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    IP Knowledge Center

    Which VPN Providers Really Take Privacy Seriously in 2023?

    • 24.07.2023
    • By Ernesto Van der Sar

    Choosing the right VPN can be a tricky endeavor. There are hundreds of VPN services out there promising to improve users' privacy, but some are more private than others. To help you pick the best one for your needs, we asked dozens of VPNs to detail their logging practices, how they handle torrent users, and what else they do to keep you as anonymous as possible.

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    AUSTRALIAN PIRATES PLAGUED BY CYBERCRIME

    • 28.04.2023
    • By Content Cafe Australia

    New research reveals Australians are bypassing site blocks and exposing themselves to cybercrime.

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    ALLIANCE FOR CREATIVITY AND ENTERTAINMENT SHUTS DOWN FRANCE’S SECOND LARGEST ILLEGAL STREAMING AND DIRECT DOWNLOAD SITE

    • 02.03.2023
    • By ACE

    Extreme-down had more than 14 million monthly visitors

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    ALLIANCE FOR CREATIVITY AND ENTERTAINMENT SHUTS DOWN INTERNATIONAL PIRACY OPERATION IN VIETNAM

    • 01.03.2023
    • By ACE

    Hanoi-based piracy ring targeted global audience, especially u.s. users, with english-language programming.

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    ACE COOPERATES WITH EGYPTIAN AUTHORITIES TO SHUT DOWN SECOND-LARGEST PIRACY OPERATION IN MIDDLE EAST

    • 18.02.2023
    • By ACE

    Illegal egypt-based service included content from all ace members.

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    ACE JOINS FORCES WITH EGYPTIAN AUTHORITIES TO SHUT DOWN LARGEST PIRACY RING IN MIDDLE EAST-NORTH AFRICA REGION

    • 18.02.2023
    • By ACE

    Unprecedented joint action shutters massive ring that drew 155 million monthly visitors

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    The Challenges of the Indie Musician: Piracy, the Value Gap, Broadcast Royalty Exemptions…and Now (For Foreign Performers) a Possible Tripling in US Visa Fees.

    • 14.02.2023
    • By Hugh Stephens

    It has always been a challenge for indie musicians and performers to earn a living, and it looks like it may soon get worse for performers outside the US who hope to play gigs there. Among the big challenges to earning a living from music are piracy, the “value gap”, COVID and now a new hurdle, a possible tripling of visa processing fees for performers to enter the US.

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    Stay safe online and find your favourite film and TV the right way.

    • 08.02.2023
    • By Content Cafe

    There really is a plethora of legal content online that you can enjoy at your leisure, most of them have flexible payment options which allow you to dip in, and dip out, and many are free, thanks to Australia’s robust free-to-air offering. If you’re wondering why it matters? Just remember that if you love to watch film and TV then watching it via legal platforms will ensure creators get paid and can continue bringing you the content you love.

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    ALLIANCE FOR CREATIVITY AND ENTERTAINMENT SHUTS DOWN POPULAR PIRACY SITES IN SPAIN

    • 04.02.2023
    • By ACE

    HD-Spain and Pixelados drew more than 300,000 monthly visits.

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    Talking Piracy with Meta’s Chatbot

    • 27.01.2023
    • By CreativeFuture

    Although Vox gave us reasons to doubt BlenderBot’s judgment, we thought that a dialogue with BlenderBot might help to improve its appreciation for copyright. After all, Meta hopes its AI will learn through conversation.

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    Guest Post: Jenil Shah: Importance of Cross Border Public-Private Partnership to tackle Online Piracy

    • 05.12.2022
    • By Jenil Shah

    While the global media and entertainment (M&E) sector has seen recovery as well as significant growth after the pandemic, online piracy has also been growing with estimates that the illegal pirate video services will be a $67 billion industry by 2023.

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    REPORT: Disturbing threats lurk on pirate sites

    • 18.09.2022
    • By Fact UK

    New research carried out by OpenText Security Solutions on behalf of FACT in the UK has revealed some disturbing threats lurking on illegal streaming sites as pirate site operators turn to questionable means to generate an income.

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    ALLIANCE FOR CREATIVITY AND ENTERTAINMENT SHUTS DOWN ILLEGAL GERMAN-LANGUAGE STREAMING SITES HDFILME AND XCINE

    • 08.09.2022
    • By ALLIANCE FOR CREATIVITY AND ENTERTAINMENT

    The Alliance for Creativity and Entertainment (ACE), the world’s leading coalition dedicated to protecting the dynamic legal ecosystem and reducing digital piracy, has shut down the illegal German-language streaming sites HDFilme and xCine, which were operated out of Vietnam.

