Hollywood and Netflix Report Piracy Threats to the EU, Call for ‘Intermediary’ Action

Over the past two decades, online piracy has proven to be a massive challenge for the entertainment industries.

Governments around the world have recognized this challenge and, where possible, lend a helping hand to identify and address these threats.

The European Commission, for example, compiles a bi-annual ‘Counterfeit and Piracy Watch List’ following the example set by the United States. Like its U.S. equivalent, the EU watchlist relies on input from stakeholder groups, which nominate problematic sites and services for inclusion.

The most recent version of the report was published in 2022 and the EU is currently working on an updated edition. This will rely in part on comments from the Motion Picture Association (MPA), which represents several major Hollywood studios and Netflix.

MPA Reports Piracy Threats

As the driving force behind the Alliance for Creativity and Entertainment (ACE), the largest and most active anti-piracy group, MPA is well aware of the global piracy threats. And indeed, its submission lists dozens of problematic sites and services.

MPA’s overview includes many of the usual targets, including torrent sites such as The Pirate Bay and 1337x, streaming portals including Solarmovie, and various piracy apps and IPTV services.

The full list, available at the bottom of this article, also includes less obvious targets, such as the messaging app Telegram, Russian social media network VK, and various domain name registries. Those have been called out previously, though, so that’s no surprise either.

The MPA says that it does not intend to provide an exhaustive overview of the most severe threats. The mentioned sites and services mostly serve to illustrate the scope and nature of the anti-piracy challenges.

“The MPA’s contribution is not intended to be comprehensive but instead reflects an attempt to identify sites and services particularly illustrative of the nature and scope of online content theft,” it writes.

Intermediaries are KEY to enforcement

Needless to say, the MPA won’t expect the European Commission to magically make these piracy threats disappear overnight. The MPA itself is much better equipped to deal with these threats than the EU. However, the EU can help to shape legislative conditions that can make enforcement efforts more effective.

With this in mind, it’s no surprise that the ‘key enforcement points’ highlighted by the MPA don’t involve pirate sites directly. Instead, they are solely focused on ‘intermediaries’, which include hosting companies, CDN providers, advertisers, and domain registrars, among others.

These companies do business with pirate sites, willingly or not. Yet, the same organizations are not particularly proactive when it comes to enforcement or helping third-party enforcement efforts, MPA says.

In fact, all the “key enforcement points” in MPA’s submission are related to intermediaries. These companies should be more proactive to prevent infringement, terminate accounts when needed, and verify the identities of business customers.

“Intermediaries should take proactive measures to prevent the availability of infringing content”

“Intermediaries should have a clear obligation to verify the identity of all their business customers and to ensure that the contact details listed are up to date and accurate”

“Intermediaries should take adequate steps to ensure their services are not used to facilitate infringement by ceasing the provision of their services”

How the EU Can Help

Throughout the submission, MPA mentions that it asked European intermediaries to release information on the operators of piracy services. This information could help to expose anonymous operators, so they can be brought to justice.

These notes emphasize that European intermediaries could potentially have usable information. If that’s not the case, the EU might want to consider legislative action to make sure that this changes going forward.

While describing the problem, MPA also offers a solution: make Know Your Business Customer (KYBC) requirements mandatory for companies operating under EU law.

“Online enforcement efforts are frustrated when intermediaries fail to take adequate steps to ensure that their services are not being used to facilitate copyright infringement, a problem compounded by the fact that many website operators and intermediaries operate anonymously.

“This is an issue that needs to be addressed by the EU legislator urgently and we therefore strongly encourage the inclusion of due diligence ‘Know Your Business Customer’ verification obligations for these services within the Digital Services Act,” MPA adds.

This isn’t the first time these suggestions have been made. In recent years, the MPA and related organizations have lobbied for stricter verification checks for online intermediaries. Making these checks mandatory would be a game-changer, they repeatedly argued.

While the Digital Services Act already includes some KYBC requirements, the rules don’t apply to intermediaries and hosting platforms.

The MPA’s extensive overview of pirate sites and services serves as a backdrop to a call to reconsider the scope of KYBC requirements. The EU Commission can’t do much to target the pirate sites and platforms directly, but they can shape the conditions to boost enforcement, MPA indirectly suggests.

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The Motion Picture Association’s full submission to the European Commission is available here (pdf). Below is a list of all the sites and services highlighted in the report. Some of these were shut down in recent weeks.

Linking and streaming websites

– Fmovies
– Vegamovies
– rezka[.]ag
– Seasonvar[.]ru
– Dizigom
– Gimy[.]ai
– Goojara[.]to/levidia.ch/Supernova[.]to
– KatMovieHD[.]boo
– Tamilblasters[.]link
– Gnula.nu/[.]se
– Dytt8[.]net, Dytt89.com, Dy2018.net, Dy2018[.]com, Dydytt[.]net, and Ygdy8[.]com
– Rlsbb[.]ru
– Solarmovie[.]to
– Sockshare1[.]com
– Hianime (formerly Aniwatch[.]to and zoro[.]to)
– Cuevana[.]biz and Cuevana3[.]eu
– Braflix[.]video
– Cuevana3[.]ch
– Veronline[.]in (formerly veronline[.]sh and veronline[.]cc)

Illegal IPTV and streaming services

– MagisTV.net
– Tele-latino.com
– TVExpress.pro
– Theking365tv.site
– GenIPTV
– King-IPTV.net
– Globe IPTV
– Crystal OTT
– Gogo IPTV
– SVI Cloud
– Unblock Tech
– WHMCS Smarters

Cyberlockers and video hosting services

– Doodstream (doods[.]pro)
– Baidu Wangpan
– VK[.]com
– Uploaded.net
– Mixdrop[.]co
– Streamtape[.]com
– Netu[.]ac
– Hqq[.]to
– Waaw[.]to

Piracy Apps

– EVPAD
– EVPAD
– MagisTV.video
– Telegram

P2p and BitTorrent portals

– 1337x[.]to
– ThePirateBay[.]org
– Rutracker[.]org
– Rutor[.]info
– YggTorrent

Hosting providers

– Virtual Systems, V-Sys
– Squitter, ABC Consultancy, Peenq, ESTOXY, BestDC, SERDECH
– Private Layer, Swiss Global, and affiliated companies
– DDoS-Guard.net

Registries

– .CH Registry
– .CC Registry
– .IO Registry
– .ME Registry
– .RU Registry
– .TO Registry

Advertisers

– 1XBET

Piracy as a Service

– 2embed[.]cc
– Vidsrc[.]to
– Njal[.]la
– Collaps.org
– GDrivePlayer
– XFileSharing/XvideoSharing

TV Operators

– SatCon Africa
– Excaf Telecom
– Cross Connect

From: TF, for the latest news on copyright battles, piracy and more.