NYAA is heralded as one of the top sources for anime content and has an audience of millions of regular users.

The site has operated for years without any significant trouble. However, a few hours ago it suddenly became unreachable due to a worrying domain name issue.

The NYAA.se domain was updated with the infamous “serverhold” status (see update below) which suggests that the responsible registry interfered. The status has been used in the past when domain names have been flagged due to copyright issues and stripped of their DNS entries.

“This status code is set by your domain’s Registry Operator. Your domain is not activated in the DNS,” ICANN writes.

As a result of the issue, NYAA is no longer accessible from its .SE domain. TorrentFreak reached out to the responsible registry for a comment, but at the time of writing we haven’t heard back.

If the registry is indeed involved, then there must be some sort of legal authority backing the request. The .SE domain registry previously stated that it will not suspend any domain names unless there is a court order.

“We believe that the judicial authorities should determine whether or not it is appropriate to take action against a particular domain name registrant. Unless we have been ordered to do so, there is a risk that we could call the validity of the legal process into question by taking action before a ruling is passed,” Punkt SE said.

Thus far it’s unclear on what grounds the domain was deactivated. A copyright complaint is one of the possibilities, but this hasn’t been confirmed. The same is true for a manual removal by the owner (see update).

Whatever the reason for the deactivation, there’s still hope for the site’s users. In theory, the NYAA team could return online if they setup an alternative domain. That is, if the domain name deactivation is the only issue they are facing at the moment, which remains to be seen.

If more information becomes available on NYAA’s domain name troubles we will update this article accordingly.

Update: The NYAAtorrents.org and NYAA.eu domains are also deactivated now.

Update: There are several people suggesting that the domain names were taken down by the owner. The org domain also has a “pendingDelete,” which could back this up. When a domain is deleted before the expiry date it could trigger a “serverhold” status, which is generally set by the registry.

There are also some screenshots in circulation that would back this up. However, TorrentFreak hasn’t been able to verify these.

We can only speculate, but given that the domains were registered through different companies, manual removal by the owner would be a plausible explanation at this point. The article was updated to reflect this option.

Source: TF, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing, torrent sites and ANONYMOUS VPN services.

Every year the Office of the United States Trade Representative (USTR) publishes its Special 301 Report highlighting countries that aren’t doing enough to protect U.S. intellectual property rights.

The format remains the same as in previous years and lists roughly two dozen countries that, for different reasons, threaten the intellectual property rights of US companies.

The latest report, which just came out, is the first under the administration of President Trump and continues where Obama left off. China, Russia, Ukraine, and India are listed among the priority threats, and Canada and Switzerland remain on the general Watch List.

“One of the top trade priorities for the Trump Administration is to use all possible sources of leverage to encourage other countries to open their markets to U.S. exports of goods and services, and provide adequate and effective protection and enforcement of U.S. intellectual property (IP) rights,” the USTR writes.

One of the main problems the US has with Canada is that it doesn’t allow border protection officials to seize or destroy pirated and counterfeit goods that are passing through.

In addition, the US is fiercely against Canada’s fair dealing rules, which adds educational use to the list of copyright infringement exceptions. According to the US, the language used in the law is too broad, damaging the rights of educational publishers.

“The United States also remains deeply troubled by the broad interpretation of an ambiguous education-related exception to copyright that has significantly damaged the market for educational publishers and authors.”

In the past, Canada has also been called out for offering a safe haven to pirate sites, but there is no mention of this in the 2017 report (pdf).

That said, pirate site hosting remains a problem in many other countries including Switzerland, with the USTR noting that the country has become an “increasingly popular host country for websites offering infringing content” since 2010.

While the Swiss Government is taking steps to address these concerns, another enforcement problem also requires attention. One of the key issues the United States has with Switzerland originates from the so-called ‘Logistep Decision.‘

In 2010 the Swiss Federal Supreme Court barred anti-piracy outfit Logistep from harvesting the IP addresses of file-sharers. The Court ruled that IP addresses amount to private data, and outlawed the tracking of file-sharers in Switzerland.

According to the US, this ruling prevents copyright holders from enforcing their rights, and they call on the Swiss Government to address this concern.

“Switzerland remains on the Watch List this year due to U.S. concerns regarding specific difficulties in Switzerland’s system of online copyright protection and enforcement,” the USTR writes.

“Seven years have elapsed since the issuance of a decision by the Swiss Federal Supreme Court, which has been implemented to essentially deprive copyright holders in Switzerland of the means to enforce their rights against online infringers. Enforcement is a critical element of providing meaningful IP protection.”

The above points are merely a selection of the many complaints the United States has about a variety of countries. As is often the case, the allegations are in large part based on reports from copyright-heavy industries, in some cases demanding measures that are not even in effect in the US itself.

By calling out foreign governments, the USTR hopes to elicit change. However, not all countries are receptive to this kind of diplomatic pressure. Canada, for one, said it does’t recognize the Special 301 Report and plans to follow its own path.

“Canada does not recognize the validity of the Special 301 and considers the process and the Report to be flawed,” the Government wrote in a previous memo regarding last year’s report.

“The Report fails to employ a clear methodology and the findings tend to rely on industry allegations rather than empirical evidence and objective analysis,” it added.

Source: TF, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing, torrent sites and ANONYMOUS VPN services.

In 2015, the UK Government announced a controversial plan to increase the maximum prison sentence for online copyright infringement from two to ten years.