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    Rated Arrrrr: Why piracy is the high-stakes fight hurting Hollywood far more than the streaming war

    • 30.07.2022
    • By Barry Hertz

    It is the thick of the first true summer movie season in three years, and audiences have never had so much choice. Blockbusters (Top Gun: Maverick), superhero epics (Thor: Love and Thunder), kid flicks (Minions: The Rise of Gru), rom-coms (The Lost City): they’re all here! Oh, I don’t mean in theatres. All the titles above – and so many more – are now available online, for free, via piracy sites.

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    A Note to Our Fellow Creatives: This Is What We’re Fighting For

    • 19.07.2022
    • By Ruth Vitale

    Eight years ago, I stepped away from a three-decades long career as a film executive – because I realized that piracy in the age of the internet posed a significant threat to the creative industries, and we all had to work together to do something about it.

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    Big Wins for Site Blocking as a Means to Counteract Online Content Piracy

    • 06.07.2022
    • By Hugh Stephens

    Site blocking—aka disabling access to copyright infringing websites and services—continues to gain wider acceptance as a useful tool in the fight against online content piracy. Several recent developments provide a good indication of the increasing acceptance of site blocking orders as a tool to dissuade users from accessing copyright infringing online streaming content.

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    ACE SUCCESSFULLY TEAMED WITH BRAZILIAN, US AND BRITISH AUTHORITIES AND DEPLOYED THE FOURTH WAVE OF “OPERATION 404” IN BRAZIL

    • 27.06.2022
    • By ACE

    The Alliance for Creativity and Entertainment (ACE) today announced success in the unprecedented fourth wave of Operation 404 in Brazil. Operation 404, a major Brazilian multi-jurisdictional effort designed to curb digital piracy throughout Brazil and other Portuguese speaking end users’ countries, was first deployed on November 2019 and continues to be the most successful online anti-piracy operation in the country’s history.

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    GUEST POST: ADMINISTRATIVE SITE BLOCKING – INDONESIA LEADS THE DIGITAL ANTI-PIRACY EFFORTS- BY JENIL SHAH

    • 22.06.2022
    • By Jenil Shah

    With the rapid expansion of digital technology, internet piracy has only increased and has therefore become a major concern for the creative community which includes writers, performers, lyricists and copyright owners.

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    beIN Sports welcomes site-blocking ruling by Paris Court of Justice

    • 27.01.2022
    • By STUART THOMSON

    New French media regulator Arcom, has more power to assist in the fight against piracy of live broadcasts after a Paris Court of Justice ruled that they could request ISPs to block any new site that illegally retransmits live.

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    Insights from Industry Insiders – Claire Pullen & Matthew Deaner

    • 22.12.2021
    • By Content Cafe

    Each month we hear from industry insiders in Australia and abroad to get their take on content piracy. Is content protection improving? How do we stop piracy? How does Australia compare to the rest of the world? These are some of the questions we'll be exploring with leaders across the content industry.

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    Damages sought against PrimeWire piracy site which claims to operate under the laws of the “Klingon Empire”

    • 22.12.2021
    • By Piracy Monitor

    PrimeWire’s revenue is sourced via advertising and it offers a massive library of unrestricted on-demand movies. Trial by jury will make available damages of US$150,000 per instance.

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    CREATING A ROBUST FRAMEWORK FOR THE CREATIVE ECONOMY IN THE DIGITAL AGE

    • 10.11.2021
    • By NS Nappinai

    A fruitful discussion with NS Nappinai, a Supreme Court advocate & founder of Cyber Saathi, on the need for a robust policy and a legislative framework for the creative economy in the digital age.

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    There will never be a legal ‘celestial jukebox’ to compete with piracy

    • 07.10.2021
    • By David Newhoff

    For more than twenty years and counting, media piracy apologists have repeated some variation of the argument which says, “People are willing to pay for content as long as it is made conveniently available at a fair price.”

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    IPRMENTLAW WEEKLY HIGHLIGHTS (September 21st to September 26th)

    • 27.09.2021
    • By Sudarshan Mohta

    Twitter appoints personnel in compliance of with new IT Rules.

