For as long as pirate sites and services have been around, entertainment industry groups have poured significant resources into having them closed down.

When Napster went down in flames 20 years ago, some people thought that was mission accomplished. In 2005, when the MGM vs Grokster case went all the way to the Supreme Court and went in MGM’s favor, many people believed that file-sharing had received its fatal blow.

Today, 15 years later, the blows are still being delivered but the wars continue. In many respects, piracy is stronger than ever. In others, notably music, the industry is finally meeting piracy head-on with value-for-money services that in terms of quality, presentation, and ease of use, pirates cannot easily compete with.

As we take a look today at the Top 19 most significant piracy shutdowns of 2019, the emphasis is clear. The overwhelming majority of pirate site and service closures during the past 12 months have been at the hands of entertainment companies involved in the supply and distribution of movies, TV shows, and sporting events.

January – Reddit’s /r/soccerstreams bites the dust

Reddit’s /r/soccerstreams was once a discussion platform catering to around 420,000 subscribers and many more casual visitors. Among other things, the sub-Reddit allowed users to post links to live games, making it easy for soccer/football fans to watch matches for free.

As a result, the forum (or more accurately, Reddit itself) was inundated with DMCA complaints from rightsholders, demanding that links be removed. Reddit’s admins ultimately lost patience, informing the mods of /r/soccerstreams to take decisive action or face being banned. In the end, the sub fell on its own sword and shut itself down.

May – One Step TV

After what appeared to be a 2018 launch, pirate IPTV service OneStepTV grew to offer around 600 TV channels and 20,000 pieces of VOD content for $25 per month or less. While the service attracted plenty of initially happy customers, things started to go sour in April 2019.

After experiencing difficulty processing payments, One Step TV ultimately stopped doing business due to threats by the legal team of the Alliance of Creativity and Entertainment.

May – Vader Streams

As far as IPTV ‘brands’ go, Vaders was one of the most recognizable in the space. With a large customer base and reportedly reliable service, Vaders disappeared into thin air early May, leaving little but rumors and educated guesses in its wake.

In August, however, it was revealed that the Alliance for Creativity took the platform down, leaving Vaders’ operators with an alleged $10 million settlement bill.

June – Convert2MP3

Despite the huge popularity of legal music streaming services such as Spotify, so-called YouTube-ripping platforms remain a thorn in the side of the world’s major recording labels. By facilitating the downloading of tracks to users’ machines, both labels and YouTube are said to lose revenue due to these services.

With dozens of monthly visitors, Convert2MP3 was one of the biggest. As a result it attracted the negative attentions of music groups IFPI and BVMI, which sued the platform in Germany. A court handed down a preliminary injunction against Convert2MP3 but then the ripping service settled the case by shutting down, handing over an unspecified amount in compensation, and surrendering its domain.

June – IPTV Bulgaria

In common with similar operations against other illicit IPTV providers in Eastern Europe, a June operation in Bulgaria was based in criminal law rather than civil lawsuits.

Supported by Europol’s Intellectual Property Crime Coordinated Coalition (IPC3) and the Audiovisual Anti-Piracy Alliance (AAPA), the raids reportedly took down a pirate IPTV service with an estimated 700,000 worldwide subscribers. It was never named and no follow-up investigation has yet been made public.

July / August – eBook.bike

Legal actions against sites dedicated to eBooks are relatively rare. Those that see the parties duel it out in public beforehand are almost non-existent. For this reason alone, the lawsuit filed by author John Van Stry against former Pirate Party Canada leader Travis McCrea is easily one of the most unusual cases of the year.

A brief summary of the case is that someone uploaded Van Stry’s books to McCrea’s eBook download platform eBook.bike. Van Stry accused McCrea of not doing enough to control piracy on his platform, McCrea asked to be sued and Van Stry complied.

For reasons unknown, in July or August eBook.bike shut down, seemingly voluntarily. The case, documented in detail here on TF, is not only still ongoing but also one of the most unorthodox lawsuits we’ve ever covered. How it will end is up for debate but if the aim was to shut down eBook.bike, victory was achieved months ago.