The proposal followed a suggestion put forward in a study commissioned by the UK Intellectual Property Office (IPO). The study concluded that criminal sanctions for online copyright infringement available under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 (CDPA 1988) should be harmonized with ‘offline’ penalties, such as those available for counterfeiting.

“By toughening penalties for commercial-scale online offending we are offering greater protections to businesses and sending a clear message to deter criminals,” then Intellectual Property Minister Baroness Neville-Rolfe said at the time.

In July 2016, the government published a new draft of its Digital Economy Bill which duly proposed an extension of the current prison term of two years to a maximum of ten.

Throughout the entire process of passing the legislation, the government has insisted that ‘regular’ members of the public would not be subjected to harsh punishments. However, that is not how the legislation reads.

As detailed in our earlier article, anyone who makes infringing content available to the public while merely putting a copyright holder at risk of loss, is now committing a criminal offense.

There are a number of variables, but this is the relevant part distilled down for the average file-sharer who downloads as well as uploads, using BitTorrent, for example.

A person…who infringes copyright in a work by communicating the work to the public commits an offense if [the person] knows or has reason to believe that [they are] infringing copyright in the work, and…knows or has reason to believe that communicating the work to the public will cause loss to the owner of the copyright, or will expose the owner of the copyright to a risk of loss.

Earlier this year, the Open Rights Group launched a campaign to try and make the government see sense. ORG did not dispute that there need to be penalties for online infringement but asked the government make amendments to target large-scale infringers while protecting the public.

“Our proposal is to set a threshold of ‘commercial scale loss’, and revising ‘risk of loss’ to ‘serious risk of commercial scale loss’. These are flexible rather than ‘specific’,” ORG said.

But the group’s appeals fell on deaf ears. No one in the law-making process was prepared to make this minor change to the Digital Economy Bill, even though legislation already exists for punishing even the smallest of copyright infringements through the civil courts.

As a result, the bill received royal assent last week which means that the country’s millions of small-time copyright infringers are now criminals in the eyes of the law.

Worst still, depending on the whims of copyright holders, any one could now be reported to the police for sharing even a single movie, an offense (as painted in our hypothetical piece in March) that could result in years in jail.

The government says that won’t be allowed. We’ll see.

Source: TF, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing, torrent sites and ANONYMOUS VPN services.

Last spring, members of the Australian music industry teamed up to file their first ‘pirate’ site blocking request Down Under.

In an application at the Federal Court, member labels Universal Music, Warner Music, Sony Music and J Albert & Son demanded that then leading torrent site KickassTorrents (KAT) should be blocked by the country’s ISPs.

The labels argued that KickassTorrents showed a “complete disrespect for music creators and the value of music,” and wanted Internet users to be prohibited from accessing the site.

However, before the court could decide, KAT was already ‘taken care of‘ by the U.S. Department of Justice, which shut it down.

That didn’t end the blocking effort in Australia though. Instead of going after the main KickassTorrents site, which no longer exists, the labels changed their focus to the various spinoffs that appeared in its wake.

A few days ago the Federal Court issued its judgment, ordering 20 Australian Internet providers to block a variety of domain names.

The new targets, which shifted quite a bit as the case progressed, include Katcr.co, the KAT ‘reincarnation‘ that was launched by a group of former staffers of the original site.

In addition, the order also listed some domains that have absolutely nothing to do with the original KickassTorrents. Kickass.cd, for example, which is little more than a dressed up Pirate Bay mirror.

Justice Burley is nonetheless convinced that the domain names in question deserve to be blocked, relying on the argument that KAT’s primary motive was to infringe or facilitate copyright infringement.

“The large number of monthly visits to the KAT website indicate that the infringement facilitated by the KAT website can be described as flagrant and reflect an open disregard for copyright on the part of the operators of the KAT website,” SMH quotes Justice Burley.

The ISPs in question now have two weeks to implement reasonable measures to block these domains.

Whether this will stop people from infringing is unclear though. A similar Federal Court targeted at The Pirate Bay, Torrentz, TorrentHound, IsoHunt and streaming service SolarMovie was quickly defeated earlier this year.

Source: TF, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing, torrent sites and ANONYMOUS VPN services.

This week we have two newcomers in our chart.

Logan is the most downloaded movie for the third week in a row.

The data for our weekly download chart is estimated by TorrentFreak, and is for informational and educational reference only. All the movies in the list are Web-DL/Webrip/HDRip/BDrip/DVDrip unless stated otherwise.

RSS feed for the weekly movie download chart.

This week’s most downloaded movies are:

Movie Rank	Rank last week	Movie name	IMDb Rating / Trailer
Most downloaded movies via torrents
1	(1)	Logan (Subbed HDRip)	8.6 / trailer
2	(…)	Fifty Shades Darker	4.7 / trailer
3	(3)	Kong: Skull Island (Subbed HDRip)	7.0 / trailer
4	(5)	Split	7.0 / trailer
5	(2)	The Fate of the Furious	6.7 / trailer
6	(…)	Colossal	7.4 / trailer
7	(4)	Get Out (Subbed HDRip)	8.1 / trailer
8	(8)	The Boss Baby (HD-TS)	6.5 / trailer
9	(7)	La La Land	8.4 / trailer
10	(10)	Ghost in The Shell (HDTS)	6.9 / trailer

Source: TF, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing, torrent sites and ANONYMOUS VPN services.