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Feds and Hollywood Seize Domains of Movie Pirates
adeelarshad82 writes "The federal government and Hollywood teamed up to seize domain names of seven sites that allegedly trafficked in copyrighted movies without due payment. The so-called 'Operation in Our Sites' sting targeted TVShack.net, Movies-links.tv, Filespump.com, Now-movies.com, PlanetMoviez.com, PirateCity.org, zml.com, NinjaVideo.net, and NinjaThis.net. The operation was run by the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and the US attorney for the Southern District of New York, in conjunction with several Hollywood studios. Unlike past anti-piracy efforts, the sites did not actually offer the movies for download, but instead streamed the movies and TV shows against ads. Previously, movie crackdowns had concentrated on sites that distributed movie files, most recently using the BitTorrent protocol."
It's the corporations that are most harmful to your freedom.
Glad to see that ICE is focusing on really important stuff like stopping movie downloads, rather than the really trivial matters like deporting the 12 million+ illegal aliens.
Shit, they took down a pirate and *two* ninja's man! Think about the unholy alliance of ninja pirates who will take their revenge and seize what is erRRRrrrrrrightfully theirs. :)
No wonder ICE doesn't have time for dealing with our border issues. They're too busy helping Hollywood. I guess Obama kind of owes them since it was their endorsement that helped put him into office.
I don't believe in karma, I just call it like I see it.
BitTorrent sites do not have the movie files on them. Users share them at their own expense and risk. They use blockable advertising to offset hosting costs.
Streaming sites obviously do have the files on them, and by using ads embedded into the stream, they were presumably attempting to directly make a notable profit off of the movies and TV shows.
So why were BT sites traditionally the main target instead of profiteering streaming sites? Nevermind how numerous and over-the-top most of the streaming sites seem.
"A Goddess rarely smiles for she is forced by others to be an island unto herself." - Zephiris
A venal government of a single country hijacked multiple domains with ease? Surely this should not be possible.
Corporation and Terrorism are not mutually exclusive. The effect of terrorism is that by harming a few people you hurt the majority by creating fear and thus terrorizing them, reducing their quality of life and freedoms. This also does not require blowing yourself up (hence the reason the term 'terrified' does not mean 'blown to bits'). If people stick to this proper definition (instead of modern sensationalism) it becomes very clear this applies to the media corporations tactics. They sue a few (actually thousands, more than have been blown up by Al Qaida) to terrorize others, and nobody knows if they will be sued (the little fact of downloading is not even relevant, anyone got sued by them).
So you Americans *do* need to fear terrorists (and thus some corporations), it's just that your idea of what terrorism means is all FOXed up.
The piracy "reportedly resulted in billions of dollars in losses to the U.S. economy," Preet Bharara, the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York, said in a statement.
No. It didn't.
You can never know everything, and part of what you do know will always be wrong. Perhaps even the most important part.
Exactly and its the index sites, sites that create lists, not the hosts.
Using the 'internet' to link is now a crime, not hosting the file or selling physical media?
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
90% of tvshacks content was hosted on megavideo, its still there, just go to another link site.
no news here as there was no accomplishment from the feds.
I would give everything i own for a little bit more.
This particular site, while I'm glad it's not, is conspicuously missing from the list. Was it omitted for some reason? If so, what reason(s)? Could it be its high profile and popularity? Could it be the matter of international relations? It is not outside of the range of possibility for the U.S. to inflict its will on the .ORG tld.
Don't think they had any movies or 19" servers on them
You should have checked their pants.
The thing about ninjavideo that I always found interesting (and what i had thought would keep them online), was that the site did not actually host the files it was streaming, but only provided links which used some sort of weird java popup that you had to keep running in the background which acted as some sort of intermediary to actually start the stream from files with obfuscated addresses hosted on 3rd party hosting sites (think megaupload).
