the Western District of Washington. "This conduct doesn't just harm billion dollar companies, it hijacks the hard work of individuals working to advance in the video-game industry."

"Theft of intellectual property hurts U.S. industry, game developers and exploits legitimate gaming customers, all of which threaten the legitimacy of the commercial video game industry," said Acting Special Agent in Charge Eben Roberts of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement's Homeland Security Investigations, Seattle. "We are committed to working with our international partners to find criminals like these who steal copyrighted material and bring cyber criminals to justice...."

According to the indictment, Team Xecuter at times cloaked its illegal activity with a purported desire to support gaming enthusiasts who wanted to design their own videogames for noncommercial use. However, the overwhelming demand and use for the enterprise's devices was to play pirated videogames.

Several Pirate Bay-related domains become available again this month after their owner failed to renew the registration. Yesterday, Piratebay.org was sold in a Dropcatch auction for $50,000 and ThePiratebay.com will follow soon. Both domains were previously registered to the official Pirate Bay site. TorrentFreak reports: Over the years the Pirate Bay team had many 'backup' domains available, just in case something happened. That included various exotic TLDs but the site also owned Piratebay.org and ThePiratebay.com. We use the past tense because both domains expired recently. The domains listed Pirate Bay co-founder Fredrik Neij as the registrant and until recently the same Swedish address was listed in Whois data. For reasons unknown, however, the registrant let both Piratebay.org and ThePiratebay.com expire. This isn't a problem for the torrent site really. The domains were never used as the site's main address. ThePiratebay.com did forward to the original .org domain at one point, but that's about it.

None of this means that the domains are not valuable to outsiders though. This became apparent in an auction yesterday, where Piratebay.org (without the the) was sold for $50,000 to a bidder named 'clvrfls.' The bid below ended up being the winning one. The Piratebay.org domain failed to renew earlier this month after which the professional 'drop catch' service Dropcatch.com scooped it up. They auctioned the domain off, which is a common practice, and it proved quite lucrative. What the new owner will do with the domain is unclear. It has a substantial number of backlinks and there will be plenty of type-in traffic as well. [...] ThePiratebay.com is expected to drop later this week and is listed at a pending delete auction, and ThePiratebay.net and Piratebay.net will drop in a few days as well.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TorrentFreak: Every day, millions of people download or stream pirated content including movies, TV-shows, games, MP3s, and books. Many of these files originate from a small and tightly organized 'community' commonly known as The Scene, which is made up of dozens of smaller 'release groups.' These groups tend to operate in the shadows with little or no public profile. At least, that's what the unwritten rules dictate. That's for good reason as the people involved risk high prison sentences when caught. It's very rare for Scene group members to get busted but last week the US Government claimed a major victory. With help from international law enforcement partners, several raids and arrests were carried out, with the SPARKS group at the center of it all.

As soon as the first rumors about the raids started spreading on Tuesday, the number of Scene releases started to drop. A day later, when confirmation came in, it became even quieter. With data provided by Predb.org we take a closer look at these dropoffs, showing that some categories are affected more than others. Before delving into detailed groups, it's worth pointing out the overall impact, which can be summarized in two numbers. On Wednesday, August 19, there were 1944 new releases. A week later, a day after the first raids, this number was down to 168 releases. The drop in new releases happened across all categories.

The official premiere of Tenet has drawn many people to the movie theaters this week. On pirate sites, there's been plenty of interest too, as thousands of people are being tricked into downloading fake copies. Pirates are not the only ones being fooled though, as Warner Bros. has its eyes set on fake releases too. TorrentFreak reports: All around the world, millions of people have waited in anticipation for the release of Christopher Nolan's sci-fi thriller 'Tenet.' The film was initially scheduled to be released in July but, after several pandemic-related delays, Warner Bros. moved the premiere ahead to the end of August. [...] According to one anti-piracy expert, Tenet's release has all the ingredients for a "perfect storm for piracy." This prediction prompted us to take a look at how Tenet is doing on pirate sites today. This question is not hard to answer, as there is no 'real' pirated copy of the film out there. Instead, sites are overwhelmed with fake Tenet releases.