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    Piracy likened to shooting “fish in a barrel” during the pandemic

    • 27.08.2021
    • By David Newhoff

    Consumers, small businesses and corporations have become more vulnerable to hackers and cyber-pirates during the pandemic, according to Tom Galvin, CEO of Digital Citizens Alliance (DCA), a consumer-focused group dedicated to raising awareness among the public and policymakers about how to make the Internet safer.

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    Global sports industry urged to act in concert to defeat growing digital piracy threat

    • 26.08.2021
    • By Neil Gane

    Collaboration between sporting bodies and rights holders is a key strategy in the fight against digital piracy, according to The Alliance for Creativity and Entertainment’s Neil Gane.

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    Much ado about nothing: have concerns over site blocking materialised?

    • 20.08.2021
    • By Peter Carstairs

    Having worked as both a filmmaker and a copyright lawyer, the issue of online piracy is one that is close to my heart. The copyright protection of an artist’s work is essential, firstly, to making a living but, secondly, to enable the funding of new works. Simply, it is a way of recognising an artist’s work.

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    Surprise! Canadians Like to Pirate NHL Games–But Dynamic Site Blocking Orders May Soon Put a Stop to the Free Rides

    • 16.08.2021
    • By Hugh Stephens

    What could be more Canadian than the pirating of hockey broadcasts, eh? It’s like Spaniards pirating broadcasts of bull fights. In neither case is it justified but it reflects how “pirate priorities” reflect the national psyche. 

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    Criminals reap US$1.34 billion in advertising annually from illegal entertainment websites and apps

    • 12.08.2021
    • By Digital Citizens Alliance

    Amazon, Facebook, and Google are among the global brands that fund an estimated $US1.34 billion in advertising annually on film, TV and games piracy websites and apps, according to a new research from the Digital Citizens Alliance and White Bullet.

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    Tackling the growing sports piracy problem prompts call for faster take down regimes

    • 11.08.2021
    • By David Newhoff

    Consistent with other piracy studies, Synamedia’s data reveal that most fans mix legal and illegal viewing, often for obvious reasons like inaccessibility due to regional licensing.

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    Insights from Industry Insiders: Eileen Camilleri

    • 20.07.2021
    • By Eileen Camilleri

    The biggest impact of piracy, unfortunately, is a financial one. It is already difficult for creatives to earn a living through their work and piracy makes it that much harder. Less money flowing to creatives means less resources and opportunity for cultural goods which is a net loss to society as a whole.

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    Sniffing Out the Truth in Advertising to Pirates

    • 07.07.2021
    • By Ruth Vitale

    We can all agree that stealing a car or a computer constitutes a crime – but stealing a movie? Well, as TorrentFreak put it earlier this year, they believe that a creative whose work is being pirated is presented with an “opportunity.”

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    Learning anti-piracy best practices from the studios

    • 05.07.2021
    • By Steve Hawley

    Attacks on IT and communications infrastructure – not to mention against media providers – by commercial and industrialized pirates and even by nation-state actors has become well documented.

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    Insights from Industry Insiders with Diane Hamer

    • 03.07.2021
    • By Diane Hamer

    Piracy threatens to undermine that exclusivity. This in turn can adversely impact the fees licensees are willing to pay to buy our content, which means BBC Studios has less money to invest in future content. It’s a vicious circle.

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    For Hollywood studios, anti-piracy begins with distribution agreements

    • 24.06.2021
    • By Steve Hawley

    We all know that ‘content owners care about piracy.’ But the concerns of content owners and rights-holders that want to protect their content against theft are quite different from the concerns of distributors and online video providers who want to minimize churn and theft of service.

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    Screens & Cinemas: Resilience Through Uncertainty

    • 10.06.2021
    • By Kamal Gianchandani

    Creative First in Conversation with Mr.Kamal Gianchandani, CEO of PVR Pictures Limited, and President of Multiplex Association of India.

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    Blocking Offshore Pirate Content Sites: The Philippines is Joining a Growing International Consensus

    • 03.06.2021
    • By Hugh Stephens

    In the ongoing struggle against content piracy, a global scourge that undermines and competes unfairly with legitimate content producers and distributors, blocking offshore web and streaming sites that distribute pirated content has proven to be an effective tool in many countries.

