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Netflix and various Hollywood studios continue their crusade against pirate sites Down Under. The companies today obtained a new blocking order in the Federal Court of Australia, targeting dozens of websites. The companies also recently obtained the first cyberlocker block order, with Mixdrop being the main target.
Pirate site blocks are the anti-piracy tool of choice for many copyright holders around the world. This is also the case in Australia, where blocking injunctions are common today.
Today, a group of prominent film companies, including Disney, Netflix and Village Roadshow, obtained the latest blocking order in the Federal Court of Australia.
52 pirate sites, 92 domain names
The court order to block, issued by Judge Nicholas, targets a wide mix of pirate sites. Many of these sites use variations of popular piracy brands, including YTS, Cuevana2, Movies123, and Tamilgun.
The film companies convinced the court that these sites, some of which have estimated millions of hits per month, clearly infringe copyright.
โ[I]It is clear from the evidence that online locations facilitate copyright infringement on a large scale. Some act as proxy servers for other servers and some share torrent files using the BitTorrent protocol," the order says.
The site's operators were given the option to challenge the blocking request, but most did not respond. The infringing activities continued and therefore a blocking order is warranted according to the court.
This is not the first injunction of its kind. The most popular pirate havens are already blocked, but Disney, Netflix, and other movie companies regularly expand the list to make it more difficult for the general public to find alternative pirate sources.
Injunction Mixdrop
Today's court order comes approximately two weeks after Judge Nicholas issued another order in favor of the film companies. That one covered the popular Mixdrop cyberlocker.
The Mixdrop command is the first to point to a file hosting service. According to complaints from rights holders, the site encouraged people to upload popular content, paying affiliates up to $1,000 per week, depending on the number of hits they generated.
Mixdrop has over 20 million estimated hits per month and the court order requires Australian ISPs to block the main domain name, Mixdrop.co, as well as several related domains and IP addresses.
Graham Burke, President of creative content australiacharacterizes the Mixdrop injunction as a major victory.
โCyber โโlockers play a key role in the piracy ecosystem and this ruling will disrupt major criminal operators who facilitate pirated content through Mixdrop,โ Burke said.
โSite blocking remains critical in reducing piracy in Australia. Ultimately, however, it helps keep consumers safe from the significant risks that come with illegal access to content."
Blocking effectiveness?
There's no doubt that blocking sites helps deter some casual hackers, but it's certainly not a panacea.
Earlier this year, Creative Content Australia to study discovered that the blocking measures do not affect all pirates. A survey of Australian hackers revealed that about half of them encountered a blocked site. Of this group, about a third gave up pirate hunting or found legal alternatives.
Most of the people who found a site blocked said they would simply search for alternative pirate sites to find the content they were looking for.
Interestingly, most hackers don't seem to be very concerned with site blocking measures. 58% of all adult hackers and 70% of all teen hackers agree that blocking hacker sites and apps is a good idea.
That's easy to say, of course, once you know how to bypass the blocks. And indeed, the same survey found that VPNs and alternative DNS servers are commonly used in Australia, especially among persistent hackers.
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A copy of Judge Nicholas's Mixdrop order can be found here (pdf). from today blocking order (pdf) redirects to the following sites, some of which operate from multiple domains:
โ Xemovie
โMoviecrumbs
โ 2k movie
โ Freemoviesfull
โwatch seriesstream
โ Open Loading Movies
โ Nunuyy
โ HDToday
โ Azseries
โ 1 hd movie
- Tamilgun
โ Activity
- Watch movie
โ 5 movies
โ Cda-hd
โFullmovieshd4k
โ Kissing movies
โ Pttplay
โ Shared socks1
โ television programs88
โ Movies4u
โ Movieffm
โ Best series
โ Aa01
โ poppies
โ Yts-en
โ Ice films
- Solar film
hindilinks4u
- Free TV Project
โ Ytsyify
โ Yts.land
โ Yts.zone
โ Yify.pl
โFboxtv
โ Olevod
โ Mudvod
โBemovies
โ fbox.to
โshowboxmovies
โ Soap 2 days
- T.V. series
โ See0123movies
โ 123enjoy
โ 123 movies
โ 123unblock.us
โ 0gomovies.cm
โ Movies123
- Yes! films
โ Dongphym
โMovies123-online
- Cuevana 2