We didn't have to look far. Most torrent sites and other download portals have plenty of Tenet copies. Or at least, that's what uploaders lead users to believe. This includes The Pirate Bay, which faces a moderation backlog, by the looks of it. Most seasoned pirates will know how to avoid these fake torrents. That said, major titles such as Tenet often attract the attention of many novice users too, who will undoubtedly be disappointed. And not just because they can't see the film. These suspicious releases can lead to all sorts of malware, viruses, and worse. The two we downloaded appeared relatively harmless. They included a 700MB video file that shows a still image, asking people to check the readme file. The readme message itself sends people to a suspicious site that requests credit card details "for verification purposes." Needless to say, we declined that offer.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Yesterday morning, TorrentFreak began receiving reports from multiple sources that something big was happening in the shadowy world of top-tier piracy known as 'The Scene.' From the volumes of information received, the majority of sources indicated that many so-called 'topsites' and their members had disappeared or gone into hiding. The word was that several major movie release groups -- SPARKS, GECKOS and DRONES -- had been targeted in a series of raids and as a result, people were running for cover. Precisely where these raids or actions took place still isn't entirely clear. Multiple sources point to the Nordic region, particularly Norway and Sweden, but reports of disruption and/or action in the Netherlands and even Switzerland persisted across our confidential sources, all of whom demand anonymity.

Movie companies and their anti-piracy partners are pressing ahead with their legal action to track down The Pirate Bay. The site reportedly used VPN provider OVPN, which carries no logs, but a security expert -- one that regularly penetration tests several major VPN providers -- believes that information about the notorious site could still be obtained. TorrentFreak reports: After a period of what seemed like calm, this year it became clear that the site's old enemies, Swedish anti-piracy group Rights Alliance, were again working to get closer to the site and its operators. We've covered the back story in detail but in summary, the site is alleged to have used Swedish VPN provider OVPN to hide its true location and Rights Alliance is now engaged in legal action to get its hands on whatever information the VPN provider may hold. The most recent move, playing out this week, is that Rights Alliance has provided testimony from an expert witness, one that has masses of experience in the VPN field.

The name 'Cure53' may not sound familiar to regular Internet users but the cyber-security company is well known for its first-class abilities in penetration testing. So much so, in fact, that the company has audited some of the most popular VPN providers in the world, including Mullvad, Surfshark, and TunnelBear. Given its experience in the field, it's no surprise that Rights Alliance has also sought the expert opinion of someone involved in Cure 53 to assess this VPN-related matter. Importantly, there doesn't appear to be any conflict of interest here, since the conclusions drawn are purely technical in nature and rely on experience and general facts, something we will touch on later. The expert opinion, which appeared in court documents reviewed by TorrentFreak this week, is from Jesper Larsson, who works at security company Ox4a but is involved with Cure 53 where he "regularly" performs penetration tests against the "ten largest VPN Providers in the world." His testimony reveals that he has been commissioned by Sara Lindback of Rights Alliance to comment on how a VPN service works and specifically, what information might potentially be stored at OVPN in relation to The Pirate Bay.

"It is clear on OVPN's website that it strives to protect its users; privacy by storing as little user data as possible in their databases," the testimony filed with the court and obtained by TorrentFreak reads. "Although [OVPN] strive to store as little data as possible, there must be data connecting users and identities to make the VPN service work. In this case, a user has paid for a VPN account with the ability to connect a public static address to OVPN which the user has then chosen to link to the file sharing site 'the piratebay,' i.e the user has configured his VPN account to point to the given domain." [...] "For this type of configuration to be possible, data about the configuration must be stored at OVPN at least during the time when the account is active," Larsson continues. "It should be considered extremely likely that the user or identity associated with the above configuration is stored in a user database where a given user can be connected to the VPN configuration, configuration regarding where the static IP address should be pointed to, and payment information that should describe how long a given account is active and which payment method the user has used. OVPN should thus be able to search its VPN servers for the given IP address, or alternatively search in their user databases or in backups of these to locate a given user or identity," the security expert adds.

