MPA and ACE Cracking on Popular Pirate Sites
While the movie studios and OTT platforms maintain strict competition for making good content, they often team up fighting against cracking down the pirate sites. The Motion Picture Association (MPA) is one such coalition that includes big production houses and fights against pirate sites. Last week, the Alliance For Creativity and Entertainment (ACE), through MPA has filed a lawsuit (1, 2) in a US court to crack down on pirate sites that are generating over half a billion views a year. They started with naming the titles that were subject to infringements like Forrest Gump, 47 Ronin, Almost Christmas, Flashdance, and Varsity Blues. The DMCA subpoena request filed in the court by ACE and the MPA seeks to identify pirate sites’ operators hosting the infringing content, like Watchmovie, Lookmovie, Himovies YesMovies, and Adfah. Most sites from the list have started their operations last year and been gaining viewers gradually ever since. For example, sites hosting the pirated content have anywhere between 10 to 100 million viewers visiting every month, thus generating a potential billion views yearly. Surprisingly, one pirate site has Netflix as one of its advertisers, and the local ISPs don’t block most sites for various reasons. One of the root problems for abolishing these is Cloudflare, whose CDN network protects such sites from being targeted. Thus, the DMCA subpoena request filed by MPA and ACE in the US court now asks for disclosing the identity details like the operators’ “names, physical addresses, IP addresses, telephone numbers, e-mail addresses, payment information, account updates, and account histories” of those websites.
