The fight against pirate IPTV and other forms of copyright infringement is getting stronger. The Motion Picture Association (MPA) and the Alliance for Creativity and Entertainment (ACE) have joined forces in recent years and have reduced the footprint of piracy in the United States from 1,400 websites to only 238 pirate websites in a period of two years, a reduction of 83%.
This fight against piracy has over 100 expert investigators working every day to hunt down these pirate IPTV websites and their subsequent server shutdowns, but if there is one key figure to target this hunt for, it is Jan van Voorn, who we could say that he enjoys this task.
Jan van Voorn against the pirates
Jan van Voorn is the executive vice president and head of global content protection at the MPA, who says in Variety who gets out of bed every morning, eager to take on evildoers.
Jan van Voorn (courtesy of MPA)
“I am there to protect legitimate content creators, big and small. We are there to keep the market clean, and most of the time we are dealing with very bad guys. I’m happy to oppress the bad guys and let legitimate businesses prosper.”
Intellectual Property advocates employ four tactics, which can be scaled as the need dictates. From the courtesy of the cease and desist letter, to appealing to intermediaries such as web hosting, payments, advertising, social networks, etc. If these fairly friendly measures do not work, legal proceedings come into play, escalating from civil litigation to criminal prosecutions in conjunction with world authorities.
Efforts have intensified since the 2017 formation of the Alliance for Creativity and Entertainment (ACE), a coalition of nearly three dozen high-impact global companies in unprecedented cooperation designed to drive traffic to legitimate content platforms. This alliance also has ongoing education initiatives emphasizing how piracy undermines jobs, stunts creativity and discourages further investment in content.
The 238 pirate content sites are not going to be able to breathe easy either, since both MPA and ACE assure, with van Voorn as spokesperson, that it is better that they give up the fraudulent business because they are going to persecute them relentlessly, in a threatening and confident tone. “Don’t do it. Because we are out there every day, all day, and we will find you and shut down your servers… We are at the top of the game.”
ACE “closes” Watchseries.ninja and Watchsomuch.org
These anti-piracy operations are seen in two recent examples, in which “ACE has shut down the Watchsomuch.org and Watchseries.ninja domains.” However, domain names were targeted, not the sites themselves, so hackers often strike back with new URLs to access their content.
Watchsomuch currently working with .tv domain
Watchsomuch.org, for example, launched in March 2019 and offered more than 100,000 hours of TV and movie content, receiving 121 million visits in the last two years. They even offered a VIP subscription for $8 a month that offered faster streaming speeds and Full HD quality playback going forward.
Watchsomuch operators knew in advance that they were being investigated, and already in February they made known publicly on Twitter that there were other ways to access. It will therefore continue to be a game of cat and mouse with new mirrors emerging as certain domains are closed.