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    Cinemas, Content & COVID

    • 20.05.2021
    • By Vivek Krishnani

    In conversation with Vivek Krishnani, Managing Director, ‎Sony Pictures Films India

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    Streaming pirates and broadcasters have a lot in common – with one big difference

    • 06.05.2021
    • By Damien Bidmead

    Contrary to the popular saying, crime does sometimes pay.

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    Charles Rivkin Remarks at the Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce and Industry (FICCI) Frames

    • 28.04.2021
    • By Creative First

    Thank you, Uday, and thank you, FICCI, for inviting me to Frames. It’s an honor to speak before such a vibrant […]

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    Real-Time Piracy Enforcement: The Answer to Sports Broadcasters’ Vengeful Prayers

    • 30.03.2021
    • By Peter Szyszko

    The window of opportunity in elite sport is incredibly narrow, in every sense: careers are short; entire matches turn on split-second incidents; and mass content piracy surges up around a particular event and then disappears again like smoke.

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    Why brands must wake up to the expanding universe of online piracy

    • 11.03.2021
    • By Peter Szyszko

    With close to a billion dollars in advertising revenue found to be going to pirate websites each year, brand marketers need to understand the risk of associating with piracy and get wise to the tactics used by these online fraudsters.

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    Three In Five Consumers Unaware Of The Hidden Dangers Of Piracy: Fraud, Malware And Identity Theft

    • 27.01.2021
    • By FACT

    62% of people in the UK unwittingly putting themselves and their new gadgets at risk through piracy.

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    YouTube Battles Complex ‘Borderline’ Content While Ignoring What’s Simple – Piracy

    • 20.12.2020
    • By Ruth Vitale

    YouTube is losing the battle against toxic content.

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    Scary Stories Rebel in the Dark: A Tale of Piracy on Reddit and the Writers Who Fought Back

    • 07.05.2020
    • By Justin Sanders

    Online piracy is a monster looking to devour all creative content, even when posted for free. Contributors to r/nosleep willingly offered their gut-wrenching works without expectation of payment, but that didn’t stop a faction of the forum’s subscriber base from taking many of the stories and using them without permission anyway.

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    How a ‘Line Art Duo’ Survives in a Cutthroat Indie Comics Industry Where Piracy is Rampant

    • 08.04.2020
    • By Justin Sanders

    With their expressive visuals and cartoony speech bubbles, comic books offer the breeziest of reading pleasures, even when the material is dark or heavy. But don’t mistake “breezy” for “easy.”

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    COVID is Not an Excuse to Throw the Accepted Rules Out the Window: Copyright as the Canary in the Coalmine.

    • 08.04.2020
    • By Hugh Stephens

    As I write we are in the depths of the COVID pandemic. Each day brings new and more frightening predictions of what is to come, what we all need to do to “bend the curve”, and how it is affecting people globally from both a health and economic perspective.

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    Like Kodi, Plex is a Technology Making Piracy Worse

    • 11.03.2020
    • By CreativeFuture

    With streaming entrenched as the dominant form of video consumption online, it’s easy to forget that piracy via the illegal downloading of actual files (AKA the old-fashioned way), remains alive and well.

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    What We Talk About When We Talk About Book Piracy

    • 26.02.2020
    • By Justin Sanders

    Let’s be clear – it’s difficult to make a living in any creative pursuit. However, it’s especially difficult to make a living as an author.

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    Tightening The Screws On Pirate Websites Through Dynamic Website Blocking Injunctions

    • 25.08.2019
    • By Hugh Stephens

    A pirate site is blocked through a court order yet like a chameleon it changes its colour (and IP address or URL) and is back up again tomorrow under a different guise. This is the reality that rights-holders have to face repeatedly in dealing with slippery pirate operators. But relief is coming.

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    Indian Cinema and the Man with the Midas Touch

    • 18.03.2019
    • By Trishi Jindal

    Concluding the first day of FICCI Frames, Rohit Shetty skilfully wove in insights from his illustrious career with the current needs and challenges of the Indian screen industry.

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    “OK Google – It’s Time To Remove Sports Piracy Streams From Your Search Results”

    • 07.03.2019
    • By Creative Future

    We’re Americans. We love sports. We get all wrapped up in the players on the field, or the court, or the […]

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    Maharashtra’s Big Push to Eliminate Piracy

    • 28.08.2018
    • By Creative First

    In 2016, Maharashtra saw a massive growth in cyber crimes. The government responded by creating the Maharashtra Cyber Digital Crime Unit (MCDCU) and becoming the first state to launch a cyber police station in every district.

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