European police busted an illegal streaming ring that provided service to 2 million people and was so sophisticated that it had its own customer-service team. From a report: The criminal network operated for over five years and offered more than 40,000 channels, movies, documentaries and other content, according to European police coordination agency Europol. The scale of the operation shows how the big streaming platforms still struggle to deal with content theft as criminals find new ways to hack their anti-piracy systems. The group offered a technical assistance service and high standards of quality control, earning an estimated 15 million euros ($17 million) through PayPal payments, bank transfers and cryptocurrencies, the agency said. The threat to legal streaming may grow if Netflix, Walt Disney Co. and others gradually raise prices in coming years to capitalize on their fast-growing subscriber bases and viewers seek out cheaper, illegal alternatives.

Nintendo of America filed two lawsuits on Friday against Nintendo Switch hack resellers that sell software to play pirated video games, according to court documents obtained by Polygon. From the report: The first lawsuit was filed Friday in an Ohio court against Tom Dilts Jr., the alleged operator of the website UberChips. The second lawsuit was filed in a Seattle court that same day, against a number of anonymous defendants from a selection of websites. All defendants reportedly sell products from a group of anonymous hackers called "Team Xecuter." Nintendo's lawyers described the products as "an unauthorized operating system ... and accompanying piracy tools that install it." These products allow users to get around Nintendo's "technological protection measures" designed to protect its products from "unauthorized access and copying." Once it's disabled, players can download the unauthorized operating system and play pirated video games, lawyers said.

At the time of writing, the UberChips website appears to be offline -- under "scheduled maintenance." Other websites listed in the second lawsuit are still operating. A kit used for hacking the Nintendo Switch is listed for $47.99. The site also sells products for the SNES Classic, PlayStation Mini, Nintendo 3DS, and Game Boy Advance. The websites are also offering pre-orders for devices that will circumvent protection measures for the previously unhackable Nintendo Switch Lite and newer Nintendo Switch models. Nintendo said this is causing "tremendous harm" to the company; Nintendo lawyers said hundreds of the devices have already been sold. Nintendo is seeking $2,500 per trafficking violation in each of these cases, as well as a permanent injunction to stop operations of these websites.

"Doom Eternal has become the latest game to use a kernel-level driver to aid in detecting cheaters in multiplayer matches," reports Ars Technica: The game's new driver and anti-cheat tool come courtesy of Denuvo parent Irdeto, a company once known for nearly unbeatable piracy protection and now known for somewhat effective but often cracked piracy protection. But the new Denuvo Anti-Cheat protection is completely separate from the company's Denuvo Anti-Tamper technology... The new Denuvo Anti-Cheat tool rolls out to Doom Eternal players after "countless hours and millions of gameplay sessions" during a two-year early access program, Irdeto said in a blog post announcing its introduction. But unlike Valorant's similar Vanguard system, the Denuvo Anti-Cheat driver "doesn't have annoying tray icons or splash screens" letting players monitor its use on their system. "This invisibility could raise some eyebrows," Irdeto concedes.

To assuage any potential fears, Irdeto writes that Denuvo Anti-Cheat only runs when the game is active, and Bethesda's patch notes similarly say that "use of the kernel-mode driver starts when the game launches and stops when the game stops for any reason...."

"No monitoring or data collection happens outside of multiplayer matches," Denuvo Anti-Cheat Product Owner Michail Greshishchev told Ars via email. "Denuvo does not attempt to maintain the integrity of the system. It does not block cheats, game mods, or developer tools. Denuvo Anti-Cheat only detects cheats." Greshishchev added that the company's driver has received "certification from renown[ed] kernel security researchers, completed regular whitebox and blackbox audits, and was penetration-tested by independent cheat developers." He said Irdeto is also setting up a bug bounty program to discover any flaws they might have missed.

