Is the replacement site the real deal? Is it endorsed by the original site’s former owners? Maybe the former owners are still behind the wheel? Or is the new site suddenly going to start serving up malware? The answers to these questions are always hard to come by for good reason, and the current Movie2K case is no different.

As previously reported, last week the site inexplicably disappeared leaving millions of former users without a home. One of the main theories is that some kind of legal pressure – or the threat of it – caused the site’s operators to jump ship.

However, very quickly a new site appeared – Movie4K.to – looking very much like the now-defunct Movie2K.to and accompanied by all the usual questions. Is it the real deal? Is it sanctioned by the former operators of Movie2K? Is it a trap?

We tried to unravel the mysteries right at the very start and one of our findings raised a few eyebrows. The old Movie2K domain had begun using the DNS servers of the German Pirate Party. Were the pirates somehow involved? They told TorrentFreak that they were not, but now they appear to be using the site’s demise to spread their political message.

This morning Markus Drenger, a member of the Piratenpartei Deutschland press team, emailed TF to advise us that they are now taking advantage of the Movie2K.to redirect to spread the Pirate message.

“This isn’t our domain, and we don’t know who owns it. However, they apparently redirected it to our servers. We don’t know exactly why, but we assume that the people responsible for it wanted to allow us to inform the visitors about the issues with current copyright law. For this reason, we are now displaying this info page here,” the Party explains.

Already the DNS issues have caused problems, with the police contacting the party and the party’s webhost. However, referencing an earlier raid on their infrastructure, the party says that this time the police didn’t seize their hardware.

The party’s latest position is that if the redirect to their DNS continues then they will possibly put up some Creative Commons movies for former Movie2K users to enjoy. However, while that might prove entertaining for a while, people are obviously looking for more varied content. It seems that Movie4K – whoever they are – intend to fill that gap immediately.

“Nobody should have the power to suppress somebody just because of money! This site is the result of the need of many Human Beings. Everyone wants Movie2k.to/Movie4k.to back,” they state in a broken English announcement.

“We, the Citizens, have to make clear that a ‘copyright infringement’ cannot be compared to a violent crime. How come bootlegger get five years of jail time while child abuser are free on a 22-month probation? That is because money is way more important than an unique human life.”

“You cannot suppress the will of the People!” they continue. “One website goes, the next day five new appear. Did not the time come to overthink your marketing concepts and accept the new media?”

In a parting shot, Movie4K attack the entities they suggest are behind the demise of Movie2K.

“FU Hollywood, FU GVU, FU Anti-piracy and FU Police. But we love Obama!” they conclude.

As a final note, Movie4K is currently using AS44571 (Akrino Inc). Records show that five out of the last six times that was used it was inhabited by a site called kinox.to, a site that took over from the now-defunct Kino.to, the subject of the biggest ever anti-piracy action in Europe.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

Avoiding the relative complexity of torrent clients, streaming portals offer movies and TV shows in a YouTube-like environment, with video embedded in a page and ready to watch – no traditional downloading required.

Offering all the latest movies and TV shows for immediate viewing after just a couple of clicks, Movie2K was one of the most popular streaming sites around. Back in February it was the 240th most popular site in the world and in Germany ranked 19th, making it more popular than Twitter, Amazon, Apple, PayPal and Microsoft.

Movie2K – gone

However, on Wednesday Movie2K became unresponsive. We were first alerted to the problems by the operators of PirateReverse and ProxyBay, sites which set themselves up to reconnect users with Movie2K after the UK Hight Court ordered it blocked earlier this month.

Something was clearly wrong – Movie2K first began redirecting to Google and then later to 127.0.0.1. We emailed Movie2K immediately but after receiving no response we began asking questions elsewhere, starting with the site’s former host.

Romanian host shut down Movie2K

Voxility is a Romanian-based company that houses quite a few file-sharing related websites. It is also the last known host of Movie2K so we wrote to the company and asked them what had happened to the site. Voxility failed to respond to our questions, but we weren’t about to give up.

What we do know is that Movie2K had been doing business with Voxility for a long time using the IP address 109.163.226.18. The records for that IP address have now been changed and allocated away from Movie2K and back to ‘reserved’ status with Voxility.

We spoke with a person familiar with Voxility’s operations who told us that ‘reserved’ indicates that the server has been canceled by the host and is no longer in use.

Was Movie2K raided or was the shutdown voluntary?

Ever since Movie2K disappeared earlier this week there have been rumors that the site (or its admin) had been raided. Most seem to be based around a statement last week by anti-piracy group GVU that a former top uploader to the now-defunct Kino.to had been raided in Germany.

