Imagine having to check that none of your links' links are unauthorized.

People living in an encampment for the homeless in Florida have found themselves without Internet access following claims of illegal downloading. The operators of Dignity Village say that after several complaints from their ISP about piracy they had no choice but to stop providing free WiFi to all.

Earlier this week it was revealed that the Czech Pirate Party is being prosecuted for running a pirate TV show site. The party faces 200,000 euros in damages and could even be dissolved as a legal entity, but according to the chief of the party's International Department, defending Internet hyperlinking is worth the risk.

The popular torrent search engine Strike has shut down permanently. Following a lawsuit from the RIAA, developer Andrew Sampson decided to stay away from torrent released projects. To mark the end of a turbulent period, he has now released the search engine's source code to the public.

A couple of years ago, the Commerce Department put out a somewhat problematic "Green Paper" on copyright, that at times seemed to have been pretty heavily influenced by the maximalist view of the world, without recognition of how widely copyright is abused.

Typeface company Font Brothers has filed a lawsuit against Hasbro claiming that My Little Pony uses one of its fonts without permission. According to the complaint, Harbro refuses to pay the required licenses while it continues to use the font in its My Little Pony merchandise and products.

Pastry shops in Croatia are receiving legal threats over their use of popular cartoon and movie characters on children's birthday cakes. Baking cakes with a Star Wars or Minions theme is off-limits, as a local pastry chain has secured the rights from copyright owners.

Recent numbers show that the movie industry just broke the magic $11 billion barrier, generating more revenue than ever before at the North American box office. The revenue for 2015 totals $11.3 billion, which is roughly a 9% change compared to last year. The worldwide grosses also reached an all-time record according to research from Rentrak, which estimates the global grosses at a staggering $38 billion based on data from 25,000 theaters across the globe.

The ever-repeated parrot statement from the copyright industry is that "authors must be paid". This ignores the existence of Wikipedia and about three billion smartphones, and is therefore simply false.

Thousands of boats are stolen each year, and some are recovered using alcohol, prostitutes, witch doctors and other forms of guile. By Ian Urbina.

Last week the UK's most prolific movie pirates were handed sentences totaling 17 years. With claims in court that the men went to great lengths to hide their identities, just how easy was it to catch them? Papers detailing the investigation obtained by TorrentFreak reveal that tracking the men down was a relatively simple affair.

A New Zealand judge ruled Wednesday Internet mogul Kim Dotcom can be extradited to the United States where he is wanted on money laundering, racketeering and breach of copyright charges.

KickassTorrents, the world's most popular torrent site, has launched its own release group. KATRG has added more than twenty-one movie releases in the past several days, including Oscar screeners Room, Brooklyn and The Peanuts Movie. Perhaps unsurprisingly, copyright holders are already paying attention. When it comes to obtaining and placing unauthorized content online, so-called ‘release groups’ are what makes the world of piracy tick.

Today marks the end of a crucial case that will define how U.S. Internet providers deal with online piracy in the future. Following a two-week trial a Virginia federal jury reached a verdict earlier today (pdf), ruling that Cox is guilty of willful contributory copyright infringement. The case was initiated by BMG Rights Management, which held the ISP responsible for tens of thousands of copyright infringements that were committed by its subscribers.

A new study estimates that sites that traffic in pirated content collect $70 million per year for installing malware, underscoring the threat of content theft to consumers. The study, called “Digital Bait,” was commissioned by Digital Citizens Alliance and conducted by RiskIQ, and sampled 800 sites dedicated to distributing infringing movies and TV shows. According to RiskIQ, one out of every three of the sites contained malware.

“The internet is shit today. It’s broken. It was probably always broken, but it’s worse than ever.” My conversation with, Peter Sunde, one of the founders and spokespersons of The Pirate Bay, did not start out optimistically. There’s good reason for that: In the last couple of months, the contemporary download culture shows heavy signs of defeat in the battle for the internet. Last month we saw Demonii disappear. It was the biggest torrent tracker on the internet...

After considering the case for almost a month, the District Court of Stockholm ruled that copyright holders could not make Swedish ISP Bredbandsbolaget block Pirate Bay. The court found that Bredbandsbolaget's operations do not amount to participation in the copyright infringement offences carried out by some of its 'pirate' subscribers. Pirate Bay is blocked by many European ISPs but anti-piracy outfits have always hoped that one day the notorious site would be restricted in Sweden.

Udemy, an online learning service, has come under criticism for selling pirated courses. The controversy began this week, when security specialist Troy Hunt discovered that one of his courses on ethical hacking was available on Udemy under another author's name. As The Next Web reports, the video had been edited to remove Hunt's introduction at the beginning, but was otherwise unchanged from the version available on Pluralsight, the video's copyright holder.

Over the past 15 years countless individuals have faced financial punishments due to online copyright infringement offenses. But what happens when a case is won by copyright holders but the alleged pirate simply cannot pay? Answers to that question vary, but over in the Czech Republic the people at the Business Software Alliance (BSA) have come up with the most unusual solution so far to settle their case with a long-time pirate.

Google is facing a never-ending flood of takedown requests from copyright holders, breaking record after record. The company currently processes a record breaking 1,500 links to "pirate" pages from its search results every minute, which is a 100% increase compared to last year. In recent years copyright holders have flooded Google with DMCA takedown notices, asking the company to delete links to pirated content.