Hollywood and publisher orders lead to new hacking blocks for UK ISP * TorrentFreak

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Film, TV show and publishing companies have been given permission to block more websites facilitating piracy and piracy in the UK. In addition to various streaming portals, MPA also targets a popular unblocking service. Companies in the publishing sector are also trying to plug loopholes by blocking access to workarounds for Sci-Hub and similar platforms.

For more than a decade, copyright holders have been able to apply for High Court orders compelling ISPs to block offending websites in the UK.

Early targets for the film and music industries were pioneering platforms such as The Pirate Bay, but over time, the scope of the task has expanded to hundreds, possibly thousands of domains.

Additional copyright holders have also blocked sites that offer live sports content and publish content such as scientific papers and books. These include proxy and match sites that re-enable access to previously blocked domains.

New Hollywood domain blocks have been reported

Under the Motion Picture Association banner, Hollywood is perhaps the most prolific when it comes to these kinds of orders, and ISP TalkTalk reported this week that a new wave of blocks has been implemented on behalf of these movie and TV show companies.

The first site on their list is project123movies.com, which carries the Project Free TV brand of sports but is unlikely to be connected to the original site of the same name. This streaming platform is currently offering all the latest movies and TV shows, including versions of No Time To Die, which made its theatrical debut just a couple of weeks ago.

With TheWatchSeries branding, gowatchseries.online is a similar process. In addition to offering a wide selection of movies, the site also offers TV shows, including the Netflix hit Squid Game. WatchMovie.cc, with the WatchSeries 2.0 banner, offers a wide range of content including a large section for anime, a genre increasingly popular in the UK and across the world.

Yesmovies.org, yesmovies.id and vidembed.cc (operating under the VidCloud brand) follow a similar pattern but perhaps the most significant addition is that of bflix.to, a hugely popular platform with over 20 million monthly visits. In the UK, bflix is ​​close to becoming the 1,000th most visited site in the country in any category, so closing access is an obvious option for an MPA.

As reported yesterday, GitHub recently removed the repository and mirroring site for Unblockit, a proxy service that allows people to access blocked sites.

The main site for the service used to operate from a .ws domain, which has also caught the attention of MPA members including Netflix. As a result, additional domains that will be blocked in the UK include eztv.unblockit.ws, pw.unblockit.ws, solarmovie.unblockit.ws, icefilms.unblockit.ws, and scnsrc.unblockit.ws.

Unblockit has already been moved to a new domain, unlockit.kim, so it’s not clear how effective these new blocks will be. In any case, MPA is also targeting fmovies.proxybit.me, which partners with Unblockit also in serving blocked sites proxies.

Publishers keep the pressure on

The Publishers Association, a UK organization that supports members producing digital and print books, research journals and educational resources, obtained its first injunction of gag in 2015, marking new ground for the sector. In the same year, it expanded the number of target sites and in September it increased its reach again.

It can now add another set of domains to its list including ebookee.unblockit.ws, freebookspot.unblockit.ws, and libgen.unblockit.ws. Again, these are the domains that are being run by the Unblockit proxy service which, as mentioned earlier, has already moved to a new domain.

Finally, publishers Elsevier and Springer Nature continue to put pressure on Sci-Hub and tools trying to circumvent previous bans. By blocking scihub.unblockit.ws they hope to restrict access to scientific papers and strengthen existing blocking measures first reported in February this year.