I guess it all comes back to the question of if whether having a link to somewhere else that hosts copyrighted material is itself infringement, and unless the ninja admins manage to beat the MPAA lawyers, it would seem we have our answer to that.
The real shame is that the site was super useful for finding archived tv shows (especially documentaries from nat geo and the bbc and the like), but i suspect linking to the big name movies is what got them shut down. Such a waste - I don't even understand why people would want to watch the cams in the first place.
So, it's easier to get US government to shut down some domains pirating movies, than to shutdown domains used by phishers, scammers and all the other types that are actually hurting 'ordinary' people (no matter how dumb those people are)?
I see.
Yes! They can never defeat the last Ninja. I propose we only keep Ninja.com, it is also useful for searching for torrents: Google Ninja
I wonder if they are pursuing any of the advertisers that were advertising on those sites. If not, that's sort of like busting the illegal immigrants without going after the business that hired them.
The diversity and expression of human opinion is essential to human survival.
One, Movies-links.tv doesn't stream video, nor does it embed any movies in their site. What they do is provide links to where you can stream videos around the web and give the users the ability to report if the stream is working or not so that finding streaming video is easier. They confiscate the domain for that? That's like arresting me for telling you to go to the crack house down the street if you want to buy crack. Maybe it's not cool to give you that information but I don't think it's illegal. Really? It's illegal to let people know where they can find video streams? Anyhow immediately after the Feds seized the domain a replacement one was created: http://www.watch-movies-tv.info/ and you know how I know this? Because when I googled Movies-links.tv it was the second link that popped up. So wait a second? Why is it okay for google to tell me where I can find Movies-links.tv but not okay for Movies-links.tv to tell me where I can find video streams? Whatever. Who knows how long it took for this "operation" to get approval, pass the paperwork around, select a operational task force, come up with an action committee, decided on a communication strategy and plan the concerted effort.... I'm pretty sure it only took the people at Movies-links.tv about 5 minutes to register a new domain though. Nice work Fed's.
In the first action carried out as part of the initiative, authorities executed seizure warrants against nine domain names of Web sites that were offering first-run movies
A seizure warrant against a domain includes what exactly ? The host, the registrar, the technical contact's residence ?
I understand warrants for physical locations, but this seems a bit wrong. Maybe its just a poor choice of wording by the original author....
If ICE, the FBI and a bunch of other alphabet soup agencies are doing this, whether it is within their jurisdiction OR NOT, it has to mean a few things in order to make sense:
Agree with it or not, the whole idea of a government takeover of a website at the flip of a switch just gives me the heebie jeebies.
The game.
They won't stop until all your bits are the right color.
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
If you're a Hollywood exec, illegals mow the lawn, clean the house, clean the pool, service the wife - all good things. Those illegals are not going home, brother, not going home.
Meat processing plants use immigration as part of the HR process. They feed names of activists, malcontents, injured workers to the immigration office and then the roundups begin. Immigration gets to pretend publicly that they're doing something and the meat plants maintain a well-behaved slave-labor force.
And because slave labor helps keep prices low, you can afford meat sometimes on your Wal-Mart salary.
Everybody wins!
-- How I want a drink, alcoholic of course, after the heavy lectures involving quantum mechanics.
Similar to the War on Drugs, the small fish and the users get pinched while the root of the issue goes ignored.
When I hear a subset of the /. crowd claim that individuals should be allowed to "share" music files for free without fear of copyright lawsuits, I respectfully disagree (in general), but at least I get where they're coming from.
But I see a lot of people here wanting to defend sites that provide a means for anyone to watch movies on demand, taking a profit and not passing any compensation on to the rights-holders... which I guess makes sense if you think there shouldn't be copyright at all, but in that case my disagreement with your position is perhaps a bit less respectful.
Particularly intersting since any site that isn't engaged in copyright infringement gets screamed at if they dare make you look at an ad.
Seems to me taking the position against the rights-holders has become a knee-jerk reaction.