[x-pubpol] China Takes Down Two Major Movie Piracy Websites, Makes Arrests

[Joly MacFie]

http://www.techinasia.com/china-movie-piracy-websites-shut-arrests/


   - by Steven Millward <http://www.techinasia.com/author/steven-millward/>



Chinese authorities have shut down two notorious movie pirating websites
today in a strengthening clampdown on both online and offline
piracy<http://www.techinasia.com/tag/piracy/>.
YYeTs.com suddenly closed itself down at 12 noon today, but a notice on the
site’s official Sina Weibo account says that it’s only temporary. The other
site, Siluhd.com (Silu HD) suffered a harsher blow, with the site forcibly
taken down and CEO Zhou Mou and eight other employees reportedly arrested.

Silu HD is said to be China’s biggest piracy site of high-definition
movies, and has been online in plain sight for a decade. It claims to have
140 million registered users, making it larger than some social networks in
the country<http://www.techinasia.com/2013-china-top-10-social-sites-infographic/>,
like dating website Jiayuan (73 million registered members). Chinese media
reports today that the Silu HD site was very subtle, hiding its movies
behind a paywall.

But “subtle” certainly isn’t a word that could be used to decribe YYeTs
(pictured below), which has also been online for quite a while. A blatant
movie download site, the service hasn’t gone down without a fight, and its
semi-deactivated homepage today directs users towards some other, fully
working URLs where they can download pirated content.


Today is World Intellectual Property Day, so there might be an element of
authorities wanting to be seen doing something. Given YYeTs’ claim of being
down temporarily, there’s a chance it will be back soon. And it has its
other URLs anyway.YYeTs’ Weibo page, I notice, also continues to link to
pirated movies and TV shows, and just posted a link to the newest episode
of *The Vampire Diaries* which it has uploaded to Baidu’s Dropbox-like
cloud storage service<http://www.techinasia.com/baidu-netdrive-cloud-storage-30-million-users/>
.

A reader tells me that Beijing authorities also held an anti-piracy
roadshow on the streets of the capital earlier today, starting in the
Zhongguancun tech district. Plus, earlier this week, the country’s biggest
e-commerce company, Alibaba, was called upon to use its ‘big data’
abilities<http://www.techinasia.com/alibaba-works-with-chinese-government-solve-piracy/>
to
help law enforcement crack down on both online and offline piracy.

It’s relatively easy for Chinese web users to view
legal<http://www.techinasia.com/china-web-video-sites-comscore-august-2012/>
and
licensed movies and TV shows online, using sites like Youku, iQiyi (owned
by Baidu), Tencent Video, Sohu TV, and many more. In fact, it’s easier to
do so legally and for free in China than it is in countries like the US.



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