In the last few days, topics have appeared in a number of Bulgarian forums about the fate of a number of native sites offering pirated online movie streaming. Several of the popular in our country, and not only, domains are now absolutely unavailable. Which sites are affected? User complaints affect the following domains:
- FilmiSub.com
- KinoFen.net
- Filmi7.com
- Muvibg.com
Are they taken down by GDBOP or some other institution? In general, when sites are taken down by law enforcement agencies, this is announced on their home page – it is indicated which authority took down the site, on what basis, etc. There is currently no such thing, although that is the #1 guess as to what happened. The four sites listed, there are probably others, suddenly disappear. When trying to look up their domains via WHOIS, it turns out that they don’t have any DNS servers to point to. That is, the domains have no connection to the hosting servers on which their content was located.
The only exception is the site FilmiSub, which was first without a DNS record, but then appeared on another hosting – in Russia. The following message was posted on the home page:
The site is permanently closed. It will never work again in any form whatsoever. All sites, pages and groups on social networks that impersonate us offering applications and promises of return and continued activity have nothing to do with us and are created to mislead and abuse you in some way by using our name. –––––––––––––––––––––––––– This website is permanently closed. It will never work again.
It turns out that two of the sites are part of the targets in a new operation by the anti-piracy coalition ACE. A number of DMCA subpoenas have been issued targeting over a dozen sites. At the head of the list is good old The Pirate Bay. The subpoenas in question were sent to Clouldflare because the group of sites used the company’s services. ACE hopes Cloudflare can help identify operators of torrent and illegal streaming portals. Judging by the disappearance of these sites in Bulgaria, either there is progress, or the owners of the sites are trying to take preventive actions in their defense. Against TPB in particular, there have been many attempts to stop it. Swedish authorities twice tried to shut down the site, confiscating dozens of servers. This did not happen, but the founders of the site suffered punishments in the form of imprisonment. And while the site still exists, it’s far from its best days. However, anti-piracy forces have not forgotten him. Through the Motion Picture Producers Association, the Alliance for Creativity and Entertainment (ACE) has filed a DMCA claim in the US District Court of California. These subpoenas are not uncommon and are usually addressed to third-party intermediaries, in this case Cloudflare. The court is seeking all relevant information the California company has about its targeted customers.
