Enforcement, on the record.
What moved in takedowns, brand protection and platform policy — with counsel’s note on what it means for brand owners.
- Casino Secrets: 40,000 leaked regulator files put the owners of Curaçao-licensed casinos on a searchable map A nine-month breach of the Curaçao Gaming Authority's licensing portal produced tens of thousands of documents, now searchable by company and domain. Reporters identified ~800 owners of ~650 licensed firms — and licences granted with ownership questions unanswered. The regulator disputes key claims. Scam watch
- A minister told the anti-piracy establishment it has a double standard — at its own summit At the Lumière Summit hosted by Macron, South Africa's culture minister told ARCOM and WIPO that the industry applauds piracy when it circumvents censorship and prosecutes it when the poor do it — then declined to sign the anti-piracy declaration. Regulation
- Meta publicly dismantles the Instrat scam-ad report — and the fight reveals how little anyone can verify A Polish think tank estimated Meta earns PLN 760m a year from scam ads; Meta responded point by point, calling the methodology fiction. Both sides agree on one thing that matters to brand owners: nobody outside Meta can measure impersonation advertising reliably. Platforms
- Brussels upholds DNS-level blocking for DAZN: Google and Cloudflare must comply, OpenDNS quits Belgium The Brussels Business Court upheld the order requiring Google, Cloudflare and Cisco to block pirate sport domains on their public DNS resolvers — €100K/day fines on match days, blocks live 90 minutes before kickoff, 100 new domains a week. Cisco will pull OpenDNS out of Belgium instead. Courts
- 1.7 million casino domains: Infoblox maps the impersonation economy where takedowns chase drop-catch infrastructure Infoblox tracks over 1.7 million illegal Chinese-language casino domains — 99.5% run by four actors behind bulletproof CDNs — plus thousands of 'scambling' fraud sites and APT decoys. Real Macau brands are impersonated at scale; UNODC calls one-by-one blocking 'practical futility'. Scam watch
- Google now requires "good policy health" from every gambling advertiser — and clones will fill the gaps it creates From 14 September Google Ads extends its 'good policy health' certification requirement to all gambling and games categories: repeat-violation MCCs lose eligibility, free subdomains are out, domains must be owned by the advertiser. What the tightening means for licensed brands. Platforms
- Site blocking reaches the US: Issa files H.R. 10364 — and it covers DNS resolvers Rep. Darrell Issa filed the American Copyright Protection Act (H.R. 10364) on 14 September — a fast-track court procedure for blocking foreign piracy sites, binding ISPs and public DNS resolvers. Three competing bills now race to give rightsholders site blocking in the largest market. Regulation
- CJEU draws the line on "free expression" as a defence for using famous brands: the IKEA-Plan judgment In C-298/23 Inter IKEA Systems the CJEU held that invoking free expression alone is not 'due cause' to use a reputed trademark: the user must show specific grounds that outweigh the proprietor's rights. The framework gives brand owners a test for when parody stops protecting. Courts
- One Malta court, all 27 EU states: Spribe gets EU-wide injunction against Aviator Studio Malta's Civil Court ordered three Aviator Studio companies to stop using Aviator branding across the entire EU — an ex parte provisional injunction issued 1 September over Spribe's EU trademarks. One filing, 27 member states: how EU trademark enforcement concentrates force. Courts
- CJEU: a Facebook post is a copyright work — length and platform are irrelevant In C-598/24 Gândul Media Network the CJEU held that a text posted on a social network qualifies as a copyright work if it reflects the author's free and creative choices — its short length, online publication and lack of artistic character are all irrelevant to protection. Courts
- Chile turns mirror blocking into a standing pipeline: 42 gambling domains ordered blocked in 48 hours Subtel instructed Chile's six main ISPs to DNS-block 42 gambling URLs within 48 hours, under a court-ratified procedure that rolls on to new mirror domains as they appear. We read the list: five brands appear twice, and several entries are numbered mutations of known brands. Regulation
- ChatGPT, Reddit and Roblox are now VLOPs — brand owners get DSA leverage on three new platforms The European Commission designated ChatGPT a VLOSE and Reddit and Roblox VLOPs on 31 August 2026. By January 2027 all three carry heightened DSA duties — and brand owners gain notice-and-action and trusted-flagger leverage where clones and scams live. Regulation
