The Hollywood-based Alliance for Creativity and Entertainment, known as “ACE”, says it’s making good progress on its efforts to combat piracy in the movie industry, having shut down more than 1,000 illegal movie streaming websites.
The alliance, made up of prominent film studios and movie production companies, has grown its membership from just over 30 to more than 50 since its launch in 2017, and now it’s stepping up its campaign against the pirates by asking U.S. lawmakers to support its bid to block websites showing pirated content.
The New York Times reported that ACE has become much busier in the last few years, and now handles as many cases per week as it did in an entire year when the organization was first founded. Since 2019, ACE has helped to decrease the number of sites offering illegal access to movies, from around 1,400 to less than 200 today.
However, ACE still has a lot of work to do, for the number of visitors to illegal streaming sites has actually increased by 12% over that period. More people are watching illegal content, despite having fewer options over where they can see it. According to a report by the pirate website monitor Muso, such websites collectively saw more than 141 billion visits in the last year.
Charles H. Rivkin, chairman and chief executive for Motion Picture Association, told the New York Times that video piracy has become an extremely lucrative racket for some major criminals.
“We’re a long way from guys on the street corners selling counterfeit DVDs,” he said. “This is global organized crime. The people stealing our movies and television shows are also involved with sex trafficking, money laundering — all the ills of society.”
Adding to the movie industry’s problems, the ringleaders behind many of those pirate video sites are trying to escape the clutches of the law by moving abroad. ACE said it has hired a former FBI officer Larissa L. Knapp to pursue those criminals, both in the U.S. and wherever they may have fled to.
ACE explained that most pirate sites operate by downloading content from legal streaming services and then posting them onto their illegal sites. They can do this in just minutes, and they have a knack for quickly putting up new websites when existing ones are shut down by law enforcement.
Typically, ACE has had to go through a long and arduous legal process to get pirate sites shut down, but it has requested that U.S. authorities allow it to use tools to block such websites via internet providers. ACE says that more than 60 countries already operate a similar system.
However, the request needs authorization by a U.S. judge, and it faces opposition from the Computer and Communications Industry Association, which is made up of prominent tech firms like Amazon, Google, Meta Platforms and Apple. That association’s members argue that the use of website blocking tools could be abused and restrict freedom of expression.
Curiously, Amazon and Apple are members of both organizations, and it’s not clear if they are for or against ACE’s proposal.