September and ongoing – Manga Rock

Given the focus on traditionally famous large sites such as The Pirate Bay or RARBG, Mango Rock may have seemed like an insignificant player, but nothing could be further from the truth. According to data from MUSO, the so-called ‘scanlation’ site was even more popular than The Pirate Bay.

The demise of the platform is unusual in several respects, not least that the operators of the platform announced that they’d come to the realization that piracy is damaging. To remedy that they are now working on a legal platform as Manga Rock, which is still operational, is phased out.

September – Xtream Codes and other IPTV players

The huge police operation that spread across Italy, the Netherlands, France, and Bulgaria in September sent shockwaves through the IPTV community. More than two dozen people were arrested and at least 180 servers were seized.

While it wasn’t the only target, Xtream Codes, the software/system utilized by a reported 5,000 IPTV services and their 50 million customers, was wiped out leaving swathes of the IPTV scene in chaos. Little has been heard of the operation since but it does seem that many providers have found alternative solutions and are now back in business.

September – Coto Movies

While browser-based sites and services remain popular with pirates, apps for both Android and iOS are a convenient option for those seeking a straightforward consumption experience. This hasn’t gone unnoticed by entertainment companies who have targeted several over the years in an attempt to stem the tide.

Early September, third-party iOS app store TweakBox removed several movie piracy apps in response to legal pressure. Following that news, the people behind the CotoMovies app decided to close down. It later transpired that the makers of the films Hellboy and Angel Has Fallen forced the move.

The operator of CotoMovies issued an apology but then poured fuel on the fire by stating he would be handing over user data so that the movie companies could “enforce their valuable intellectual property.”

October – Share-Online.biz

As Germany’s largest file-hosting site serving between six and ten million users, Share-Online.biz had a target on its back. In 2017, anti-piracy group GVU filed a criminal complaint against the platform. Two years later, the platform was shut down following police raids in Germany, France, and the Netherlands.

Three suspects in their forties and fifties were reportedly placed under investigation.

October – Pirate CDNs

Founded in 2013, Moonwalk acted as a back-end for pirate streaming sites. Back in February, TF was informed that it was offering more than 33,000 movies and TV shows to site operators who embedded Moonwalk content and advertising into their own sites.

In Russia, Moonwalk was said to have serviced around 80% of pirate streaming platforms but in October it was all over. BREIN, the MPA and Alliance for Creativity and Entertainment teamed up, leaving Moonwalk to announce that it would “NEVER be up again.”

Later that month the Moonwalk closure proved infectious, with several other ‘pirate’ CDNs also shutting down.

October – RapidVideo

RapidVideo was one of the most popular file-hosting sites around but like many of its competitors, it had plenty of entertainment industry rivals. Under pressure from the MPA and ACE while facing a lawsuit in Germany filed by Warner Bros. and Netflix, RapidVideo threw in the towel, leaving millions of users behind.

October – Openload / Streamango / StreamCherry

Already known to millions of users generating around 65 million hits per month, Openload hit the mainstream headlines in 2018 when it was claimed to be generating more traffic than Hulu and HBO Go.

Previously branded a “notorious market” by the USTR, this year Openload decided to stop paying uploaders. The move was controversial but nothing compared to what followed.

At the end of October, following some kind of agreement with the Alliance for Creativity and Entertainment, Openload suddenly shut down, surrendered its domains, and paid “significant damages”. At the same time, hosting sites Streamango, StreamCherry, and VeryStream also disappeared.

October – Boom Media

Boom Media was once one of the most recognizable brands in the IPTV reseller space, offering packages from providers including Nitro, Epic, Beast, MFG, and Vaders. In October, however, it found itself on the wrong end of a lawsuit filed by DISH Network.

Despite signs that it might put up a fight, Boom Media shut itself down but the lawsuit hasn’t gone away.

November – Movie2free.com, Thailand’s largest pirate site

With millions of views per day, Movie2Free.com was not only popular in Southeast Asia, it was also one of the largest pirate sites on the Internet, period. However, in early November all that changed when Thailand’s Department of Special Investigation confirmed that the streaming portal had been shut down following a request from the Motion Picture Association.

