The global crackdown on movie piracy continues as the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA), in partnership with Dutch anti-piracy group BREIN, swooped in on as many as 51 international torrent websites.

While 12 of the websites shuttered were American, the latest anti-piracy closed 39 others abroad. These websites were pulled offline by their hosting companies following complaints from the two organizations.

BRAIN last week pulled down 12 more sites in the U.S., again in cooperation with the Motion Picture Association of America, the Dutch agency said in a statement.

Earlier this month, BRAIN following information from the MPAA 39 inaccessible sites in the Netherlands. The sites published structural links to streaming movies. BREIN investigated the sites and ordered the hosting provider sites inaccessible, it added.

The names of the torrent sites were not disclosed.

There will be new sites but when we aim at getting to them faster so they can not grow big , BREIN director Tim Kuik remarked. Our target is the accessibility of illegal sites that Web users prefer to hinder legitimate platforms.

Last year, the MPAA and its colleague in The Netherlands closed down 29 BitTorrent and Usenet indexing sites.

For quite some time now, MPAA has been lodged in a battle against piracy and unauthorized availability of movies on the Internet. BRIEN, which conducts anti-piracy stings in 11 other countries, including Germany, France, Britain and Canada, thus became the perfect partner for the American Motion Picture Association.

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