In news that might give a second reason to call the raids on several streaming sites a failure, TVShack is currently back up under a different domain. It was TVShack.net, now it’s TVShack.cc.
Note: This is an article I wrote that was published elsewhere first. It has been republished here for archival purposes
“Criminal copyright infringement occurs on a massive scale over the Internet, and reportedly results in billions of dollars in losses to the U.S. economy,” said Preet Bharara when the raids first made headlines. “That translates into lost jobs and real hardships for ordinary working people. That’s why we took today’s action. If your business model is movie piracy, your story will not have a happy ending.”
It seems that one of the sites raided by authorities is back up under a Cocos (Keeling) Islands domain, TVShack.cc. Word got out at the same time as when NinjaVideo laughed at rumors that it was taken down for good.
Whether or not one agrees with the methods of the sites that were raided, it does start to call in to question the effectiveness of the raids conducted by ICE (Immigration Customs Enforcement from the US). If these raids only serve to be little more than a minor inconvenience to some of these sites, would this effort to stop these site be a waste? Really, it’s bad enough that there are a hundred sites itching to take the place of one site that was taken down, but when the sites don’t even really go down at all, doesn’t that add insult to injury for enforcement?
There’s already a copyright czar in the US. It suggests that the US government isn’t going to tolerate copyright infringement, but what’s the difference so far in terms of trying to stamp out piracy? Before the copyright czar, when sites were raided, most of the time, that was it and the sites fold. Here we see stories of takedowns becoming more of a brief inconvenience for site owners more than anything else. At best, maybe copyright enforcers can scream, “Don’t infringe, or I’ll be irritating!” during their speeches – at least then enforcement bodies can stay true to their word the way things are going.
Drew Wilson on Twitter: @icecube85 and Google+.