The individual, said to be called “Hologram”, is alleged to have uploaded more than 100,000 movies. GVU said that he was “cooperative” and later “confessed.” The raid took place early on May 22 according to GVU, but TorrentFreak received an email later that evening from the Movie2K admin, so it seems moderately unlikely he was raided that same morning.

However, what we do know from a source inside Voxility is that the operator of Movie2K voluntarily closed down the server this week and canceled his business with Voxility. And in the past few minutes there are suggestions that there might indeed be some connection, not necessarily directly though, between the shutdown of Movie2K and the raid last week.

While stating that they don’t really know why Movie2K has disappeared, GVU are suggesting that the site’s operators may have seen the ongoing Kino.to investigation and decided that enough is enough. That’s possible of course, but we still aren’t finished.

Updated DNS entries –

Movie2K used to operate via many different domains such as .com and .net, but the prime URL for the site over the years has been Movie2K.to. Now, .to is the top-level domain (ccTLD) of the island kingdom of Tonga and is handled by the Tonic domain name registry.

Tonic have a policy of keeping domain registrants’ information secret so there is no traditional WHOIS that will reveal names and addresses etc. There is however a limited search that can be done to find out DNS entries etc, which revealed something interesting. An update this morning…

Domain: movie2k.to
Created on: Tue Aug 31 05:07:54 2010
Last edited on: Fri May 31 08:28:53 2013
Expires on: Thu Aug 31 05:07:54 2017
Primary host add: 87.106.42.187
Primary host name: dns1.piratenpartei.de
Secondary host add: 62.48.67.66
Secondary host name: ns2.pop-hannover.net

Piraten Partei is the German Pirate Party and the addresses listed above certainly match the party’s DNS server addresses. So, are they involved?

“We have nothing to do with this and our DNS servers do not serve this domain,” Markus Drenger of the Pirate Party’s press team told TorrentFreak.

So with the Pirate Party denying knowledge we will have to wait a short time to see what happens next with the Movie2K domain. Tonic update their nameservers once a day at (GMT +13) so the next move might become apparent then. However, . com updates sooner….

Movie2K is dead, long live…..Movie4K?

Visitors to Movie2K.com are now being redirected to a server in the Virgin Islands playing host to a new site called Movie4K. There’s nothing there at the moment but there are signs that something might be about to burst into life. The DNS entries for that domain were updated last evening.

Domain: movie4k.to
Created on: Sat Dec 03 00:50:01 2011
Last edited on: Thu May 30 21:11:00 2013
Expires on: Sat Dec 03 00:50:01 2016
Primary host add: 89.32.145.101
Primary host name: pns1.cloudns.net
Secondary host add: 62.75.145.77
Secondary host name: pns2.cloudns.net

So will Movie2K reanimate itself into Movie4K this weekend and become fully operational once again? All the indications suggest that we won’t have long to find out. In the meantime, GVU may have to put their champagne back on ice.

Update: Movie4k is now up and running. TorrentFreak is trying to talk to the operator of the site for a follow-up article. Stay tuned.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

Update May 31: Here

Following action by the Motion Picture Association, earlier this month the UK High Court ordered local ISPs to block subscriber access to Movie2K.

The censorship effort was quickly circumvented, with existing Pirate Bay proxy services stepping up to unblock the site.

Earlier today, however, all Movie2K proxy services broke down when the Movie2K site itself disappeared from the Internet without warning.

For a while the site began redirecting to Google but now fails to respond in any way.

TorrentFreak contacted the site’s operators hours ago but we have yet to hear back, which is unusual since they are normally quite responsive.

Twitter is alive with rumors that the site has been shut down in a raid, but at this stage there are no credible sources for those claims.

As soon as we hear anything more we’ll post an update here or if the situation is more serious, on our main page in the hours to come.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

Against a background of initial pessimism, Section 97A of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act has proven more than capable of enabling the filtering dreams of the entertainment industries after blocking provisions in the Digital Economy Act were deemed too controversial.

While more recent blocks were actioned by the UK recording industry under the watchful eye of the BPI, it was the MPAA who pioneered site censorship in the UK. Their success against Usenet indexing site Newzbin2 has become the model through which ISPs can be forced to black out sites based on the order of a judge.

Last week we reported that the music industry are considering future action against a wide range of sites but there is a more immediate situation developing courtesy of their movie-making counterparts.

Sometime in the past two months the MPAA went to court with a copyright complaint against two sites – Movie2K and another called Download4All (DL4All). The precise details are unclear, but it seems likely that they presented similar arguments to those offered in earlier cases.

Broadly speaking the studios will explain that these sites breach their copyrights and cost them money and, since ISPs are now aware that they’re facilitating their users’ infringements, they must now block the sites to avoid becoming liable themselves.

TorrentFreak can confirm that in the last week of April several of the UK’s leading ISPs including BT, Virgin Media and TalkTalk, and almost certainly O2, EE and Sky, received a copy of a High Court order compelling them to block the sites.

