{"id":62872,"date":"2022-03-11T09:01:14","date_gmt":"2022-03-11T09:01:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.cryptocabaret.com\/?p=62872"},"modified":"2022-03-11T09:01:14","modified_gmt":"2022-03-11T09:01:14","slug":"ace-says-it-shut-down-two-pirate-sites-but-thats-not-quite-the-full-story","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.cryptocabaret.com\/?p=62872","title":{"rendered":"ACE Says It \u2018Shut Down\u2019 Two Pirate Sites But That\u2019s Not Quite The Full Story"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"ACE<\/a>Earlier this week an article was published in Variety<\/a> detailing the massive task being undertaken by the anti-piracy team at the MPA and Alliance for Creativity and Entertainment.<\/p>\n

Jan van Voorn, the MPA\u2019s executive vice president and chief of global content protection, explained that his job is to \u201coppress the bad guys\u201d in order to let legitimate platforms thrive. As our regular reports here on TF illustrate, no one can deny that the team is achieving those goals. Indeed, many pirates are sick and tired of ACE enforcement efforts.<\/p>\n

The exact impact is hard to evaluate since ACE\/MPA do not always publicly report all of their successes. Indeed, we report way more than they do but according to van Voorn, the North American market is being hit hard. From a high of 1,400 illegal platforms in that region in 2019, various anti-piracy campaigns reportedly reduced that number to 238 in 2021.<\/p>\n

The sites are taken down in a number of ways, from cease-and-desist warnings to full-blown litigation. However, there are other options too, including by targeting the intermediary services that the sites rely upon to stay online. The latter aspect is certainly interesting, as an announcement published by ACE last evening reveals.<\/p>\n

\u201cACE Shuts Down Watchseries.ninja and Watchsomuch.org\u201d<\/h2>\n

\u201cThe Alliance for Creativity and Entertainment (ACE), the world\u2019s leading coalition dedicated to protecting the dynamic legal ecosystem of creative content and reducing digital piracy, today announced it has shut down the popular streaming sites Watchseries.ninja and Watchsomuch.org,\u201d the anti-piracy group\u2019s announcement reads.<\/p>\n

According to ACE, Watchsomuch.org was launched in March 2019 and offered more than 100,000 hours of TV and film content, receiving 121 million visits in the last two years. In addition, Watchsomuch.org offered a \u2018VIP\u2019 subscription for $8 USD per month which offered faster streaming speeds.<\/p>\n

A large proportion of this information is accurate but note the initial \u201cshut down<\/em> popular streaming sites<\/em>\u201d reference (emphasis ours) and then a subtle change of terminology later on.<\/p>\n

Domain Names Were Targeted, Not The Sites Themselves<\/h2>\n

\u201cBoth domains, which affected all ACE members, are offline following ACE\u2019s enforcement actions. ACE\u2019s trusted notifier agreements and outreach to domain name registries and registrars led to the domains\u2019 suspension,\u201d ACE later adds.<\/p>\n

Shutting down an actual site and having its domain suspended might sound the same but there are big differences. Pirates tend to be pretty well informed these days and as it turns out, the operators of Watchsomuch knew well in advance they were being investigated. <\/p>\n

As far back as 2019 they were served with an injunction<\/a> indicating that they could be blocked and in 2021, the domain watchsomuch.org was indeed rendered inaccessible<\/a> in Australia.<\/p>\n

Possibly as a result, mid-2020 Watchsomuch was advertising on Twitter<\/a> that its .org domain wasn\u2019t the only option for accessing the platform. The archived site image<\/a> below shows that an alternative was also displayed on the site itself.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

\"watchsomuch-ss2-2020\"<\/a><\/center><\/p>\n

On February 9, 2022, the site\u2019s operators acknowledged<\/a> that its .org domain had been \u2018banned\u2019, a likely reference to the ACE suspension action. However, it also took the opportunity to announce that the other domains it uses are still working. There are additional domains too but since they aren\u2019t publicly advertised, we won\u2019t mention them here. <\/p>\n

It\u2019s also worth noting that Watchsomuch actually operates both a streaming and a torrent portal that cross-reference each other making new locations even easier to find. All that shows that the platform itself was not shut down, it just lost one of its several domains.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

\"watchsomuch-domain-banned\"<\/a><\/center><\/p>\n

The situation with Watchseries.ninja is less easy to decipher. ACE says that it carried 10,000 HD movies and 60,000 HD TV show episodes, receiving 85M visits since its launch in June 2020. <\/p>\n

We cannot confirm with certainty that the site is still up but, like Watchsomuch, its servers don\u2019t appear to have been taken down. Instead, its domain was also suspended as part of ACE\u2019s \u201ctrusted notifier\u201d agreements. So how do these agreements work?<\/p>\n

The Fatal Mistake \u2013 Registering Domains Under Donuts Control<\/h2>\n

In 2016 we reported<\/a> that the MPAA (now MPA) had done a deal with domain name registry Donuts<\/a>. <\/p>\n

The agreement gave the Hollywood group \u201cTrusted Notifier\u201d status and to the registry became the definitive authority on what is considered a large-scale piracy website. As a result, if the MPA can now show that a domain breaches Donuts\u2019 terms and conditions, it can be suspended.<\/p>\n

\u201cDonuts will treat referrals from the MPAA expeditiously and with a presumption of credibility,\u201d the agreement notes.<\/p>\n

While pirate site operators are often quite savvy, those behind Watchsomuch.org and Watchseries.ninja apparently weren\u2019t aware of this six-year-old domain suspension deal. The registrars for their domains (1API GmbH and Name.com) are both Donuts affiliates meaning that after MPA\/ACE had presented a valid case to Donuts, their .org and .ninja domains were toast.<\/p>\n

The overall point here is that announcements about sites being \u201cshut down\u201d shouldn\u2019t always be taken at face value, as another recent example shows.<\/p>\n

In May 2021, ACE announced that it had shut down massively popular streaming site Cuevana but didn\u2019t mention<\/a> that the most popular of the brand\u2019s domains (with 60 million visits per month) was still in operation. The fact that it\u2019s still running today earned it a spot on the USTR\u2019s Notorious Markets List published last month<\/a>.<\/p>\n

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

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Earlier this week an article was published in Variety detailing the massive task being undertaken by the anti-piracy team at the MPA and Alliance for Creativity and Entertainment. Jan van Voorn, the MPA\u2019s executive vice president and chief of global content protection, explained that his job is to \u201coppress the bad guys\u201d in order to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":62873,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[308],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-62872","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\/62872","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=62872"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.cryptocabaret.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/62872\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cryptocabaret.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/62873"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cryptocabaret.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=62872"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cryptocabaret.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=62872"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cryptocabaret.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=62872"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}