ACE Enforcement Action Reaches Record Levels, Over 3,000 Pirate Domains Seized

The domains in question have either been signed over or redirected to the Motion Picture Association (MPA). File photo: John Hanson Pye, ShutterStock.com, licensed.

LOS ANGELES, CA – The Alliance for Creativity and Entertainment (ACE) has stepped up their enforcement actions recently, having seized over 3,000 pirate site domains over the past few weeks. But despite this impressive effort, the number of new and illegal domains constantly taking the place of the ones that have been taken down are never-ending.

The domains in question – which revolve around pirating copyrighted video entertainment such as movies and television shows – have either been signed over or redirected to the Motion Picture Association (MPA).

However, some critics have complained that it is difficult to track ACE’s enforcement efforts due to the fact that the organization rarely releases details of settlements, the names of site operators, or even the actual domain names that have been shuttered.

Some are calling for ACE to maintain a single public list of domains that they have been either seized or redirected, making the process of tracking their enforcement actions more straightforward.

With their currently policies, the full story on what domains have been commandeered by ACE is not immediately available from DNS or WHOIS records; reports indicate that multiple domains that were redirected to the ACE in recent weeks do not list the MPA as their owner, including watchgameofthrones.co, watchfriendshd.com, watchhowimetyourmother.co, watchthesimpsons.co, and watchparksandrecreation.co.

Individuals who Google terms such as “watch Big Bang Theory” or “watch Game of Thrones” often find themselves inundated with a digital flood of links leading to current or former pirate sites – many of them out-ranking links to legal Video on Demand (VOD) platforms such as Hulu or Amazon –  that are now redirecting to the ACE portal. It appears Google has been working to try and clean this up.

The reason for the growing number of domains being seized by ACE is due to the fact that many pirate sites that had previously operated a single domain without problems have expanded to dozens and dozens of them to avoid issues such as ISP blocking or having their search engine ranks downgraded. In the end, despite ACE‘s continued efforts, it’s an issue that is expected to persist for the foreseeable future.