The fight against pirate IPTV does not stop. A new wave of documents presented in the courts of the United States by ACE (Alliance for Creativity and Entertainment) put the operators of these services in check, including one that extracted videos from the official CDN of Warner Media, using Google as proxy.
These lawsuits will be the first step for many of the IPTV websites or subscriptions to cease suddenly and for no apparent reason.
Pirate Sites Sued
In recent weeks, both the MPA (Motion Picture Association) and ACE (Alliance for Creativity and Entertainment) have taken steps to require Cloudflare and domain name registry Tonic to hand over the personal information of the people behind dozens of of sites and services that infringe copyright and intellectual property rights.
According to these lawsuits, the listed platforms have harmed the interests of major Hollywood studios by making available to users pirated copies of various movies such as Morbius, Joker, Frozen, Mortal Kombat and Godzilla vs Kong, in addition to the television series Supernatural and Dark.
The list of services that will be knocked down soon is as follows:
- 123moviesfree.so
- 123movieshub.tc
- 123watchmovies.co
- 2embed.ru
- blogdepelis.io
- cinema-quality.com
- cliver.me
- cavena.pro
- cavena3.cc
- d123movies.to
- dytt89.com
- ffmovies.sc
- pelisplay.co
- putlockers.li
- repelis.red
- repelis24.co
- seriesflix.video
- hackstore.la
- suzihaza.com
- tvlibre.net
- we-play.live
- ymovies.to
- bflix.watch
- 123moviesfree.love
- pelis24.se
According to estimates, between them they had a total of 163 million monthly visits.
Pirate IPTV at risk of disappearing
As for the pirate IPTV provider and reseller sector, they remain key targets for ACE, which is why they regularly appear in DMCA (Digital Age Copyright Act) subpoena requests. The latest installment lists several domains and asks to obtain personal information related to them.
“The subpoena requires information to be provided about individuals offering infringing material through the domains described above: magistv.net, 6iptv.com, xtremehdiptv.org, ” the letter to Cloudflare says. “ This would include people’s names, physical addresses, IP addresses, phone numbers, email addresses, payment information, account updates and account history.”
DMCA subpoena requests for IPTV platforms are a bit more detailed than those sent against standard sites. In addition to detailing the allegedly infringing content, the primary domain, and a portal URL (such as a directory or M3U playlist file ), backend URLs are also referenced.
In many cases, these URLs are simply IP addresses or domains followed by long alphanumeric strings, but sometimes a gem can be found in the form of accessible web. In the DMCA summons addressed to Cloudflare to provide the required personal data mentioned above, vw-source.com and futbollibre.net are included as alleged infringers of the television series Supernatural. Interestingly, the backend URLs appear to show that Google is used as an HTTP proxy to access streams available through Warner Media’s official Content Delivery Network (CDN).