Movie2K Down: MPAA Lists Site Among 'Notorious Markets' To Government
The Motion Picture Association of America, or MPAA, identified Movie2k, a streaming-movie portal that recently and unexpectedly disappeared from the Internet, as an “online notorious market” nearly two years ago in a letter sent to the U.S. Trade Representative. That letter gave the government a long list of websites known for piracy. But whether the site's sudden demise was a result of action taken by the U.S. government, whose plans to shut down piracy sites like Movie2k may have been hindered because the site was in a foreign territory, is still uncertain.
A representative from the MPAA couldn’t be reached for a comment. However, the bitTorrent weblog TorrentFreak is reporting that court action in the U.K. taken by the MPAA last month led to Movie2k being blocked.
In a 2011 letter to Stan McCoy, the assistant U.S. Trade Representative for Intellectual Property and Innovation, the MPAA labeled Movie2k (Romania) on its notorious markets pirate list as a linking website. The MPAA’s Michael P. O’Leary, senior executive vice president of global policy and external affairs, wrote that these sites aggregate links to files on other websites.
“The linking site typically organizes the illegal copies of movies and televisions shows by title, genre, season and episode, and provides an active link so the user can access the infringing content,” O’Leary wrote to McCoy. “Depending on the website, users are commonly presented with the option to either stream the content in a video-on-demand format or download a permanent copy to their computer.”
According to the MPAA's letter, Movie2k generates more than 723,000 monthly unique viewers, which makes it the 830th most popular Website, according to Alexa. Some of the sites Movie2k allegedly links to include Megavideo.com, Putlocker.com, and Duckload.com, according to the MPAA’s letter. Movie2k uses a variety of domains, the MPAA said: Movie2k.com, Movie2k.me, Movie2k.ws. and Movie2k.
There is no information available about when or if Movie2k will go live again.
Read the MPAA's full letter.
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