FMovies and Sister Pirate Sites Shut Down by Vietnam with ACE Assistance
Published on August 30, 2024
- Vietnam authorities conducted a shutdown operation that targeted the popular FMovies pirate website and affiliated domains.
- Alliance for Creativity and Entertainment also participated in the takedown, which represents global rightsholders.
- The FMovies has been in the crosshairs of legal issues for several years now.
FMovies, one of the largest pirate streaming networks, was successfully dismantled by Vietnamese authorities supported by the Alliance for Creativity and Entertainment (ACE). Several affiliated sites suffered the same fate, including AniWave, Bflixz, Flixtorz, Movies7, and Myflixer.
Anti-piracy coalition ACE collaborated with the Hanoi Police as a representative of major rightsholders like Hollywood studios and Netflix. Fmovies and its sister sites had an estimated 6.7 billion visits between January 2023 and June 2024.
FMovies was unreachable for a short while in July without any explanation or notice, displaying a connection timeout error instead of the regular homepage. After 8 years of seemingly undeterred operation, its operators stopped uploading new content earlier in July, and rumors had it the pirate website faced “legal issues.”
ACE also targeted the popular anime piracy portal Animeflix, which closed in June via a sudden announcement. The original Animeflix went offline several years ago and has moved to a few new domains since then.
In other recent news, an OCLC lawsuit demands monetary damages and a permanent injunction for the popular pirate library search engine Anna's Archive, as the site’s operators managed to scrape 2.2 terabytes from OCLC’s proprietary WorldCat database and published 700 million records for free last year.
This month, Webtoon Entertainment targeted 170 unique pirate domains that allegedly violated intellectual property rights. Among these pirate domains are several widely popular names that were hit with a DMCA subpoena that required Cloudflare to expose their operators’ details.
Also, the operators of 31 pirate manga websites distributing Kakao Entertainment’s “webtoon” comics were identified. The illegal domains were shut down by the company’s Illegal Distribution Response Team (P.CoK) anti-piracy unit.