And because of Denuvo Anti-Cheat's design, Greshishchev says the driver is more secure than others that might have more exposure to the Internet. "Unlike existing anti-cheats, Denuvo Anti-Cheat does not stream shell code from the Web," Greshishchev told Ars. "This means that, if compromised, attackers can't send down arbitrary malware to gamers' machines...."

If a driver exploit is discovered in the wild, Greshishchev told Ars that revocable certificates and self-expiring network keys can be used as "kill switches" to cut them off.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TorrentFreak: Operated by Bruno Gustavo Januario, the 'Jorge Dejorge' channel is packed with technology-focused videos offering reviews, unboxing videos, tips and tutorials, most of which are entirely non-problematic. However, a decision to publish advice on how to obtain TV channels via pirate IPTV services attracted the attention of ABTA, the powerful Brazilian Pay TV Association. ABTA, which represents the main cable TV and channel operators in the country, including Globosat, Sky, NBC Universal, Fox and Discovery, filed a lawsuit against Bruno Gustavo claiming that his instructional videos infringed their rights.

In his response, the channel owner described himself as an "ordinary person" with a YouTube channel and denied that he'd named any of the TV operators in his videos. In any event, he argued, they were informative in nature and did not aim to instruct people on how to break the law. Nevertheless, in April 2018 a judge at a Sao Paulo court handed down an order that required hosting and search companies, including Google, to remove the videos in question and Bruno Gustavo was told to stop publishing such content in the future. Failure to comply would result in a fine equivalent to $1,740 for each offense. However, according to a Globo report, the judge held back from compensating the TV companies as he believed their trademarks had not been infringed. This resulted in an appeal from both sides to the Court of Justice of Sao Paulo which was heard in April 2020. In its ruling, the Court found that the operator of the Jorge Dejorge channel must pay compensation to ABTA for breaching its members' rights with his "fraudulent" videos. "The Court found that the videos improperly reproduced the channels' trademarks, infringed their copyrights, and amounted to unfair competition against ABTA's members," reports TorrentFreak. The Court says 10% of any revenues earned by the channel since the illegal content was first published in February 2017, must be handed over to the TV companies.

"The Jorge Dejorge operator must also pay $8,721 in compensation to the broadcasters adjusted for interest at the rate of 1% per month from the publishing of the first content in February 2017," the report adds. "In addition, the defendant was ordered not to publish any more content that infringes on the rights of the pay-TV stations and was told to pay the costs of the lawsuit plus attorney fees." Gustavo's legal team is planning an appeal.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from NPR: Last week, when the Internet Archive announced its "National Emergency Library," expanding access to more than a million digitized works, the group explained the move as a goodwill gesture in the time of coronavirus. With so many brick-and-mortar libraries forced to close their doors, in other words, the group was opening up its lending program: Now, instead of its usual policy of just one digital copy per reader for a 14-day period, many frustrated readers could borrow copies of the same book during the same time -- and could do so through the end of June or the end of the global pandemic, whichever came sooner.

But there's one major issue that several media outlets, including NPR, failed to mention in covering the decision: Many writers and publishers say the website, even before the creation of this National Emergency Library, has been sharing full digital copies of their books without their permission. And over the weekend, dozens of prominent authors, from Colson Whitehead and Neil Gaiman to Alexander Chee, made clear that they were upset with the Internet Archive's model -- and doubly so now, with the expansion of lending services and its timing. "With mean writing incomes of only $20,300 a year prior to the crisis, authors, like others, are now struggling all the more â" from cancelled book tours and loss of freelance work, income supplementing jobs, and speaking engagements," the Authors Guild, a professional group that provides legal assistance to writers, said in a statement released Friday. "And now they are supposed to swallow this new pill, which robs them of their rights to introduce their books to digital formats as many hundreds of midlist authors do when their books go out of print, and which all but guarantees that author incomes and publisher revenues will decline even further."

