GoKawiil
Tech News
Overdrive, an unofficial PS5 storefront offering more than 1,600 pirated PS4 and PS5 games for jailbroken consoles, has gone offline after its developer reportedly received a cease-and-desist notice from Sony. The project went viral after modder Edigax shared it on social media, but within hours of its removal, multiple forked versions appeared on GitHub, with one already listing over 1,800 titles.
The Entertainment Software Association submitted recommendations to the US Trade Representative identifying Chinese-made handheld gaming devices, including those from Anbernic, as major piracy offenders. The ESA says these 'superfake' consoles ship with hundreds or thousands of pirated ROMs preloaded and may run insecure or malicious firmware. It cited an Italian enforcement action that seized roughly 12,000 Anbernic devices containing more than 47 million pirated files.
The Entertainment Software Association has petitioned the US Trade Representative to designate Chinese handheld maker Anbernic as a 'Notorious Market' for copyright piracy and trademark counterfeiting. The ESA's filing says Anbernic devices are routinely sold with removable memory cards preloaded with thousands of unauthorized game ROMs, though Anbernic's own website does not appear to ship devices this way. TorrentFreak first reported the submission, which was filed last week.
Nintendo of America won a $4.5 million default judgment against James Williams, who allegedly moderated the r/SwitchPirates subreddit and ran online shops selling pirated Switch games. Nintendo sued Williams in June 2024, but he stopped responding to the case, prompting the company to request and receive a default judgment. The court has ordered Williams to pay the damages and immediately shut down all pirated game shops he operates or controls.
Rehan Ahmed, 40, was sentenced after London police raided his company Phoenix of Vinyl and found 2,791 fake vinyl records covering 108 artists, including Adele, Beyoncé and the Beatles. The British Phonographic Industry triggered the raid after a test purchase, and BPI director Peter Ratcliffe says the operation cost artists and labels tens of millions of pounds.
A US District Court awarded Nintendo $4.5 million in damages against James Williams, known online as Archbox, after he failed to respond to the company's lawsuit. Nintendo had accused Williams of running Pirate Shops and using the 190,000-member r/SwitchPirates subreddit to direct users to pirated game downloads and circumvention tools. Judge Lauren King granted the default judgment on September 23, also issuing a permanent injunction requiring Williams to shut down any related shops and stop distributing pirated titles.
Nintendo of America won a $4.5 million default judgment against James Williams, known online as Archbox, over allegations he ran online shops selling pirated Switch games. The suit, filed in 2024, claimed Williams was the operator behind several 'Pirate Shops,' and he was ordered to shut down access to any such shops he controls. Williams reportedly did not respond to the lawsuit, leading the court to rule in Nintendo's favor by default.
A federal judge in Washington ordered James Williams, a moderator of the r/SwitchPirates subreddit known as 'archbox,' to pay Nintendo $4.5 million after he failed to respond to a 2024 lawsuit. The judgment covers 30 pirated games at $150,000 each, including titles like Animal Crossing: New Horizons and Pikmin 4, and requires Williams to shut down his alleged pirate shops and related social media accounts.
Court documents made public in an ongoing copyright lawsuit reveal internal OpenAI communications in which employees discussed the expense and legality of acquiring books to train early ChatGPT models, with some staff flagging the sourcing as questionable. The messages suggest teams weighed pirated material as a cheaper alternative to licensing content properly.
Martin Paul Eve's book 'Warez: The Infrastructure and Aesthetics of Piracy' offers the first academic study of the 'Scene,' an elite, secretive network of pirate groups that race to release music, films, games and software before their official launch dates. It traces the Scene's roots from pre-internet Bulletin Board Systems to modern FTP 'topsites,' examining its internal rules, social hierarchies, and artistic traditions such as release art.
Sony Music Publishing, Warner Chappell and other music publishers have filed suit against Anthropic and its co-founders Dario Amodei and Benjamin Mann in a California federal court, accusing the AI company of torrenting and scraping copyrighted song lyrics and sheet music to train its Claude models. Anthropic says it disagrees with the claims and plans to fight the case in court.