MPA & ACE Subpoenas Target Dozens of Potential ‘Burner’ Pirate Streaming Sites
A new batch of DMCA subpoenas obtained by ACE and the MPA target dozens of pirate streaming sites, some with a few thousand visits per month, others with up to 90 million. The presence of a few established names shows that tradition isn't dead just yet, but there are clear signs that pirate sites are becoming disposable. Here today yet easily burned to the ground tomorrow, few are built to last like they used to. Yet there's no waste; a recycled site performs like new. From: TF, for the latest news on copyright battles, piracy and more.
A trio of DMCA subpoena applications filed in the United States this week aim to extract any information held by three well-known internet companies, on potentially dozens of pirate site operators using their services.
The vast majority of the requests appear in a single DMCA subpoena targeting Cloudflare. Of the 52 main domains in that application, six also appear in another application directed at Tonic Corporation’s .to registry.
While .to domains are preferred by some operators due to the limited information requested by the registry when acquiring them, ACE/MPA file requests similar to the one below several times each year.
The final subpoena contains a single request for Zenlayer to offer up the personal details of whoever is behind the app MAGIS TV v7.1.2, which appears to serve movies direct from the company’s servers.
Stability vs. Mobility
In the DMCA subpoena above targeting Tonic, 1337x.to is easily recognized as the main domain of one of the most popular torrent sites online today, having been in use for well over a decade. The domain predates the launch of Google’s transparency report a decade ago, but since then has been targeted by at least 6.59 million URL takedown notices sent to Google alone.
For comparison, other domains mentioned in the subpoenas, including netmovies.to (2022) and 1hd.to (2023), have attracted relatively few takedown notices. Further examples, including Binged.to and Freek.to, only raised their heads above the parapet in the last quarter of 2024, and have barely received any at all.
That leaves freeky.to which appears to have attracted just four takedown notices – ever. As the data in the table below shows, traffic growth at some of these sites has been remarkable in the absence of significant pushback.
The data above begins in January but for Freek.to, December 2024 was an even more productive month; over 24 million visits according to SimilarWeb data, with less than 5% of its overall traffic attributed to organic search.
Time to Burn
With ACE/MPA now clearly on the case, future tactics should be interesting to watch. That being said, ACE has seen this same pattern of activity several times before. Sooner or later, the domains above will likely cease to exist, or at least, won’t present the problems they once did after their return to storage.
At that point, all eyes will be on the new rising stars of pirate streaming, having apparently appeared out of thin air but just in time to seamlessly scoop up a massive windfall of traffic.
The Rest of the Rest
Other domains listed in the DMCA subpoena include hydrahd.me, a domain that received 87.1m visits in January, 82.1m in February, and ‘just’ 54.7m in March. The domain hydrahd.cc also ‘lost’ significant traffic, falling from 2.57m in January to less than 1 million in March. Hydrahd.com started the year with 500K visits but by March had just 125K left.
Fortunately, hydrahd.ac performed significantly better; zero visits in January and February led to a healthy 21.3m in March. The reasons for the site returning an intermittent Error 451 (Unavailable for Legal Reasons) this week are currently unknown.
The rest of the domains can be found with additional data in the table below. How many will choose to self-destruct and/or hand themselves in for seamless recycling will probably become apparent in due course, at least among those with the strength, patience, and spare time to keep up.
Copies of the DMCA subpoena applications are available here (1,2,3,pdf)
From: TF, for the latest news on copyright battles, piracy and more.