"Acting as a piracy site -- of which there already are too many -- the Internet Archive tramples on authors' rights by giving away their books to the world," the guild added.

The Internet Archive pushed back against this characterization with a lengthy rebuttal. Brewster Kahle of the Internet Archive said the group "uses the same controls limiting access to these works as the publishers themselves, with encrypted files that are meant to disappear from the user's computer after a brief period," reports NPR. "The copies the group lends, Kahle said, are owned by the Internet Archive -- either through donations, straight-up purchases or collaborations with brick-and-mortar libraries."

Popcorn Time, the highly popular and extremely-easy-to-use "Netflix for piracy" service, came back Tuesday after a years-long hiatus. The move comes as people around the world are quarantined or being asked to stay in their homes during the coronavirus pandemic. Motherboard reports: Popcorn Time allows people to stream movies using BitTorrent, without actually downloading the movies or worrying about finding a tracker to use. Essentially, it removes any torrenting learning curve, allowing people to (illegally) stream movies and television shows from an easy-to-use app. Because it's so simple to use, Popcorn Time became instantly popular upon its release in 2014 and was immediately targeted by the movie industry. The service was shut down multiple times by court order, police raids, and IP blocks all over the world between 2014 and now; the open source app was forked several times and has worked intermittently, but has been largely offline over the last few years.

Within the last couple days, a new version of Popcorn Time popped up on Popcorntime.app, version 4.0. The new app works just as well as earlier versions of the app, is free, and implores people to use virtual private networks to avoid having their use of the app detected by their internet service providers. The app has been released while many around the world are quarantined, and also comes at a time when piracy is becoming more popular, generally speaking. Other versions of Popcorn Time are also currently active, but the user interface of this one and its release appear to be closely affiliated with earlier Popcorn Time projects, based on domain redirects and urls.

An anonymous reader shares a report: For those who don't want to dive fully into torrents, Plex is a great alternative for streaming television shows and movies for free. Officially, Plex is a "neutral" media player, and it first became popular with people looking to stream content between devices at home, like from their desktop in the study to their laptop in their bedroom. But, with Plex Media Server, users can also share media with other users to stream, creating a virtual free-for-all, and a serious problem from a copyright perspective. CreativeFuture, a pro-copyright coalition boasting more than 560 members, has taken notice and is calling out the platform, along with rival service Kodi.

"Thanks to a rapidly growing media application called Plex, torrent-based piracy is back in vogue, and better than ever (for criminals who have no problem with profiting from content that doesn't belong to them, that is)," the coalition writes in a blog post. Those who pay $4.99 per month for Plex Pass are able to share their libraries with up to 100 users. As Creative Future points out, this isn't always done for the sake of altruism, or so family's can share their legally procured copies of Frozen. Some Plex users actually charge for access to their content -- a more nefarious (though, granted, enterprising) evolution from the totally free world of torrenting. For extra sass, the shared content can be pirated to begin with.

An anonymous reader quotes CNN: The music industry was in crisis just a few years ago. Sales were cut in half from their peak as single downloads, YouTube and piracy made the CD album go virtually extinct. But music has found its white knight: streaming. Last year, recorded music revenues in the United States went up by 13% to $11.1 billion — the highest level since 2006... "The music industry today is healthier than it's been in more than a decade," Josh Friedlander, the senior vice president of research at the Recording Industry Association of America, told CNN Business.

"Revenues from streaming services are more than offsetting decreases in physical sales and digital downloads." Friedlander added "it's hard to overstate the impact streaming music has had on the music industry...." Music streaming — which includes paid streaming, ad-supported streaming and streaming radio — represented about 5% of the music industry's revenues in the US in 2009.

In 2019, that number had grown to roughly 80%, according to the RIAA.

