The Bescherming Rechten Entertainment Industrie Nederland is an advocacy group with international links, based in the Netherlands, which represents the interests of the Dutch entertainment industry and is organised under the Dutch law through the legal form of stichting. It is notable for launching court proceedings against copyright infringement in the country and for engaging in lobbying in order to create legal precedents of global significance.
The Pirate Bay, commonly abbreviated as TPB, is a freely searchable online index of movies, music, video games, pornography and software. Founded in 2003 by Swedish think tank Piratbyrån, The Pirate Bay facilitates the connection among users of the peer-to-peer torrent protocol, which are able to contribute to the site through the addition of magnet links. The Pirate Bay has consistently ranked as one of the most visited torrent websites in the world.
This is a timeline of events in the history of networked file sharing.
isoHunt was an online torrent files index and repository, where visitors could browse, search, download or upload torrents of various digital content of mostly entertainment nature. The website was taken down in October 2013 as a result of a legal action from the MPAA; by the end of October 2013 however, two sites with content presumably mirrored from isohunt.com were reported in media. One of them – isohunt.to – became a de facto replacement of the original site. It is not associated in any way with the old staff or owners of the site, and is to be understood as a separate continuation.
TorrentFreak (TF) is a blog dedicated to reporting the latest news and trends on the BitTorrent protocol and file sharing, as well as on copyright infringement and digital rights.
Torrentz was a Finland-based metasearch engine for BitTorrent, run by an individual known as Flippy and founded on 24 July 2003. It indexed torrents from various major torrent websites and offered compilations of various trackers per torrent that were not necessarily present in the default .torrent file, so that when a tracker was down, other trackers could do the work. It was the second most popular torrent website in 2012.
This is a comparison of BitTorrent websites that includes most of the most popular sites. These sites typically contain multiple torrent files and an index of those files.
TPB AFK: The Pirate Bay Away From Keyboard is a 2013 Swedish documentary film directed and produced by Simon Klose. It focuses on the lives of the three founders of The Pirate Bay – Peter Sunde, Fredrik Neij, and Gottfrid Svartholm – and the Pirate Bay trial. Filming began sometime in 2008, and concluded on 28 February 2012.
KickassTorrents was a website that provided a directory for torrent files and magnet links to facilitate peer-to-peer file sharing using the BitTorrent protocol. It was founded in 2008 and by November 2014, KAT became the most visited BitTorrent directory in the world, overtaking The Pirate Bay, according to the site's Alexa ranking. KAT went offline on 20 July 2016 when the domain was seized by the U.S. government. The site's proxy servers were shut down by its staff at the same time.
This is a list of countries where at least one internet service provider (ISP) formerly or currently censors the popular file sharing website The Pirate Bay (TPB).
Nyaa Torrents is a BitTorrent website focused on East Asian media. It is one of the largest public anime-dedicated torrent indexes.
RARBG was a website that provided torrent files and magnet links to facilitate peer-to-peer file sharing using the BitTorrent protocol. From 2014 to 2023, RARBG repeatedly appeared in TorrentFreak's yearly list of most visited torrent websites. It was ranked 4th as of January 2023. The website did not allow users to upload their own torrents.
Mp3skull was a website that provided direct download links to MP3 files located on third-party sites. It was founded in 2010 and the site has been the subject of controversy for helping users to find unauthorized copies of copyrighted music.
TamilRockers is a torrent website based in India which facilitates the distribution of copyrighted material, including television shows, movies, music and videos. The site allows visitors to search for and download copyrighted material with the help of magnet links and torrent files, which facilitate peer-to-peer file sharing. It also operates multiple Telegram channels and groups with thousands of subscribers. TamilRockers is the tenth most popular torrent site in TorrentFreak's Top 10 Most Popular Torrent Sites of 2020 list.
YIFY Torrents or YTS was a peer-to-peer release group known for distributing large numbers of movies as free downloads through BitTorrent. YIFY releases were characterised through their small file size, which attracted many downloaders.
123Movies, GoMovies, GoStream, MeMovies or 123movieshub was a network of file streaming websites operating from Vietnam which allowed users to watch films for free. It was called the world's "most popular illegal site" by the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) in March 2018, before being shut down a few weeks later on foot of a criminal investigation by the Vietnamese authorities.
FMovies was a series of file streaming websites that host links and embedded videos, allowing users to stream or download movies for free. The sites have been subject to legal action in various jurisdictions on grounds of copyright infringement and piracy. In August 2024, the Alliance for Creativity and Entertainment announced that the site was shut down by Vietnamese authorities. The sites were receiving billions of views a year at its peak.
KissAnime was an anime-focused file streaming website that hosted links and embedded videos, allowing users to stream or download movies and TV shows illegally for free. It was a sister site to a related manga viewing website, KissManga. KissAnime was described as "one of the world’s biggest streaming anime websites". TorrentFreak reported that the sites had audiences of millions and that, for a time, KissAnime was "the most visited pirate site in the world".
Z-Library is a shadow library project for file-sharing access to scholarly journal articles, academic texts and general-interest books. It began as a mirror of Library Genesis, but has expanded dramatically.
Anna's Archive is an open source search engine for shadow libraries that was launched by the pseudonymous Anna shortly after law enforcement efforts to shut down Z-Library in 2022. It aggregates records from several major shadow libraries, including Z-Library, Sci-Hub, and Library Genesis, as well as other sources. It calls itself "the largest truly open library in human history", and has said it aims to "catalog all the books in existence" and "track humanity's progress toward making all these books easily available in digital form". It claims not to be responsible for downloads of copyrighted materials, since the site indexes metadata and links to third-party downloads but does not directly host any files. However, it has faced government censorship and legal action from publishers and anti-piracy groups for engaging in large-scale copyright infringement.
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