The owner of an adult foster care home who operated an open WiFi network has booked a big win against a copyright troll. Thomas Gonzales was accused of downloading the Adam Sandler movie The Cobbler but won $17k last year after being wrongfully targeted. The case went to appeal and in a ruling handed down yesterday by the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, Gonzales emerged victorious again.

The Pirate Bay has been hard to reach for more than a day, causing concern among some BitTorrent users. The outage is likely due to 'technical' issues, so the site is expected to resurface soon. Meanwhile, some of the site's proxies and its Tor domain are still working fine.

In just 15 days' time, MEPs will again vote on the now-controversial copyright proposals of Article 13. The legislation would see platforms such as YouTube compelled to introduce upload filters, to prevent unlicensed content being offered to the public. The new 'Love Music' campaign, supported by powerful industry players, aims to ensure a thumbs-up from MEPs. But the opposition is out, in force.

The top 10 most downloaded movies on BitTorrent are in again. 'Deadpool 2' tops the chart this week, followed by ‘Ocean's Eight'. 'Avengers: Infinity War ' completes the top three.

Internet provider Cox Communications has agreed to pay an undisclosed but substantial settlement to music publisher BMG. The companies were scheduled to go to trial this week but the case is now dismissed. BMG is "extremely happy" with the outcome and says it won't hesitate to take action against other ISPs, if needed.

TVAddons has announced that it has reached a settlement with Dish Networks. As a result, the US lawsuit will be dropped. Most details of the agreement remain confidential but TVAddons has promised to expedite Dish's DMCA notices going forward. Meanwhile, the site's Canadian legal battle continues.

During the past few months, several sections of Reddit dedicated to piracy have been closed down. The big question among some users now, it seems, is whether the site's flagship /r/piracy sub-Reddit will suffer the same fate. The answer is entirely dependent on whether the sub's users behave and the mods keep taking out the trash.

Court-ordered pirate site blockades are pretty common nowadays. While not everyone sees these as the ideal solution for the problem at hand, they follow the letter of the law. More problematic are the private blocking efforts by various Wifi providers, which we are frequently the target of. Apparently, TorrentFreak is a pirate site too.

In a protest against piracy, major broadcasters have pulled their content from the main page of Yandex, Russia's largest search engine. The companies want Yandex to do more to prevent unauthorized content appearing in results. Meanwhile, search engines including Google are preventing content from more than 2,600 blocked sites from appearing in their indexes.

The owner of now-defunct ROM sites LoveROMS.com and LoveRETRO.co is working on a settlement with Nintendo. The gaming giant filed a copyright lawsuit last month accusing the sites of massive copyright infringement. This led to the shutdown of the sites in question as well as several other ROMs sites, who feared they could be next.