Fortran IV writes: In an attempt to "start a conversation" about copyright and IP theft, one of the largest subreddits on Reddit.com, the horror sub r/NoSleep, has gone private for a week. NoSleep, with nearly 14 million subscribers, is one of the largest collections of horror fiction on the internet; MIT used it to train an AI system to write horror stories. Authors retain copyright to all stories on NoSleep, but piracy remains an ongoing problem, so the moderators have elected to shutter the sub from 02/24/2020 to 03/02/2020 to draw attention to the issue.

In 2018, the owner of Two-Bit History, a site dedicated to computer history, wrote a successful article about mathematician Ada Lovelace, who some credit as being the first computer programmer. Sadly, if you search Google for that article today you won't find it. Some idiotic anti-piracy company had it deleted because it dared to use the word "did." TorrentFreak reports: In 2018, [Sinclair Target, the owner of computing history blog, Two-Bit History] wrote an article about Ada Lovelace, the daughter of Lord Byron who some credit as being the world's first computer programmer, despite being born in 1815. Unfortunately, however, those who search for that article today using Google won't find it. As the image below shows, the original Tweet announcing the article is still present in Google's indexes but the article itself has been removed, thanks to a copyright infringement complaint that also claimed several other victims.

Sinclair's article was deleted because an anti-piracy company working on behalf of a TV company decided that since its title (What Did Ada Lovelace's Program Actually Do?) contained the word 'DID,' it must be illegal. This monumental screw-up was announced on Twitter by Sinclair himself, who complained that "Computers are stupid folks. Too bad Google has decided they are in charge." At risk of running counter to Sinclair's claim, in this case -- as Lovelace herself would've hopefully agreed -- it is people who are stupid, not computers. The proof for that can be found in the DMCA complaint sent to Google by RightsHero, an anti-piracy company working on behalf of Zee TV, an Indian pay-TV channel that airs Dance India Dance. Now in its seventh season, Dance India Dance is a dance competition reality show that is often referred to as DID. And now, of course, you can see where this is going. Because Target and at least 11 other sites dared to use the word in its original context, RightsHero flagged the pages as infringing and asked Google to deindex them. In the complaint sent to Google, "the notice not only claims Target's article is infringing the copyrights of Dance India Dance (sorry, DID), but also no less than four online dictionaries explaining what the word 'did actually means," adds TorrentFreak. "Perhaps worse still, some of the other allegedly-infringing articles were published by some pretty serious information resources [including the U.S. Department of Education, Nature.com, and USGS Earthquake Hazards Program of the U.S. Geological Survey]."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Wired: Twitch has been and remains home to illicit sports broadcasts; a late December boxing match attracted over 86,000 viewers -- some of whom spammed ASCII genitalia in chat -- and a mid-January soccer match drew over 70,000 over three livestreams. Although Twitch often stomps them out mid-match, plenty of livestreams posted by throwaway accounts with innocuous names like "Untitled" slip through the cracks and garner tens of thousands of viewers. As the value of sports media rights has climbed to over $20 billion, copyright holders have more incentive than ever to guard their treasure. Yet piracy persists, in part because it's so burdensome for copyright holders to catch it. Stream aggregation site FirstRow Sports lays out a buffet of illicit livestreams for games ranging from ice hockey to basketball and attracts over 300,000 daily visitors, according to data from web analytics firm SimilarWeb. In January 2019 alone, sports fans accessed sports piracy sites 362.7 million times, according to data from digital piracy research firm Muso. On Discord, anonymous benefactors distribute links to soccer livestreams like handfuls of pigeon feed at the park. Once a stream is taken down, another immediately manifests. It's like 40 games of Whac-A-Mole simultaneously taking place in 40 adjacent arcades.

