{"id":54380,"date":"2021-02-04T09:01:47","date_gmt":"2021-02-04T09:01:47","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.cryptocabaret.com\/?p=54380"},"modified":"2021-02-04T09:01:47","modified_gmt":"2021-02-04T09:01:47","slug":"police-arrest-14-people-behind-8-million-user-piracy-subtitle-site","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.cryptocabaret.com\/?p=54380","title":{"rendered":"Police Arrest 14 People Behind 8 Million-User Piracy & Subtitle Site"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"China<\/a>Back in 2014, the MPAA made its usual \u2018notorious markets\u2019 submission to the USTR and among regular targets such as The Pirate Bay and Popcorn Time, the Hollywood group highlighted the activities of China-based YYeTs.com.<\/p>\n

At the time, the site \u2013 which is also known as Renren Yingshi \u2013 was described as the most popular dedicated download site for copyrighted content in China, providing links in various formats, including for the popular Xunlei and BitTorrent clients. It rose to fame after being founded in 2004 by a group of Chinese students living in Canada.<\/p>\n

Notably, the site was also called out for offering crowd-sourced Chinese subtitles for Western content, something that helped boost infringement of US-made movies and TV shows. On the other hand, it allowed local users to easily consume otherwise unavailable content, to the disappointment of both Hollywood and the Chinese government, albeit for different reasons.<\/p>\n

Chinese Government Takes Action<\/h2>\n

On November 22, 2014, visitors to YYeTs and another subtitle-focused site, Shooters.cn, found the platforms in considerable trouble. With Shooters announcing its immediate closure, YYeTs said that it would be offline for a while, ostensibly to \u201cclean up\u201d its site. State-run news services indicated that the sites had been targeted for infringing the rights of foreign companies.<\/p>\n

YYeTs somehow managed to survive, as it had done previously following similar enforcement action in 2010. This week, however, it became clear that the site is under pressure once again after being targeted by local police.<\/p>\n

According to local media reports, police in Shanghai arrested 14 people under suspicion of being involved in the operations of YYeTs\/Renren Yingshi, which was recently reported to have eight million registered users. <\/p>\n

\u201cInvestigations showed that the suspects set up several companies engaging in the distribution, operation and maintenance of the \u2018Renren Yingshi\u2019 mobile app and a related web portal by setting up or leasing servers in China or overseas since 2018,\u201d the People\u2019s Daily reported Wednesday.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s believed that those arrested in this week\u2019s operation systematically downloaded movies and TV shows from pirate websites located outside China, added subtitles, and distributed the captioned videos from their own servers in breach of copyright. <\/p>\n

Specific dates for the arrests haven\u2019t been circulated in the media. But, in mid-January, there were several reports that China-based pirate sites had closed their doors to new members. It\u2019s likely those precautionary measures were linked to the current arrests.<\/p>\n

A report from SCMP<\/a> notes that China has hundreds of subtitling sites similar to Renren Yingshi that originally used volunteer translators. Over time, however, site operators have chosen to hire translators to generate Chinese subtitles for foreign movies and TV shows, paying around $60 per video.<\/p>\n

From: TF<\/a>, for the latest news on copyright battles, piracy and more.<\/p>\n

Powered by WPeMatico<\/a><\/small><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Back in 2014, the MPAA made its usual \u2018notorious markets\u2019 submission to the USTR and among regular targets such as The Pirate Bay and Popcorn Time, the Hollywood group highlighted the activities of China-based YYeTs.com. At the time, the site \u2013 which is also known as Renren Yingshi \u2013 was described as the most popular […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":54381,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[308],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-54380","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-torrent"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cryptocabaret.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/54380","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cryptocabaret.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cryptocabaret.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cryptocabaret.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cryptocabaret.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=54380"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.cryptocabaret.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/54380\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cryptocabaret.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/54381"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cryptocabaret.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=54380"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cryptocabaret.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=54380"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cryptocabaret.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=54380"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}