November – Omniverse One World Television

In February 2019, several major Hollywood studios under the ACE banner filed a lawsuit against IPTV service Omniverse One World Television.

The company put up a spirited defense, claiming that it acted entirely legally and had appropriate licensing deals in place. In the end, however, ACE prevailed. Alongside a reported $50 million settlement agreement, Omniverse shut itself down.

November – Gears Reloaded

Finally, the strange story of YouTuber and entrepreneur Bill Omar Carrasquillo, otherwise known as OMI IN A HELLCAT. Carrasquillo is the self-confessed founder of IPTV service Gears Reloaded, a business that he claims to this day was fully legal.

In November he announced that he’d been raided by the FBI and IRS who “took everything” as part of a copyright infringement and tax evasion investigation.

Despite witnesses and Carrasquillo himself appearing on TV to discuss the raids, rumors persist that he made the whole thing up. Meanwhile, the authorities are refusing to confirm anything, one way or the other.

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Take Two Interactive’s Red Dead Redemption (RDR1) is considered one of the greatest video games of all time but the open world masterpiece had a considerable shortcoming.

Officially a console-only release, millions of PC gamers were denied access to one of the most expensive video games ever made, an itch that remains unscratched to this day.

With the 2018 release of Red Dead Redemption 2 (RDR2), developer Rockstar Studios finally bridged the gap but for many fans, not having the original title on PC was something that needed to be addressed. Back in August, this simmering demand looked like it was going to be met with an announcement revealing a new project titled ‘Red Dead Redemption: Damned Enhancement Project’.

The plan was not only to modify the Xbox360 and PS3 versions of RDR1 and bring the game to the PC, but also to improve the title with better graphics and additional features.

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ySEXO4r9DNA&w=560&h=315]

In September, however, things started to go off the rails. Project lead ‘DemandDev’ took to GTAForums to reveal that development had been stopped. He didn’t directly state that Take-Two had put him under pressure but complained of being bullied by a corporation.

“They done shady stuff getting my private info and contacted my family,” he wrote. “I’ve been contacting people to spread word. I’m not letting them them bully me and keep my mouth shut. I complied and stopped progress but hopefully I can sort out this.”

Several months later, sorting it out will now have to be actioned through the courts. On December 26, Take-Two Interactive filed a lawsuit at a New York court against a Johnathan Wyckoff and John Does 1-10.

“Take-Two brings this action to maintain control over its world-famous video
games in the face of Wyckoff’s publicly stated intent to distribute unauthorized software files that would dramatically change the content of Take-Two’s video games,” the lawsuit reads.

“Those unauthorized changes include but are not limited to importing the entire game map of 2010’s Red Dead Redemption into the 2018 game Red Dead Redemption II, enhancing graphics and visuals in Take-Two’s Red Dead Redemption game, and allowing players to play an enhanced version of the game on personal computer (‘PCs’), a platform for which Take-Two itself has not yet released the Read Dead Redemption game.”

Claiming breaches of its intellectual property rights and user licensing agreements, Take-Two says that it “repeatedly” asked Wyckoff to cease and desist. When these contacts failed to stop the project, Take-Two said it was forced to take legal action.

Take-Two’s lawsuit details two matters. The first, the ‘RDRII Project’, aims to add the full RDR1 game map to RDR2. This, the company says, would not only “dramatically change the RDR2 experience but also reduce interest in purchasing a future release of RDR1 or a RDR1 add-on map for RDR2. The company doesn’t state it intends to release either, however.

The second targets the ‘Red Dead Redemption: Damned Enhancement Project’ which Take-Two says would utilize game files from Grand Theft Auto V and RDR1 “to vastly improve the graphics and performance of the game” and enable players to play RDR1 on PC, where it isn’t officially available, “thereby destroying the market for an official, updated version from Take-Two, and creating competition for Take-Two’s PC-version of RDR2.”

Take-Two also takes issue with Wyckoff’s claimed hobbyist status by implying donations received are effectively payments and that the projects serve to drive traffic to his social media and streaming accounts. The company adds that efforts to resolve the dispute peacefully failed, claiming that Wyckoff suggested that if he didn’t release the project, it might somehow get “leaked” online.

