Open Source Movie Streaming Project 'Movie-Web' Shut Down By Hollywood Complaint

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TorrentFreak: In recent months, Movie-Web has quickly gained popularity among a particular group of movie aficionados. The open source software, which is still available on GitHub, allows anyone to set up a movie search engine capable of streaming content from third-party sources. These external sources tend to have large libraries of pirated entertainment. Movie-web's developers are not oblivious to the legal ramifications but since they don't host any files, they hoped to avoid legal trouble. The software just provides a search engine for third-party content, they argued. [...]

Yesterday, the movie-web.app domain was suddenly taken down. According to a message posted on the official Discord server, this is the result of a "court action" from several movie companies including Warner Bros. Netflix, Paramount, Universal, and Disney. [I]t appears that action was taken against the movie-web.app domain. It seems likely that registrar Namecheap suspended the domain after receiving a legal complaint from the aforementioned Hollywood companies. [Update: After publishing the article we learned that there is a legal action that requires registrars to take action against several 'pirate' domains. We're looking into the matter and will follow this up later.]

Namecheap updated the domain's status to clientHold, which effectively rendered the domain inaccessible. The measure is often used to suspend pirate site domains following copyright holder complaints. The surprise takedown only affects movie-web's publicly hosted 'demo' instance. On Discord, the movie-web team says that it has no plans to bring this website back in any shape or form. "As a team, we always said that if we were taken down, we would go down without a fight and we have decided to stick to that. We have zero interest in getting involved with legal matters, and so we will not be trying to circumvent this takedown in any way," developer 'BinaryOverload' writes.

How did they not see that coming?

[NomDeAlias]

Seems like a massive oversight to have not setup their website like all the pirate sites that Hollywood has been unable to get shutdown. It's not like they weren't familiar with these other sites given their service is powered by them.

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[Kernel Kurtz]

Seems like a massive oversight to have not setup their website like all the pirate sites that Hollywood has been unable to get shutdown. It's not like they weren't familiar with these other sites given their service is powered by them.

Github is a great place to start to recruit developers though. Maybe their own repository is in the future for the controversial bits. Or maybe they just leave a small legacy like Popcorn Time on Github in the end.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]

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[NomDeAlias]

Their github page would be more successful with a long running service.

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[Kernel Kurtz]

Their Github page will be the first to go in any case.

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[NomDeAlias]

It's literally not though. Their .app domain was the first thing to go, that's what the story is about. You even pointed out Popcorn Time still has a github page. Sure they get a quick bump from this story but it's short sighted if that was the plan.

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[rgmoore]

Many people think they're capable of outsmarting the law. I think computer programmers can be especially prone to it, since they're used to coming up with creative solutions to rules-based problems. They don't realize two things:

1) They aren't the first people to try this stuff. The legal system has encountered lots of clever scofflaws, and it has been tweaked to account for their tricks.

2) The law is more flexible than computers are, because it's run by humans. There are plenty of legal rules that inclu

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[NormalVisual]

Three things, actually:

3) It's not about outsmarting the law, it's about outspending it. What's legal now can be made illegal with the proper application of a sufficient amount of currency directed at the appropriate legislators, and if even if it remains legal, those who choose to fight you will almost certainly be able to tie you up in court until you can no longer afford to fight.

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[Bill, Shooter of Bul]

No. No it is not. This is why people do dumb things like this. They can't do that that would be "Racketeering", or "It would violate my first amendment rights!". Just incredible what people believe.

Streisand Effect

[bill_mcgonigle]

> Receiving objects: 100% (19333/19333), 7.68 MiB | 1.84 MiB/s, done.

I have no interest in this project but Babs made me clone it.

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[93 Escort Wagon]

That darn Babs!

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[waspleg]

Do you have a DeCSS [wikipedia.org] one?

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[nasch]

If they have user interface...

  - they cannot displlay names of pirated content

  - they cannot display locations of pirated content

Why not? What exclusive rights do those things violate?

Dingus

[paul_engr]

Maybe Warner should just merge with them and then Zaslav can burn everything to the ground like all that other shit

Always remember

[DarkRookie2]

That justice is always bought in this country.