📰 New article from TorrentFreak
2025: Two Decades of Piracy Reporting: TorrentFreak’s Retrospective
https://torrentfreak.com/2025-two-decades-of-piracy-reporting-torrentfreaks-retrospective/
20 Years of Piracy: From Torrents to AI, We’ve Come a Long Way
Remember when downloading a movie meant wrestling with eXeem’s adware and praying your ISP didn’t throttle you? Fast forward to 2025, and now AI models are trained on pirated books—and the RIAA is suing Spotify scrapers.
The early 2000s were wild: The Pirate Bay rose like a digital Robin Hood, Comcast sabotaged uploads with fake network signals, and the “Mega Song” featuring P. Diddy somehow got made (and then vanished). By 2016, giants like KickassTorrents and ExtraTorrent fell one by one—not because people stopped pirating, but because the legal hammer got heavier.
Then came 2020: lockdowns sent piracy soaring 40%, YouTube-dl got yanked from GitHub, and the world realized: we don’t need torrents anymore—we just need a shady app that says “stream for free.”
Now? AI companies are quietly slurping up pirate archives like Books3. Z-Library’s seizure felt like the end of an era—until Anna’s Archive scraped 86 million Spotify tracks. Cue a 750-million URL takedown campaign. Meanwhile, U.S. lawmakers are reviving SOPA-style site blocks like it’s 2012.
The lesson? Piracy didn’t die. It evolved—into algorithms, shadow libraries, and corporate paranoia. The war’s not over. It just got weirder.
And we’re still here to report it.