Increasingly, those links lead to Twitch, whose credentials as a mainstream platform make it a relatively safe option -- especially after Reddit shut down the popular soccer piracy subreddit r/soccerstreams. "The older days of streams (5+ years ago) was [sic] littered with ads and viruses," says a soccer stream Discord moderator who goes by Tom. "even though it is considered illegal, I see it being the same as watching porn and being under 18." He adds that some of the hairier-looking piracy sites are still more popular, offer higher-quality streams, and have live chats that utilize Twitch chats' code. Twitch's DMCA guidelines specify that copyright owners can submit takedown requests, and asks the people who submit them to add a "statement under penalty of perjury" that they're authorized to act on behalf of the copyright owner. Occasionally, media companies file claims to Twitch impacting legitimate streamers who commentate over or react to games, television, or YouTube clips. Copyright holders can also choose to sue, as the third-largest internet company in Russia did against Twitch in December for broadcasting an English Premier League streams. It's a rare escalation, and one that underscores how serious an issue Twitch sports piracy has become. Twitch "only provides users access to the platform, does not post its own content, cannot change the content posted by users, or track possible violations of rights," says Twitch lawyer Yuliana Tabastayeva.

The live streaming service said it will "continue to, as has always been the case, effectively and swiftly address any violation of its terms of service with the removal of unlicensed copyrighted content."

In 2019, companies lost about $9.1 billion to password piracy and sharing. From a report: On Dec. 9, Charter Communications CEO Tom Rutledge took aim at the "content companies" entering the direct-to-consumer streaming business. The cable executive told a roomful of investment bankers in Manhattan that these new streamers are "creating havoc in the ecosystem." Rutledge wasn't talking about the proliferation of content or the fight to secure exclusive deals with talent. He was targeting the lax security and rampant password sharing that's prevalent across the streaming landscape. "Half the people in the country live in houses with two or less people in them, and yet these services have five streams," Rutledge added. "There are more streams available than there are homes to use them." Password sharing has serious economic consequences. In 2019, companies lost about $9.1 billion to password piracy and sharing, and that will rise to $12.5 billion in 2024, according to data released by research firm Parks Associates.

For now, many streamers -- including Netflix, Hulu, Disney+ and Amazon Prime -- seem content to allow the practice to continue, even while they crack down on illicit password sales. But as services mature, priorities will likely change. "When the growth starts to flatten and you start to look at the balance sheet, you are going to be looking for revenue," says Jean-Marc Racine, chief product officer of video delivery and security firm Synamedia. The company (which counts Disney, Comcast and AT&T among its clients) conducted a study of two anonymous video providers and said Jan. 6 that it found they were losing more than $70 million annually from password sharing.

Over the past few years, record labels have been suing ISPs for not removing music pirates from their services, and this week, the record labels may have hit a tremendous victory. From a report: A US District Court jury has found Cox Communications liable for piracy infringement of more than 10,000 musical works, and as a result, has awarded $1 billion in damages to Sony Music, Universal Music Group, Warner Music Group and EMI. Essentially, the recording industry just showed that a jury will buy its argument that an ISP should be held liable for failing to kick a music pirate off its network. And similar lawsuits like the one Cox lost today have been filed against Charter, Charter subsidiary Bright House Networks, RCN, and Grande Communications, so there's a chance that rulings against those companies could go similarly.

Russia's third-largest internet company is suing streaming service Twitch for 180bn roubles ($2.8bn) over pirate broadcasts of English Premier League games. From a report: Rambler Group alleges its exclusive broadcasting rights were breached by the service more than 36,000 times between August and November. It is seeking to permanently ban the Amazon-owned platform in Russia. Twitch's lawyer has called Rambler's case "unfounded." Russia is the third-largest user of Twitch, which has more than 15 million daily active users worldwide. Its terms and conditions state users cannot share content without permission from the copyright owners, including films, television programmes and sports matches. The streaming giant's lawyer, Julianna Tabastaeva, told Russian-language news website Kommersant Twitch "only provides users with access to the platform and is unable to change the content posted by users, or track possible violations." She added the company took "all necessary measures to eliminate the violations, despite not receiving any official notification from Rambler." Further reading: Why Twitch Is Still the King of Live Game Streaming.