FMovies Transfers to Iceland Over The Loss of Its Swedish Domain

• FMovies' Swedish domain gets blocked by the domain registrar.
• A WHOIS lookup reveals that the old domain is likely to get deleted permanently.
• The free movie streaming site has now moved to Iceland and is fully functional yet again. 

FMovies is a popular free streaming site offering a Netflix style experience. The site offers free streaming of mainstream movies and TV shows and anyone can just open the site and sit back to enjoy a movie of their choice. However, FMovies has been under the scrutiny of many copyright watchdogs and has been domain hopping in order to avoid search engine downgrading and evade copyright law enforcers.

For a while now, this media streaming service has been operating under the Tonga domain FMovies.to but has recently moved to FMovies.se, a Swedish domain. However, the domain registrar, SE Direkt, has apparently deactivated the .se domain for some reason. Though FMovies did not state any reason why the registrar has deactivated the domain, it is not too hard to guess the role of copyright law at play. But FMovies being FMovies, has now moved to an Iceland-based domain, FMovies.is. The site confirmed this via its official Twitter handle.

Hi folks. We've switched to https://t.co/FUn1yyZmqY again due previous registrar deactived our .se domain. Now please use https://t.co/FUn1yyZmqY for enjyoing also please help us spread this world. Thanks!

— Fmovies.to (@fmoviesdotto) September 5, 2018

A WHOIS lookup confirms that the FMovies.se domain is indeed deactivated despite having an official expiry date of November 29, 2018. The status messages in the WHOIS lookup indicate that the renewal of the domain is prohibited and will be possibly deleted. Interestingly, popular torrent tracker The Pirate Bay was also initially having a .se domain but it took quite a bit of time before authorities seized it.

Image Source: TorrentFreak

FMovies is not new to copyright controversy, though. Last year, it was ordered to pay US$210,000 in copyright damages when it lost a case filed by ABS-CBN in the US. The court ruling gave ABS-CBN the rights to the FMovies.to domain. Despite many setbacks, the website continues to domain hop and shows no signs of slowing down anytime soon.

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