Ultimately, Wyckoff was given until November 18 to comply with Take-Two’s demands but the company says the deadline came and went.

As a result, it was left with no choice but to file a lawsuit seeking “injunctive relief and damages that it will suffer as a result of Wyckoff’s direct and contributory copyright infringement under the Copyright Act of 1976”, breaches of Take-Two’s user agreement, and his “interference with Take-Two’s contracts with other Take-Two game players using his modifications.”

What happens next in the lawsuit remains to be seen but a post apparently made by Wyckoff a few hours ago suggests that his project is now “canceled”.

Take-Two’s complaint, obtained by TorrentFreak, can be found here (pdf)

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China’s government is regularly accused of not doing enough to prevent piracy but court records show that there are many copyright cases under consideration.

A particularly interesting case that has now reached its conclusion featured Youku Tudou Inc., one of the country’s top online video platforms and Baidu Wangpan (Baidu Web Drive), a cloud-storage service operated by technology giant Baidu.

Filed by Youku, the lawsuit claimed that despite the company holding the rights to distribute the popular TV series ‘Eternal Love‘ online in China, copies of the show were being made available to the public after being uploaded to storage accounts on Baidu Wangpan. Youku says it sent numerous complaints to have the content removed but according to the company, the response was insufficient.

While Baidu did take some action, Youku was still able to find more than 11,000 Baidu Wangpan accounts offering episodes of the TV series for viewing without permission from the license holder, Caixin Global reports (paywall).

The lawsuit accused Baidu of not taking down infringing links quickly enough, failing to take action against the accounts of repeat infringers, and not installing technology to prevent the uploading, storage, and sharing of copyrighted material.

Baidu countered by stating that its users had uploaded the TV shows and as a result, the company should not be held liable for their actions. It further said that it had responded to Youku’s complaints and that Youku’s demand for 29 million yuan (US$4.14 million) in compensation was excessive.

Local reports cite the judge in the case weighing whether the response of Baidu was sufficient, noting that more than 60% of infringing links were indeed removed but other content remained online.

The balance was ultimately decided in favor of Youku, with the Beijing court ordering Baidu to compensate Youku to the tune of one million yuan (US$143,000) and 30,000 yuan ($4,300) in expenses.

Both parties have appealed the ruling.

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Piracy settlement letters have become a serious threat in countries all round the world.

Until now, Dutch Internet users have been spared from this practice but local movie distributor Dutch Filmworks would like that to change.

Two years ago the company received permission from the Dutch Data Protection Authority to track the IP-addresses of BitTorrent users who shared pirated movies.

However, that was only the first hurdle. The next step was to identify the subscribers behind the IP-addresses and Dutch Internet provider Ziggo didn’t want to share any customer data without a court order.

The case went to court, where the movie company requested the personal details of 377 account holders whose addresses were used to share a copy of “The Hitman’s Bodyguard”.

This didn’t go as planned for Dutch FilmWorks. In February, the Central Netherlands Court denied the company’s request for data and last month the Court of Appeal reached the same conclusion.

Both courts concluded that Dutch Filmworks’ plans lacked transparency and it’s not clear what the movie company plans to do with the personal data it obtains. Dutch Filmworks said that it could either warn subscribers or request damages, but the criteria remain a guess.

It also remains unclear how large the proposed settlements will be. An initial figure of €150 per infringement was mentioned in the past, but this number could also be significantly higher.

The movie company is unhappy with both verdicts and told the Dutch newspaper NRC that it will take the matter to the Supreme Court. This means that the 377 account holders from ISP Ziggo remain at risk.

In theory, it’s not impossible to obtain an order compelling Dutch Internet providers to hand over personal details of accused pirates. However, the previous verdicts make it clear that Dutch Filmworks has to come with a concrete plan.

Ultimately, the Supreme Court must find a balance between the privacy rights of subscribers and Dutch Filmworks’ intellectual property rights. When there’s too much uncertainty for accused subscribers, their rights tend to weigh stronger.

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