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A court in Murcia, Spain, has ordered Google to testify in a criminal case concerning IPTV app, NewPlay. Football league LaLiga, whose matches were allegedly offered illegally through the app, previously called for the directors of Google, Apple, and Huawei to face criminal charges. LaLiga criticized the companies for failing to disable copies of NewPlay already installed on users' devices. Google and Huawei must now testify as 'profit-making participants' in an alleged piracy scheme.

In response to several court orders, Cloudflare geoblocked more than 400 sports streaming piracy domain names on its pass-through service in France last year. Notably. Cloudflare says that, despite requests, it has not blocked any websites through the 1.1.1.1 Public DNS Resolver. That last comment is relevant to the renewed site blocking push in the United States.

For people who pirate HBO service products, no changes, your lifetime subscription to piracy is still valid.

Before the Oscars are handed out early March, the Motion Picture Association (MPA) has announced its own annual awards. Wicked director Jon Chu is a proud recipient, but the bulk of the accolades go to lawmakers and the U.S. Government's IPR Center, who helped to combat online piracy. Perhaps not coincidentally, those lawmakers could help to push a pirate site blocking bill over the line.

WTF!

A sustained campaign by U.S. authorities has led to the seizure of a growing number of pirate sports streaming domains. The IPR Center is now listed as the owner of dozens of .DEV domains, which were signed over as part of the seizure operation. Previously, close to a hundred .APP domains linked to piracy suffered the same fate.

A renewed attempt to introduce site blocking in the U.S. emerged in late January when U.S. Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D) introduced the Foreign Anti-Digital Piracy Act. The FADPA bill received the MPA's full support, and it now transpires that similar legislation is being prepared by U.S. Rep. Darrell Issa (R). A recent meeting to discuss the 'American Copyright Protection Act' was attended by Disney, Paramount, and Amazon, plus Google, YouTube, and Verizon.

Following the arrest of Telegram founder Pavel Durov in France last summer, some positive changes were reported. The criminal probe is not centered on piracy, but Telegram appeared more responsive. Some reported that the speed at which takedown requests were processed, went from more than 24 hours to less than 20 minutes, for example.

In addition, Telegram updated its terms of service and privacy policy to clarify that, going forward, personal details of alleged infringers, including their IP addresses, would be handed over in response to valid legal requests.

This stricter policy was evident to outsiders as well. Telegram removed accounts of piracy associated websites and services, after initially leaving these untouched for years. That included the official Z-Library channel, which had more than half a million subscribers at its peak.

Although Z-Library’s communication channel didn’t directly link to pirated books, it served as a key information hub, providing updates on new features and access methods. That was enough to warrant a permanent suspension last month.

The Telegram ban was a setback for Z-Library, but the shadow library wasted no time creating a new account and regaining tens of thousands of subscribers. Progress ground to a halt last weekend when the ‘new’ @zlibrary_news account was also suspended for copyright infringement.

“The channel is unavailable due to copyright infringement,” Telegram reports.

In addition to the main communication channel, one of the most used Z-Library download bots on Telegram was also taken offline. The @1lib account had more than 20,000 monthly users, who presumably used it as a handy tool to download books for free.

According to a Z-Library representative posting on X, Telegram took action in response to complaints from a major publisher. Many other ‘personal’ bots are unaffected and remain online for the time being.