In 2017, the newly formed anti-piracy group Alliance for Creativity and Entertainment (ACE) announced its presence to the world. Headed up by the traditional studios of the MPA plus Netflix and Amazon, the coalition also featured dozens of global movie and TV show giants.
The clear aim of ACE is to tackle video piracy on a global scale by pooling resources, finances, and knowledge. At least publicly, the coalition had a relatively slow start but as projects came to fruition, sites and platforms associated with piracy began to fall.
Some legal battles were conducted publicly through US courts (Omniverse, SetTV) but many others were settled quietly behind the scenes, without any official announcements. But perhaps the most dramatic, such as the takedowns of major IPTV player Vaders and file-hosting platforms Openload and Streamango, began silently, never went to trial, and were only confirmed when big cash settlements were revealed.
But of course, cash wasn’t the only thing ACE demanded from these players. In numerous cases so far (1,2,3,4,5), ‘pirate’ platforms were also compelled to hand over their domain names to the MPA. However, instead of lying dormant, ACE now uses them to deliver a short message to former users, declaring that platforms have been shut down due to copyright infringement.
A few seconds later visitors are then diverted to ACE’s anti-piracy portal, a place where movies and TV shows can’t be found. Instead, pro-copyright messages are presented with every click alongside details of previous ACE successes, shutdowns, and some (but certainly not all) ACE domain seizures.
Despite plenty of smaller domain seizures, traffic to Alliance4Creativity.com was minimal right up until September 2019 but then things took off in a big way. SimilarWeb stats reveal that at the start of the month the site had around 10,000 monthly visits.
At the start of October, however, visits had skyrocketed to around 620,000 per month, an increase of more than 6000%.
While this increase is impressive in its own right, by the start of November ACE’s website was receiving 2.3 million monthly visits, around 23,000% up on September’s traffic. Leading pirate sites aside, many illicit platforms never reach this number of eyeballs.
Given that the Openload/Streamango shutdown took place on October 31, it seems likely that the majority of the traffic to ACE’s site comes from former users of the defunct file-hosting platforms.
Whether the figures will continue to rise when SimilarWeb’s stats update remains a question, however. It’s possible that all traffic is yet to be accounted for but as a negative, former Openload and Streamango users are unlikely to keep revisiting the domains now that they know that ACE is in control.
TorrentFreak approached ACE for comment on its increasingly ‘popular’ website, which is now delivering its anti-piracy message while being largely fueled by traffic from seized ‘pirate’ domains. Unfortunately, an ACE spokesperson declined on the group’s behalf.
In the background, however, more seizures are taking place. TF has discovered that in recent weeks ACE quietly took over the domains of another pair of allegedly-infringing sites, Jailbrokenfirestick.com and Jailbrokefiretv.com. In common with other smaller seizures, no official announcements were made but nevertheless, will still add to the Alliance’s growing website traffic.
Finally, there’s a strong chance that ACE will be analyzing the traffic hitting these former ‘pirate’ domains that they now own. While that data isn’t likely to be particularly useful from a direct litigation perspective, it will certainly prove of interest to the global anti-piracy alliance.
The data for our weekly download chart is estimated by TorrentFreak, and is for informational and educational reference only. All the movies in the list are Web-DL/Webrip/HDRip/BDrip/DVDrip unless stated otherwise.
RSS feed for the articles of the recent weekly movie download charts.
Early 2010, the online piracy ecosystem looked entirely different from what it does today.
IPTV and pirate streaming boxes had yet to reach the masses. Limewire was still the preferred piracy app for millions, while torrent sites such as BTJunkie, isoHunt and Mininova were dominating in terms of traffic.
Today, Limewire is a distant memory and the aforementioned torrent sites have all gone. Many other things have changed too. In this article, we will highlight some of the most pivotal events of the past ten years.
Bear in mind that this is by no means an exhaustive overview. It does, however, show that much has changed over the past ten years.
2010
The decade started with positive news for Alan Ellis, the operator of the defunct private music tracker OiNK. The jury returned a unanimous not guilty verdict and Ellis walked free.
