Fmovies Has Gone Offline, the End of a Pirate Streaming Giant?

When Fmovies first appeared on the scene in 2016, it quickly gained popularity among streaming piracy fans.

Copyright holders were less pleased. They swiftly recognized the new threat and just months after the site was launched, Fmovies found itself being sued in a U.S. Court.

The copyright infringement lawsuit and the $210,000 damages award were casually ignored by the site’s owners. Instead, Fmovies continued to focus on providing free entertainment to the masses, profiting from this activity through advertisements.

In recent years, rightsholder representatives, including the MPA, worked hard to maintain the pressure. They pinpointed the site’s operators in Vietnam and teamed up with local authorities to address the threat. In addition, U.S. authorities and lawmakers were repeatedly warned about the site.

Last fall, lawmakers in Congress got a demonstration of the site from MPA’s Senior Executive Vice President, Karyn Temple. This showed how easy it is to stream the latest movies and TV shows inside one of the best secured buildings in the country. The site didn’t budge, however.

Fmovies in Trouble

After years of operating seemingly undeterred, Fmovies started to show cracks earlier this month when the site stopped releasing new content. No reason was provided for this sudden change, which left users wondering if more trouble lay on the horizon.

This week the troubles increased and yesterday Fmovies became totally unreachable. Instead of the regular homepage, people were greeted with a Cloudflare error, notifying users that the connection had timed out.

“The initial connection between Cloudflare’s network and the origin web server timed out. As a result, the web page can not be displayed,” the error message reads.

In isolation, a temporary stretch of downtime could be a minor issue. However, since the site had yet to start posting new content again, it suggests the operators may have quietly abandoned ship.

Fmovies Shuts Down?

There is no word from the Fmovies team but through an indirect source, TorrentFreak heard that the site faces “legal issues”. However, that’s nothing new, and doesn’t explain why the site went offline this time.

With more than a quarter billion site visits in three months, Fmovies is (or was) one of the most popular pirate sites on the Internet, so the stakes are high.

As far as we can see, the site doesn’t have any immediate domain name problems and hosting setbacks can’t explain the lack of new content in recent weeks. So there must be a more concrete reason for recent events.

The big question now is whether the site is destined to go off offline permanently. This will be answered as more time passes, but we can be certain that, in the interim, many new ‘Fmovies’ clones will try to scoop up the site’s regular users.

But… could that even be part of the plan?

If we have to come up with a possible explanation, we would hypothesize that the site’s operators might want to abandon the tainted Fmovies brand. Being the poster child of streaming piracy comes with immense pressure, as highlighted earlier. Stepping away from that, intentionally, might make sense.

The people running the site are presumably connected to several other large pirate streaming sites. Those pirate sites remain online but are not in the headlines, at least not as much. Time will tell, anything beyond that is speculation at this point.

From: TF, for the latest news on copyright battles, piracy and more.

TorrentFreak