Towards the end of piracy and IPTV? Thousands of sites could be disabled at once

Tens of thousands of domains could soon be blocked, based on a single court order.

British justice has potentially found a new weapon that could wreak havoc on hacking sites. In 2016, the MPA – for Motion Picture Association – ordered the blocking of the site 123movies.to, one of the biggest piracy platforms active in the United Kingdom. The following month, half a dozen clones were born. Each new legal blockage systematically leads to the opening of multiple “mirror” sites or copies, managed by other teams.

Until now, anti-piracy organizations had to submit a new request for each site, whether it was a simple mirror – meaning an official copy redirecting to another URL that is not blocked – or a copy. A long and tedious process, since the organizations in question had each time to obtain a quantity of information on the site before requiring its blocking.

Between 2021 and 2022, nearly a dozen domain names linked to the 123movies site were thus blocked in the United Kingdom, always with the same purpose: with each blocking, new clones emerged. The MPA therefore decided to change its methodology to be more efficient. She returned a new list to the London Court last summer, which included the sites for which she did not carry out the investigation – and which turn out to be simple plagiarisms of the original site. And to everyone’s surprise, the sites in question were all blocked, without in-depth analysis. The new methodology of the MPA is clear: new sites similar to 123movies, which offer pirated content and have a name similar to 123movies will now be automatically added to this list and blocked in the following weeks, without any investigation does not allow to define the owner of the site or his connection to the previous sites. And mine nothing, it could change a lot of things. In recent months, over 100 sites using the term 123movies have been banned in the UK. Other countries could learn from this methodology.

So of course, it is always possible to circumvent the barriers with a VPN, but for the vast majority of users, these measures should be sufficient to deter piracy, according to the MPA, which sees this new methodology as an extremely powerful tool to come to bout not only piracy but also illegal IPTVs.

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