Not much later the final verdict in The Pirate Bay case was revealed. The Swedish Court of Appeal sentenced Peter Sunde to eight months in prison, Fredrik Neij received a 10-month sentence, and Carl Lundström four months. Pirate Bay co-founder Gottfrid Svartholm did not appear but was later sentenced to a year in prison.
Later that year there was bad news for Jammie Thomas-Rasset, a mother of four, who lost her case against the RIAA. Following a re-trial, Thomas-Rasset was ordered to pay $1.5 million for 24 songs she shared via Kazaa. This verdict was appealed and eventually reduced to $222,000 by the Appeals Court.
In October a US federal court also sided with the RIAA in its battle against the Gnutella-based download client LimeWire. The world’s most popular file-sharing application shut down soon after.
In November 2010, the US Government launched “Operation in Our Sites,” through which it seized several domain names of alleged pirate sites including torrent search engine Torrent-Finder. Years later, the DoJ also dropped its case against the torrent search engine and returned the domain name.
Another domain that was targeted by the feds was from Ninjavideo. This eventually resulted in several criminal indictments. Operation In Our Sites continued throughout the rest of the decade, taking down millions of domain names, mostly related to counterfeiting.
2010 also marked the start of the so-called ‘copyright-trolling’ lawsuits against alleged BitTorrent users in the US, which are still ongoing today. The first lawsuits, including one from the makers of The Hurt locker, targeted tens of thousands of people at once.
2011
After pressure from the entertainment industries, Google started to censor piracy-related keywords from its instant and autocomplete services. Keywords such as “The Pirate Bay” and “RapidShare” were excluded. This marked the start of a series of anti-piracy initiatives, including downranking of pirate domains in search results.
In March, President Obama’s “IP Czar” Victoria Espinel laid the foundations for PIPA and SOPA, calling on Congress to make changes in order to make it easier to clamp down on copyright infringement. Both bills were heavily protested in the months that followed.
Europe witnessed one of the largest piracy-related busts in history. The popular movie streaming portal Kino.to was shut down and a dozen people connected to the site were arrested.
Richard O’Dwyer, the then 23-year-old UK-based administrator of TVShack was arrested by police. In the year that followed, the admin successfully fought off an extradition request from the U.S.
Megaupload released the Megaupload song, where superstar artists including P Diddy, Will.i.am, Alicia Keys, Snoop Dogg, and Kanye West promoted the site.
The new year started, with the historic SOPA and PIPA protests that carried over from 2011. Eventually, both bills were defeated.
News headlines were also dominated by the Megaupload raid and the indictment against the “Mega Conspiracy.” The criminal investigation disrupted the file-hosting business and today, Kim Dotcom and several former colleagues still await the final decision regarding possible extradition to the US.
BTjunkie, one of the largest BitTorrent indexes at the time, decided to shut down voluntarily. A combination of legal actions against fellow file-sharing sites and time-consuming projects was cited as reasons for the drastic decision.
The founder of NinjaVideo, one of the first domains to be targeted in the ongoing Operation in Our Sites campaign, was sentenced for conspiracy and criminal copyright infringement. Hana Beshara, was sentenced to 22 months in prison. Several other accomplices received lesser sentences.
The Pirate Bay made dozens of headlines as well. The infamous BitTorrent site removed torrents for popular releases and moved to the .SE domain name to avoid a possible US domain name seizure, which never came.
The Pirate Bay was also blocked by UK ISPs following a High Court order. Nonetheless, the site saw a huge increase in traffic.
2013
The Motion Picture Association won its piracy lawsuit against file-hosting site Hotfile, which agreed to pay a $80 million settlement. However, this figure mostly served to impress and scare the public, as both parties settled the matter for ‘only’ $4 million behind closed doors.
Kim Dotcom launched Mega as the successor to the defunct Megaupload. Mega billed itself as “The Privacy Company” and remains popular today despite the fact that its founder cut ties with the file-hosting service.
The MPAA and RIAA, helped by five major Internet providers in the United States, launched their “six-strikes” Copyright Alert System. After five or six warnings ISPs could take a variety of repressive measures to deter pirates. The system eventually shut down four years later.