BT have already begun blocking the site in the UK and Virgin Media inform us that they too will initiate a blockade today.

“Virgin Media has received an order from the Courts requiring it to prevent access to Download4All and Movie2K in order to help protect against copyright infringement,” a spokesperson told TorrentFreak.

“As a responsible ISP, Virgin Media complies with court orders addressed to the company, but strongly believes that changing consumer behaviour to tackle copyright infringement also needs compelling legal alternatives to give consumers access to great content at the right price.”

And in a final and somewhat amazing note, the operators of PirateReverse.info, one of the largest Pirate Bay proxy services, informs TorrentFreak that they have already deployed a proxy site to unblock Movie2K.

“We’ve just deployed movie2kproxy.com (in record time), still working on getting the images to load properly but should all be fixed shortly.”

The moles in this game now appear to be getting whacked even before they appear.

UPDATE: The operator of PirateProxy.net, the world’s largest Pirate Bay proxy, says that he too will unblock Movie2K for UK users.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

Through these reports we can look at copyright claims and the actions taken by Google, which overwhelmingly follow the US DMCA to the letter. Today, however, we look at an instance where the search engine appears to be going quite a bit further.

Movie2K is a site dedicated to indexing streaming movies and TV shows. Its indexes are huge and with as little as two clicks mountains of premium content – including movies still in theaters – will play in an embedded window.

To give an idea of how big the site is, Alexa ranks Movie2K as the 240th most popular site in the world but on a local level things are even more impressive. In Germany, for example, the site is ranked 19th, making it more popular than Twitter, Amazon, Apple, PayPal and Microsoft.

However, Movie2K is struggling to correct what it sees as an injustice. In March 2012, Paramount Pictures sent a copyright complaint to Google asking it to remove from its search listings two links to the movie Transformers: Dark of the Moons. However, while one was a specific URL, the other was Movie2K’s homepage.

As a result, for nearly a year Movie2K’s homepage has been absent from Google search results, despite requests to have it reinstated.

“We have received and reviewed your message. At this time, Google has decided not to take action based on our policies concerning content removal and reinstatement,” the search engine told Movie2K in April 2012.

During the months that followed Movie2K kept up their efforts but despite the Transformers movie not being listed on the site’s homepage or present at the URL listed in the DMCA complaint, Google still refuse to reinstate the site’s homepage to its listings.

“Thanks for reaching out to us. We have received and reviewed your DMCA counter notice. At this time, Google has decided not to take action based on our policies concerning content removal and reinstatement. We encourage you to review [link] for more information about the DMCA,” the company wrote in a recent email.

Google add that should Movie2K remove the allegedly infringing content from their entire site (the Transformers movie in question is currently available on another URL) and promise not to put it back, then Movie2K can let them know.

What appears to be happening in this particular instance is that when asked to remove a specific link Google responded as they are required to under the law. However, faced with a URL removal by Movie2K but a subsequent relisting of the content on another URL, Google considers the content as still up, a major problem if the URL is the site’s main page.

Movie2K admin Terry believes that Google is hinting at an even more aggressive solution to becoming re-listed.

“So they want us to remove all links which are somehow copyright infringement, that’s the only way we can have our index back listed on their search engine,” Terry told TorrentFreak. “That might happen to every other site, to thepiratebay, to mega.co.nz.”

But considering the infringement issues many content providers have with the site, is Google justified in issuing tough demands to Movie2K before reinstating its listing?

“If Google wants to filter all websites with infringing links, then they will need to do the same with a lot of sites in the world, especially with our competition like 1channel.ch and kinox.to since they all have copyright infringing material on their homepages,” Terry says.

The Movie2K admin concludes by saying that Google’s efforts against infringement are not only hurting his site but are actually boosting the chances of Internet users being harmed by malicious content.

“Delisting has a terrible effect. If you compare our Alexa stats we are still growing, but a lot of people aren’t able to find our site on Google and are instead diverted to malicious and virus infected websites,” Terry says.

“The bad guys have recognized that our website index is not listed on Google and are trying to make profit from their sites with similar names that appear in the results instead. Google knows that but they don´t care and in this case they are supporting such malicious and virus infected websites.”

While the rightsholders whose content is linked from Movie2K will be wholly unsympathetic to the site’s plight, this situation further highlights how Google is being forever drawn into the copyright debate. The decisions it makes have to strike a balance between the interests of many parties including those of rightsholders, site owners and the general public, not to mention their own.

Google received 14,380,699 takedown requests last month and is apparently struggling to keep up with demand, to the point where it has been forced to limit the number of complaints copyright holders can file. Rightsholders argue that this problem can be solved immediately if Google simply delists offenders’ sites.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.