The .ly domain of the Spanish pirate streaming portal Series.ly was suspended this week by its Libyan registrar, a little over a week after a Madrid court approved a broad anti-piracy order against the site.
Series.ly was once one of Spain's best-known pirate link sites. The original operation dropped its piracy links in late 2014, and in 2021 the domain was bought at auction by a new team, which says it is not part of the first.
The second Series.ly, which required a login to use, became popular in its own right, with close to two million monthly visits and nearly 90 per cent of its traffic coming from Spain.
In May the film and television producers' group EGEDA complained to the Second Section of Spain's Intellectual Property Commission, which sits under the Ministry of Culture. The Commission's investigator checked a sample of 42 of the 110 titles listed in the complaint and found that 35 of them could be streamed or downloaded from the site at the time. The Commission ordered the removal of the infringing content in July and says it received no response.
At the end of July the Commission sanctioned measures aimed not at the site but at the third parties around it. Google and Bing are required to remove it from search results, and internet providers with a market share above 1 per cent must block the domain; they are also urged to redirect visitors to a government page explaining that the domain was blocked "for having illegally facilitated access to content protected by intellectual property rights".
The order further names Cloudflare, the Ukrainian hosting company Virtual Systems and the site's domain registrar, Libyan Spider Network. The measures apply not only to the current domain name but to new ones the operator may use for the same purpose.
The Commission's resolution needed court approval before it could be enforced. That came on 28 September, when a judge at the Central Court of First Instance in Madrid concluded that the measures were proportionate.
Little more than a week later the registrar acted. WHOIS records showed series.ly placed on "clientHold", a status that pulls a domain out of the .ly zone so that it no longer resolves. Libyan Spider has not commented publicly. The site's operator says the notice it received cited the Spanish order and reached it through the auction house that sold it the domain and that acts as a reseller for the registrar.
"The reason they gave us was a Spanish copyright resolution and a court order authorizing suspension measures against the domain," the operator told TorrentFreak, in quotes the site translated from Spanish. The operator says Series.ly is a non-profit that has never generated revenue, hosts no video files and carries links added by its community. "We think it's disproportionate that a complaint about content hosted by third parties ends up getting our entire domain suspended, including email and the personal library features."
Soon after the suspension a similar site appeared under the name Cinubo, and the Series.ly Telegram and Discord channels were renamed to match. A few days later the registrar lifted the suspension, stressing that the domain could no longer be used to link to copyright-infringing content. The company behind the project is registered in Nevis, and the operator does not plan to appeal.
The order's most powerful clause is the one about names that do not exist yet. The measures reach the current domain and any new domain used for the same purpose, which means an unbounded set of addresses has been blocked on the strength of a sample.
The arithmetic of that sample deserves a line of its own. Of 110 titles complained about, 42 were checked and 35 were found available, and from those 35 an order now extends to every domain name the operator might ever register.
This newspaper notes where the chain of enforcement finally bit. Not the Spanish courts, nor the Spanish providers, nor Cloudflare, but a registrar in Libya, acting on a notice relayed through a domain auction house, against a company incorporated in Nevis, over a Spanish-language site whose traffic was ninety per cent Spanish.
Our analysts regard the result as the tidiest available. The operator has moved to Cinubo, which the order may also cover, because the order covers successors; and if it covers successors it covers the successors of successors, so the only domain name certain to comply with the Spanish order is one nobody has thought of.
The domain has reached the same conclusion unaided. Returned to its owner and forbidden to link to anything, series.ly now publishes an account of what happened to series.ly.
The Department of Unnecessary Research considers the measure fully effective. A blocking order that ends with the blocked address explaining the blocking order has nothing left to block.