They obtained DMCA subpoenas at a California federal court, requiring Discord and Cloudflare to share all personal information they have on customers associated with domains such as hdfull.org, sflix.fi, and pstream.mov.
ACE has used these subpoenas as an intelligence-gathering tool for years. While these efforts are often fruitless, as many site owners use fake data, they occasionally have some effect. That’s also true for the latest round, which has motivated P-Stream to shut down permanently.
P-Stream Shuts Down
A few hours ago, P-stream’s operator, Pas, informed TorrentFreak that they decided to shut down the website effective immediately. This decision is a direct result of the DMCA subpoena and the added legal pressure, which previously resulted in the loss of the Discord server as well.
People who try to access the site’s official domain are now redirected to a shutdown message. Pas stresses that P-Stream never hosted any infringing material, but the operator can’t afford to mount a legal defense if it came to that.
“Although P-Stream does NOT host, control, or guarantee any media or content, I can’t afford to fight that in court. So to be safe, P-Stream will no longer host a public instance,” the operator writes.
While the operator regrets the shutdown, Pas also mentions that the project was life-consuming and took its toll, so the decision to throw in the towel could be a healthy one on that front too.
Code Remains Public
P-Stream was launched in April 2024, when movie-web was shut down by legal pressure from Hollywood. It eventually grew into a popular project of its own with close to an estimated ten million visits last month.
However, two years after its predecessor’s demise, history is repeating, perhaps in more ways than we now know.
The P-Stream project was largely based on sudo-flix, which itself was a successor to the original movie-web code. Today, the (alleged) P-Stream code remains available as well, through publicly available GitHub repositories. Whether these repos are controlled by the site’s operator is unknown.
As always, there will likely be people who try to keep the project going, and once they become popular enough, these projects will come on Hollywood’s radar, repeating the same process.