Netflix revealed that piracy is more than a competitor. The company’s then Vice President of Content Acquisition revealed that they keep an eye on what’s popular on file-sharing platforms to determine what TV-series to buy. This apparently worked well, as Netflix also mentioned that it was killing BitTorrent traffic.
Torrent search engine isoHunt settled its legal battle with the MPAA for $110 million. The site’s owner, Gary Fung, decided to throw in the towel after fighting Hollywood for several years. Soon after the shutdown a copycat site appeared, which took over many of the site’s regular visitors.
Law firm Prenda was caught uploading their own torrents to The Pirate Bay, creating a honeypot for the people they later sued over pirated downloads. The accusation was first published here on TorrentFreak, based on input from the Pirate Bay. This would later turn into a criminal case.
2014
A new app named Popcorn Time became an instant hit by offering BitTorrent-powered streaming inside an easy-to-use Netflix-style interface. After being chased by lawyers, developers shut it down after a few weeks, saying that they wanted to move on with their lives. By then the app had been forked by others, which took over distribution and continued to develop the project.
The Pirate Bay was pulled offline after Swedish police raided a data center near Stockholm. The police confiscated dozens of servers which many believed to belong to the notorious torrent site. Cryptic teasers aside, The Pirate Bay remained offline for nearly two months but later denied that police took anything useful.
The music and movie industries and several of the UK’s leading ISPs agreed on a deal to tackle Internet piracy. The arrangement would see the BPI and MPA monitoring people sharing files illegally and the ISPs sending them “escalating” warning letters. It would take until 2017 before the first warnings were sent out.
Sony was hacked, revealing all sorts of inside scoops from the company. Among other things, leaked documents revealed in detail how Hollywood planned to take on piracy in the years to come. Several unreleased Sony movies also ended up on pirate sites.
2015
Popular TV-torrent distribution group EZTV shut down. After losing key domain names and data in a hostile takeover, EZTV founder NovaKing called it quits. The group’s retirement marked the end of an era in which the EZTV brand became synonymous with TV-torrents. Today, the brand still persists, but it’s a copycat that is not affiliated with the original group.
The first four episodes of the new Game of Thrones season leaked online a day before the official premiere. The leak triggered a download spree but the real piracy boom came a few weeks later when Game of Thrones set the all-time swarm record with 258,131 people simultaneously sharing a single torrent of the season finale. That record still stands today.
The Stockholm District Court ordered the seizure of both thepiratebay.se and piratebay.se domains, arguing that they were linked to copyright crimes. Responding to the decision, the torrent site started rotating to a bunch of new domains, including thepiratebay.GS, LA, VG, AM, MN and GD.
After being one of Hollywood’s biggest arch-rivals, YTS/YIFY signed an unprecedented agreement with the movie industry. Instead of going to trial, the MPAA signed a deal with YIFY’s operator, ending a multi-million dollar lawsuit before it really got started. The YTS/YIFY name is still out there today, but any sites carrying it have nothing to do with the original.
A federal jury ruled that Internet provider Cox Communications was responsible for the copyright infringements of its subscribers. The ISP was found guilty of willful contributory copyright infringement and ordered to pay music publisher BMG Rights Management $25 million in damages. This was the start of several similar piracy liability lawsuits.
On and before Christmas, high-quality screener copies of some of the hottest Hollywood productions appeared online. Some titles, including The Hateful Eight, even appeared before their official theatrical release. Hive-CM8, the group that was responsible for these leaks, later apologized.
Torrentz.eu, one of the world’s largest torrent sites, announced “farewell” to its millions of users. The meta-search engine, which hosted no torrents of its own but linked to other sites including The Pirate Bay, decided to cease its operations. Soon after, the unaffiliated Torrentz2.eu jumped in to fill the gap.
After months of domain hopping, The Pirate Bay moved back to its original .org domain. The torrent site moved away from it years earlier to avoid a possible seizure, but instead, all alternative domains were either seized or suspended.
