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Cineby, one of the biggest pirate streaming sites on the web, says it will shut its doors on August 26. The site was previously flagged as a notorious piracy operation by Hollywood and has been blocked by court order in several countries. If history is any guide, successors and copycats will line up soon to fill the gap.
With more than 160 million visits last month, Cineby is one of the most popular pirate streaming sites on the Internet.
The streaming portal has been a thorn in the side of Hollywood, with the Motion Picture Association (MPA) listing it as a notorious pirate site in its submission to the USTR last fall.
“Cineby is a fast-growing one-stop-shop piracy site in the ‘hydra site’ category. These are a rapidly expanding category of one-stop piracy sites offering content somewhat comparable to IPTV services, but without the need for subscriptions or dedicated devices,” MPA wrote at the time, linking the operation to Russia.
Enforcement Pressure Builds
In addition to the diplomatic pressure, the movie industry was also the driving force behind several high-profile blocking orders against the site this year.
In May, Cineby was listed as a target in the new UK “omnibus” site blocking order, for example, which also covers the site’s successors preemptively. The same applies to the recent “expanded scope” order from Canada’s federal court, which also covers Cineby and any potential successors.
Cineby
In July, a Delhi High Court order obtained by HBO and other movie studios went further. This injunction covered four Cineby domains and directed Indian ISPs to block the sites, while domain registrars were ordered to suspend them.
Despite the Indian order, Cineby’s main .at domain name remains online, suggesting that Registrar.eu has not complied with the Indian order. However, according to a recent announcement by the site’s operators, there soon might be no need to take action anymore.
A Voluntary Shutdown?
Visitors to Cineby’s website are currently greeted with a new announcement, suggesting that the site will shut down permanently in a few days.
“Cineby and all related services will cease operations on August 26th. It’s been a good run, but the time has come to stop,” the site announces, adding that “all servers will be shut down, and every user account will be deleted.”
The operators provide no rationale for this surprising decision. However, it is a reasonable assumption to suggest that the mounting enforcement pressure played a role.
The shutdown announcement
What will happen to the domain name when the site shuts down has yet to be seen. With millions of daily visits, the site has a massive audience, which will be looking for an alternative.
The Hydra…
Whether the operators will indeed shut down the site and get out of the business has yet to be seen. In the past, other sites have simply rebranded in an attempt to shake off the legal pressure. This includes the now-defunct HiAnime operation, which started as Zoro and also used the Aniwatch brand.
According to the MPA, Cineby relied heavily on piracy-as-a-service (PaaS) infrastructure, embedding videos from third party sites. These remain online, which means that the underlying piracy problem remains.
In the typical ‘hydra’ fashion, Cineby’s planned shutdown will result in plenty of new sites popping up; whether these are linked to the original site or not.
This problem is one of the key reasons why the UK and Canadian site blocking orders were expanded to cover future Cineby copycats and successors, even if they don’t use the same brand. If everything happens according to plan, this new blocking power can be put to the test later this month.
For now, however, cineby.at remains online, streaming pirated movies and TV shows as usual.
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