- Google switches off site reputation penalties in the EEA — parasite SEO keeps its rankings in Europe From 30 August, manual actions under Google's site reputation policy no longer affect search results shown in the EEA. A DMA concession with a direct cost for brand owners fighting parasite SEO in Europe. Platforms
- UKGC suspends two operators mid-season — licences frozen on suspected AML and social responsibility failings The Gambling Commission suspended BresBet Ltd and Bet St George Ltd on 28 August 2026, pending a section 116 review over suspected social responsibility and AML failings. What a suspension actually does — and what operators should take from it. Regulation
- Take-Two is unmasking the GTA 6 leaker with §512(h) subpoenas — four in two days Four DMCA subpoena petitions in the S.D.N.Y. (20–21 Aug 2026) target Discord, Microsoft, X and Google records tied to the Cyberleek GTA 6 leak. What §512(h) can and cannot deliver for rights holders. Courts
- Nintendo cleared 400+ Switch-emulator repos off GitHub in one day — with seven notices Seven §1201 anti-circumvention notices filed 17 August 2026 took down 403 GitHub repositories — whole fork networks at once. The mechanics any rights-holder can reuse. Platforms
- Search ads impersonating billers just cost Doxo $2.1m — and handed brands a prohibition list worth citing The FTC filed a stipulated order in FTC v. Doxo (No. 2:24-cv-00569, W.D. Wash.) on 17 August 2026: $2.1m in consumer redress for search ads posing as consumers' billers, plus itemised bans on biller names, logos and web addresses in ads. What the 28-month docket teaches brand owners. Scam watch
- Romania blacklisted 808 gambling domains in one session — we counted, and it is nine operators One ONJN Supervisory Committee session on 30 July 2026 produced two blacklist decisions covering 808 domains. We counted the annexes: 99% of them are numbered rotation ranges off nine brand strings. ISPs have 15 days to redirect them to a single IP. Regulation
- Paris ordered DNS resolvers, VPNs and search engines to block 73 domains — under a statute brand owners cannot use Fourteen orders of the Tribunal judiciaire de Paris (RG 26/08356–26/08401, 17 July 2026) put Canal+ blocks on ISPs, Cloudflare, Google Public DNS, Quad9, DNS4EU, three VPN operators, Google Search and Bing. The reasoning reaches any intermediary — the statute behind it does not reach brand owners. Courts
- Hundreds of scam PDFs are ranking from the European Space Agency's own domain — and Google is quoting them back ESA's Cosmos portal is serving hundreds of spam PDFs pushing pirate IPTV and free-Robux generators from cosmos.esa.int URLs — three still answered HTTP 200 on 4 August 2026, and Google's AI Overview has relayed their rankings as ESA's. Google calls that hacked content, not site reputation abuse. Scam watch
- Munich held Suno liable for what its model produced — and reached the US training that built it LG München I, 31 July 2026: Suno infringed six GEMA compositions. Memorisation in model parameters is reproduction, outside the § 44b TDM exception; outputs infringe because the originals stay recognisable; the injunction reaches training done in the US. The provider is liable, not the prompter. Courts
- Operation Offsides seized 1,000+ domains — then its own director said that doesn't dismantle the business DOJ announced 1,000+ World Cup streaming domains seized across three actions on EDVA warrants. Eleven days later the MPA and the IPR Center's own director co-signed an op-ed conceding a takedown does not dismantle the business — and asked Congress for judicial site blocking. Regulation
- Delhi High Court blocks 30 pirate operations for HBO — and redraws who decides what gets blocked next CS(COMM) 740/2026 grants HBO an ad-interim block across 30 rogue-site operations, then limits the dynamic extension: registrars and ISPs verify mirror identity only, rights-holders carry the affidavit — and the risk of getting it wrong. Courts
- Live! Casino says its vendor cleared the Louis Vuitton lookalike bags — and sues to move the bill Louis Vuitton claims a Maryland casino handed out counterfeit monogram bags in a loyalty promo; the casino is now suing the promotional supplier that sold them. What the chain says about promo merchandise risk for regulated brands. Courts
- Backdated Facebook posts are powering fake copyright strikes — creators drag Meta to Delhi High Court Scammers swap old Facebook posts’ attachments for stolen videos, keep the original date, and file “older-than-yours” copyright strikes. Delhi High Court is examining the racket — what brand owners should check in their own rights tooling. Scam watch
- Federal Circuit ends the Intellectual Pixels v. Sony cloud-gaming patent fight All twelve claims of the ’109 patent — server-rendered frames streamed to thin clients — held obvious over 1990s server-gaming art. What the decision signals to studios facing streaming-patent demands. Courts