The private music tracker What.cd, arguably the world’s most comprehensive library of digital music, shut down. The site went offline after several of its servers were raided by French military police. The local music industry group SACEM later confirmed that the law enforcement efforts were part of a criminal investigation.
Two principals of the copyright-trolling Prenda law firm were arrested by the feds. The duo were charged with conspiracy to commit fraud, money laundering, and perjury. As mentioned earlier, The Pirate Bay played a key role in the case.
A new report from piracy tracking firm MUSO revealed that the piracy landscape continued to evolve. There was a clear shift from torrents to direct download and streaming sites. Interestingly, traffic to private trackers remained relatively stable.
Pirate streaming boxes and the Kodi media player software began making headlines. In the UK, police carried out raids targetting several resellers. Concerned about piracy, the Kodi team announced legal action against those who use its name to promote infringing activity. Soon after, Kodi itself was banned by Amazon over piracy concerns.
2017
Torrent site ExtraTorrent shut down ‘voluntarily.’ The abrupt decision was announced in a brief message posted on the site’s homepage and came as a complete surprise to many friends and foes. ExtraTorrent’s distribution groups ettv and EtHD remained active and launched their own website.
Several prominent entertainment industry organizations launched the Alliance for Creativity and Entertainment (ACE), a huge anti-piracy coalition featuring not only MPAA members, but companies like Amazon, Netflix, CBS, HBO, and the BBC. In the years that followed, the group filed several lawsuits against pirate streaming box vendors including TickBox and Set-TV.
YouTube-MP3, the world’s leading YouTube-ripping site at the time, agreed to shut down and hand over its domain to the RIAA. A private settlement agreement, including an undisclosed payment, put an end to the copyright infringement lawsuit filed by several major record labels a year earlier.
Mininova, once the biggest torrent site on the Internet, decided to shut down. The site had lost nearly all of its traffic after a Dutch court ordered it to remove all copyright infringing torrents in 2009.
The Pirate Bay started using the computer resources of its visitors to mine Monero coins. This resulted in a heated debate. Supporters saw it as a novel way to generate revenue and an opportunity to replace ads, while opponents went out of their way to block the mining script.
Sci-Hub, often referred to as the “Pirate Bay of Science,” lost two court battles. Following a $15 million defeat against Elsevier, the American Chemical Society won a default judgment of $4.8 million in copyright damages. Despite the verdicts, the site remains widely accessible today.
The streaming piracy threat really became apparent when the Motion Picture Association described illegal streaming devices as “Piracy 3.0.” These devices offer a Netflix-like experience to consumers, but without rightsholders getting paid.
Kodi add-on repository TVAddons disappeared. It later became clear that the site’s founder was being sued in the US and Canada. The US lawsuit filed by Dish Networks was settled but the Canadian action remains ongoing.
After the initial disappearance, TVAddons returned with a more curated site.
2018
Demonoid went offline. During the summer the site started to suffer downtime and later on it vanished completely. The site’s owner, Deimos also went missing around the same time. A few months later we heard that Deimos had passed away.
Nintendo filed a complaint at a federal court in Arizona, accusing LoveROMS.com and LoveRETRO.co of massive copyright and trademark infringement. The operators, a married couple, eventually agreed to a $12 million settlement in favor of the game developer.
The ad-free and privacy-focused torrent site “SkyTorrents” became a victim of its own success. With millions of pageviews per day, the site was too expensive to manage, leaving the operator with no other option than to shut it down.
Terrarium TV – one of the most-loved ‘pirate’ applications for Android – ceased operating for good. Developer NitroXenon later informed TorrentFreak that, if required, he’d give up user data to the authorities.
The copyright trolling epidemic remained ongoing, but there is pushback as well. The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals reached a verdict in Cobbler Nevada v. Gonzales. The Court ruled that identifying the registered subscriber of an IP-address by itself is not enough to argue that this person is also the infringer. The order also affected several other cases.
2019
A group of former Demonoid staffers launched a new torrent site to keep the legacy of founder Deimos alive. While the original Demonoid is not coming back, the new site aims to offer a new home to those who miss the defunct torrent tracker.
