Fmovies, a Hanoi-based streaming operation, has been shut down in what an industry group says was the source of the world’s largest piracy ring.
The Alliance for Creativity and Entertainment, a global anti-piracy coalition, said that Hanoi police shut down the streaming operation as well as associated sites. The authorities acted in partnership with ACE, which includes studios and other content companies to wage legal efforts against infringing sites.
Charles Rivkin, the chairman and CEO of the MPA and chairman of ACE, said that the shutdown of Fmovies was “the largest takedown in history and a huge victory for IP holders.”
According to ACE, Fmovies and associated sites generated more than 6.7 billion visits between January 2023 and June 2024. The site featured recently released movies and TV shows, with easy streaming links and the tagline, “Just a better place for watching online movies for free!”
The website TorrentFreak had reported on Fmovies stoppage earlier this summer, noting that it had halted the release of new content and was unreachable.
Fmovies launched in 2016, but it has taken until now to sideline the service because of the “increasingly complex” nature of investigations, given the “means and methods available to targets to mark their identities and detect evasion,” according to an MPA official. No charges have been filed yet, but this is the first case of this scale to be prosecuted under the Vietnamese penal code, the official said.
“Fmovies had dozens and dozens of domains, and so that was really challenging,” Rivkin said. “…The team completely uprooted a global piracy ring, versus removing a branch here and there. You talk about piracy sometimes being whack-a-mole. Well, we took down the whole game here.”
After its launch, a Philippine media conglomerate, ABS-CBN, sued Fmovies in federal court. A federal judge in 2017 issued a $218,200 default judgment against a set of John Doe defendants.
Karyn Temple, the executive vice president and global general counsel for the MPA, went through a demonstration of the Fmovies site in testimony before a congressional committee last year. She and a delegation went to Vietnam last summer to meet with the Ministry of Public Security about the case.
The U.S. Trade Representative also had listed the site on its annual “notorious markets” list from 2017 to 2023. Rivkin noted that before the Fmovies shutdown, the top five English language piracy sites were all in Vietnam. “It’s a real pivotal moment for us,” Rivkin said.
Last year, Vietnam’s Ministry of Information and Communications and it Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism formed a unit to crack down on piracy sites, according to Torrent Freak.
Other agencies involved in the shutdown include the Department of Homeland Security and the Justice Department.
Marc E. Knapper, the U.S. ambassador to Vietnam, said in a statement, “These prosecutions demonstrate Vietnam’s commitment to intellectual property rights enforcement, contributing to an economic ecosystem where creators an inventors can thrive.” Madam Ngo Phuong Lan, the chair of the Vietnam Film Development Association, said that the shut down was a “milestone” that “will contribute significantly to the advancement of the Vietnamese film industry.”
Rivkin also said that there are signs that the scale of piracy has been reduced in North America. In 2017, when he joined the MPA, there were 1,444 IPTV piracy services operating in North America, compared to 220 this year. “Our fight isn’t over and our fight will probably never be over, but I think we are winning,” he said. “This is a real turning point and we have them on the run.”
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