Overseas and Out of Reach:  International Video Piracy and U.S. Options to Combat It, released today by IP House and Digital Citizens Alliance (DCA) is one more reason the U.S. Congress should adopt site-blocking legislation to protect American creators and consumers. Thirteen years ago this coming January, Congress shelved bipartisan legislation that was designed to restrict foreign-based criminal enterprises from ...

The Motion Picture Association (MPA) has prefaced a renewed interest in site-blocking legislation to combat piracy. Will things be different this time? When the internet industry killed the antipiracy bills SOPA and PIPA in January 2012, I was a newbie blogger but guessed at the time that those parties had totally blown their wad on that campaign. First, there was ...

The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) announced that among the 2023 recipients of the EFF Award (formerly the Pioneer Award), it will honor Sci-Hub founder Alexandra Asanova Elbakyan this September. The Russian-based Sci-Hub is an enterprise-scale pirate site specifically built to host scientific papers about which the EFF states: Through Sci-Hub, Elbakyan has strived to shatter academic publishing’s monopoly-like mechanisms in ...

Digital Citizens Alliance (DCA) released a new report yesterday with the eye-popping statistic that 72% of Americans who subscribe to pirate media sites experience incidences of credit card fraud compared to 18% prevalence of credit card fraud among those who do not subscribe to pirate sites. These data are based on a survey of 2,030 Americans, of which 1 in ...

I know I’m arriving late to this party. It’s almost Thanksgiving, but it was back on November 3 that two Russian nationals—Anton Napolsky and Valeriia Ermakov—were arrested in Argentina at the request of the United States on charges of criminal copyright infringement, wire fraud, and money laundering. Concurrent with the arrests, authorities seized 241 domains controlled by the book piracy ...

Enjoy this blog? Please spread the word :)