As detailed just a few days ago, 2019 also saw numerous enforcement actions and shutdowns against pirate sites and services. The most prominent, including those targeted at Xtream Codes, Openload, Gears Reloaded, Cotomovies, and Vader are detailed here. These actions also show an increased focus on streaming sites and apps, including IPTV.
Two attorneys behind the controversial ‘copyright trolling’ law firm Prenda were found guilty. They were the masterminds behind the fraudulent scheme that extracted settlements from alleged pirates. They repeatedly lied to the court and operated a pirate honeypot.
Disney launched its new streaming platform which immediately gained millions of subscribers. While more legal platforms may sound positive, there are also concerns that more fragmentation will do little to curb piracy. Instead, people may be tempted to return to unauthorized sites and tools, as they can’t or don’t want to sign up for a handful of subscription services.
At the and of a decade where the piracy masses moved from direct downloading and torrents to streaming-based tools, none other than The Pirate Bay appears to have jumped on the streaming bandwagon as well. The notorious torrent site now links to the new streaming service Baystream, which allows people to stream videos directly in the browser.
For years on end, entertainment industry insiders have regularly portrayed Australia as a piracy-ridden country.
To see if this is indeed the case, the Government conducts annual consumer surveys to study local piracy habits. In recent years, this has revealed a steady decline in piracy.
The latest online copyright infringement report, released by the Department of Communications and the Arts this week, suggests that there’s been a steady decrease in the number of people who consume music, movies, and TV shows illegally. This follows the trend that was revealed in earlier reports.
According to the Government, 16% of the population can be classified as pirates. This is a drastic drop compared to last year when a similar study found that 32% were pirates. In 2015, when the first survey was taken, the number was even higher at 43%.
These are indeed impressive numbers. However, this doesn’t translate directly to more revenue for the entertainment industries. In fact, in many cases revenue appears to be down, based on the survey data.
For example, the total spend on music dropped from $88.34 in 2018 to $70.01 in 2019. This is the lowest amount since 2015 when the survey started. The drop is mostly caused by fewer concert and merchandise sales as well as physical music purchases.
Although piracy has seemingly plummeted, the percentage of Australians who spend money on music remains unchanged at 46%.
A similar decline in revenue is visible for games and movies. For both categories, consumers spend less than in previous years, despite the dropping piracy rates. The only category where spending is up is TV, which saw a big spike in 2019, as shown below.
If anything, the survey makes it clear that less piracy doesn’t automatically translate to higher spending. In fact, those who pirate and buy tend to spend much more on average, compared to those who only purchase content 100% legally.
The report found that people who consume everything legally spend $42 on average per three months. Their counterparts, who pirate and buy, spend more than twice as much, $84. in the same period.
This finding is consistent with previous research indicating that “hybrid” consumers (who pirate and buy) are bringing in the most money, probably because they are the most content-hungry consumers.
Another noteworthy finding deals with pirate site blockades, which are increasingly ordered by Australian courts. These are meant to decrease piracy, which the report appears to back up.
Of all respondents, only 7% say they will bypass a blocked site if they encounter one. The vast majority, 58%, will simply give up. This suggests that pirate site blocking is extremely effective, but is it?
Looking closer at the data we see that the 7% number comes from the entire survey. This means that the responses also include the answers from the 84% who don’t pirate to begin with. These people obviously have no intention to circumvent the blockades.
Finally, the report shows that those who say they will circumvent blockades see VPN services as the ideal tool. Of all respondents, 44% mentioned VPNs, which is up from 30% last year.
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.
In 2017, the newly formed anti-piracy group Alliance for Creativity and Entertainment (ACE) announced its presence to the world. Headed up by the traditional studios of the MPA plus Netflix and Amazon, the coalition also featured dozens of global movie and TV show giants.
This week we have three newcomers in our chart.
Early 2010, the online piracy ecosystem looked entirely different from what it does today. 
For years on end, entertainment industry insiders have regularly portrayed Australia as a piracy-ridden country.
