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In the first part of the retrospective we saw that in 2022, the authorities worked closely with rights holders, particularly in the fight against IPTV. 

For the other entertainment sectors, 2022 was also a year of progress. The timeline below summarises the highlights for everything other than sports broadcasts.

January/February/March

  • France: creation of government agency ARCOM to fight more effectively against copyright infringments in audiovisual industry
  • Japanese anti-piracy group CODA is building a large coalition to combat the illegal online distribution of anime, manga and similar copyrighted content. The International Anti-Piracy Organization will be made up of 32 local companies, including publisher Kodansha, Hollywood studios and Netflix, and about 450 companies in China.
  • The Pirate bay, the historic site, is still the top site for downloading illegal content
  • The ETTV torrent distribution group has been shut down
  • The Motion Picture Association and the Alliance for Creativity and Entertainment coalition announced that they will be integrating their staffs into the U.S. government’s National Intellectual Property Rights Coordination Center. 

March/April/May

  • According to a Danish study, YouTube and Facebook are now the main sources of illegal access to  copyrighted content.
  • Password sharing is becoming a growing concern.
  • The anti-piracy initiative “Operation 404″ has taken down 226 websites and 461 pirate applications have fallen under the purview of Operation 404-4 through the combined efforts of local authorities and their international partners.
  • The Delhi High Court ordered Telegram to provide rights holders with the personal data of copyright infringing users. After an initial refusal, they were forced to comply with the injunction.

July / August / September

  • The EU is preparing to launch its own blockchain solution to authenticate physical products through NFTs.
  • Bell Media and several other companies have filed a lawsuit against two streaming server operators in the Federal Court of Canada. The rights holders want to act to reduce the availability of pirated sports streams during the FIFA World Cup. The targeted services were allegedly indexed by popular streaming aggregators such as soccerstreamlinks.com and Bingsport.

November

  • Italian authorities have announced an operation to disrupt mass piracy on Telegram.
  • A seizure order has been executed against 545 channels, accompanied by physical searches in five regions. Eight channel administrators are suspected of copyright infringement felonies.
  • The British Publishers association’s succesful request to the High Court resulted in an injunction requiring several operators to block the associated domains of e-book piracy platforms, such as LibGen, Ebookee, Freshwap, AvaxHome, Bookfi, Bookre and Freebookspot.

Z-library

Finally, the end of the year was marked by the “Z library saga”.

Z-Library is one of the largest parallel libraries on the Internet. Through various domain names, the site offers over 11 million books and 84 million articles. It has attracted a steady stream of users and several million monthly visitors, and is particularly well-known and popular with students.

All books are available for free, but Z-Library also accepts donations. These donations provide one month of access to a variety of additional features, including more search results and the ability to send books to the Kindle ebook reader.

  • The Syndicat National de l’Édition – French National Publishing Union –  a group of more than 700 members of the publishing industry, initiated a lawsuit this summer in France, targeting more than 200 Z-Library-related domains, all of which must now be blocked by French Internet service providers.
  • Following a recent complaint from the Authors Guild, TikTok banned the hashtag #zlibrary in September
  • In October, the majority of z-library’s domains became inaccessible after action by the U.S. Department of Justice (Z-lib claimed for a time that it was only a hosting problem that made the site inaccessible)
  • The U.S. government  arrested two Russian nationals accused of operating the ebook piracy site. Anton Napolsky and Valeriia Ermakova were arrested in Argentina in October, and the U.S. is considering prosecuting them for copyright infringement, wire fraud and money laundering.
  • The site now seems to have disappeared completely from the mainstream internet . All mirror sites are also disabled; only the Tor version remains online, but even that had disappeared for 48 hours; it is quite possible that 2022 will see the end of the biggest e-book infringer of the last years: for the moment the site – or any mirror sites does not seem to have reappeared. 

See you in 2023 for more articles about copyright and anti-piracy and cybersecurity.

Our tream at PDN wishes you very happy holidays.

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