2022: Anti-Piracy Year in Review – Part 2

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

For the other entertainment sectors, 2022 still brought progress. The timeline below summarizes the key events for everything other than sports broadcasts.

January/February/March

• France: the ARCOM is born
• The Japanese anti-piracy group CODA is putting together a large coalition to fight the illegal online distribution of anime and manga. The international anti-piracy organization will be made up of 32 local companies, including the publisher Kodansha, the Hollywood studios and Netflix, and about 450 companies in China.
• The Pirate Bay, the historic site, is still at the top of the sites offering illegal content
• The torrent distribution group TV ETTV was shut down
• Film: the Motion Picture Association and the Alliance for Creativity and Entertainment announced that they would embed their staff in 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 pirated content.
• Password sharing is a growing concern for legal streaming services.
• The anti-piracy initiative “Operation 404” took down 226 websites, and 461 pirate apps fell under Operation 404-4 thanks to the combined efforts of local authorities and their international partners.

• The Delhi High Court ordered Telegram to disclose to rights holders the personal data of users who infringe copyright. After an initial refusal, it was forced to comply with the injunction.

July/August/September

• The EU is preparing to launch its own blockchain solution to authenticate products through NFTs.
• Bell Media and several other companies brought legal action 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 reportedly indexed by popular streaming aggregators such as soccerstreamlinks.com and Bingsport.

November

• Italian authorities announced an operation aimed at disrupting mass piracy on Telegram. A seizure order was executed against 545 channels, along with physical searches in five regions. Eight channel administrators are suspected of copyright infringement offences.
• A request by the UK Publishers Association to the High Court resulted in an injunction requiring several operators to block the domains associated with ebook 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.”

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Z-Library is one of the largest shadow libraries on the internet. Through various domain names, the site offers more than 11 million books and 84 million articles. It attracted a steady number 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 give a month of access to various additional features, including more search results and the ability to send books to the Kindle e-reader.

• The Syndicat national de l’édition, which brings together more than 700 members of the publishing sector, launched legal action in France this summer, targeting more than 200 domains linked to Z-Library, all of which must now be blocked by French internet service providers.
• Following a recent complaint from the Authors Guild, TikTok banned the #zlibrary hashtag in September
• In October, most Z-Library domains became inaccessible after action by the U.S. Department of Justice (Z-Lib claimed for a time that only a hosting problem had made the site inaccessible, which turned out to be false)
• The U.S. government charged two Russian nationals accused of operating the ebook pirate site. Anton Napolsky and Valeriia Ermakova were arrested in Argentina earlier this month, and the United States intends to prosecute them for copyright infringement, wire fraud and money laundering.
• The site now appears to have disappeared completely from the regular internet. All mirror sites are also deactivated; only the Tor version remains online, but even that one disappeared for 48 hours. It is quite possible that this year-end marks the end of the biggest rights infringer in the ebook field in recent years, since for the moment, neither the site nor any of its mirrors seems to have reappeared.

Join us in 2023 for new articles on anti-piracy and cybersecurity.

Agence PDN wishes you a wonderful holiday season!