The Motion Picture Association has sent its annual notorious markets submission to the US Trade Representative, and has used it to claim a series of enforcement successes, TorrentFreak reports. The USTR will review the filing with input from other stakeholders over the coming months, and its own list is expected early next year.
Among the entries are two of the largest streaming piracy operations of the past year. The MPA says Cineby and the linked embed service Videasy.net "have ceased operations following MPA and ACE actions", referring to itself and the Alliance for Creativity and Entertainment.
Cineby announced a surprise shutdown in August, went offline in stages over more than a week and lost its last domains in early September. In July, before shutting down, it had more than 160 million visits.
Its operators gave a different account of why. They said their main video providers, which they called the "Sflix group" and the "1Movies group", had gone down about three months earlier and never fully recovered. TorrentFreak notes that the Sflix group may be the same network the MPA describes as part of the HiAnime operation, which Vietnamese law enforcement dismantled; seven suspected operators were charged in July.
The second claimed success is AnimeFLV, a Spanish-language anime portal that the MPA credits with over a billion visits a year. It stopped serving video in mid-June and now returns an HTTP 502 error. "This shutdown represents a significant enforcement success," the submission says.
The filing also sets out what remains. Kisskh, which had about 70 million visits in August on kisskh.is, mostly from India, is listed as the only priority linking site. DoodStream has moved to the regular list and Cuevana from priority to regular.
Growth elsewhere is brisk. Around 30 sites using the live sports platform Streamed drew 463 million visits in July, up from 134 million a year earlier, and VidFast is reportedly used by at least 158 pirate sites with roughly 629 million combined monthly visits. The MPA cites more than 243 million downloads of MovieBox from the Palm Store; TorrentFreak notes the store's counter has since passed 300 million.
Telegram is now the top priority in the cyberlockers category, with the MPA saying its takedown responses range from swift to weeks of inaction. "Telegram is a platform of immediate concern," the submission says. The filing also names new "hydra" threats, among them 1Shows and 1Flex, CineHD and VidBox, and StreamEX, and flags the IPTV services MagisTV and FlujoTV as priorities.
Both of the headline successes are also recorded as having copycats, operating under versions of the same names.
The structure of the claim repays a careful reading. Cineby ceased operations following MPA and ACE actions, which is true, and following the collapse of its video providers three months earlier, which its operators say is the reason. The submission reports the first fact and the second does not appear in it.
This newspaper notes the convenience of the construction. Anything that happens after an enforcement action happens following an enforcement action, and the MPA files annually, which means there is always one to be after.
The taxonomy completes the system. A site that closes is an enforcement success. A site that reappears under a similar name is a copycat, and a cluster of sites that regrow after removal is classified as a hydra, which in the MPA's categories is a threat type rather than a result.
The Department of Unnecessary Research has therefore examined the list for the only property that matters to a list, which is whether it can get shorter. The successes of each year generate the copycats and hydras of the next, and both are entries.
On this arithmetic the submission cannot shrink. Every site it removes qualifies it for another.