Cuevana Announces Voluntary Shutdown Following MPA Pressure
For well over a decade, Cuevana has been a dominant piracy streaming brand in Latin America.
The original Cuevana site was founded by Argentine Tomas Escobar, who was an engineering student at the time. By offering a Netflix-type streaming experience, with a bigger catalog and without any subscription fees, the pirate service quickly took off.
The Cuevana Whack-a-Mole
It didn’t take long before rightsholders started to take notice of the millions of users flocking to the site. That marked the start of a series of enforcement campaigns that continues to this day.
Rightsholders and their anti-piracy representatives are no longer battling Escobar. The original founder moved on many years ago and now has a legitimate career as an entrepreneur. However, there were plenty of aspiring pirate tycoons ready to fill his shoes.
Over the past decade, many dozens of new Cuevana variants have launched, using creative domain name variations such as Cuevanahd, Cuevana2, and Cuevana3. These sites are a thorn in the side of Hollywood’s MPA and the associated ACE anti-piracy coalition, which structurally try to take these replacements offline.
Three years ago, ACE appeared to have made a breakthrough. The coalition announced that it managed to shut down a major Cuevana operation. However, the problem didn’t go away, as new sites with the same brand continued to surface time and again.
MPA Reports Cuevana.biz to the USTR
Today, Cuevana continues to present a major piracy threat in the Spanish-speaking part of Latin America. This was highlighted earlier this month, when the MPA submitted its latest list of “notorious pirate sites” to the U.S. Trade Representative (USTR).
With more than 100 million estimated monthly visits in August, Cuevana.biz was mentioned as one of the largest piracy portals in existence today.
“[T]he Cuevana[.]biz/Cuevana3[.]eu group is currently the most popular streaming site group in Spanish-speaking Latin America and is one of the most popular streaming piracy site groups in the world, offering more than 19,000 titles including movies and television series,” the MPA wrote.
This certainly isn’t the first time that a Cuevana site has been reported to the USTR. In most cases these reports don’t yield immediate results but the operators of Cuevana.biz appear to be taking action this time.
Cuevana.biz Announced Voluntary Shutdown
The operators of Cuevana.biz have posted a notice stating that they will voluntarily hand over their domains to the MPA in the near future.
“We are very sorry to see the website closed, but we have to give in to pressure from MPA. We are establishing communication with ACE, where an agreement will be reached to hand over our domains,” the (translated) notice starts.
The MPA and ACE have repeatedly tried to identify the site’s operators. A year ago, for example, the MPA obtained a subpoena to compel Cloudflare to share all information the company has on Cuevana.biz. Despite these efforts, the operators suggest that they have not been exposed.
The operators say they are a group of Mexican students, who launched the site when another Cuevana was shut down. The site became an instant success and continues to thrive today but while the students have a passion for ‘Internet culture’, they realize that piracy is wrong.
At the time of writing, the streaming portal remains online, but the notice states that the site will close in the coming weeks. This was presumably triggered by recent comments in the MPA’s submission to the USTR, where it was listed alongside another major pirate site, AnimeFLV. Apparently, that mention hit the wrong note.
“We want to highlight that MPA never contacted us, we only saw a general statement where we are linked to AnimeFLV, our site is not even 20% of AnimeFLV. That is why we are going to hand [the domains] over,” the notice reads.
“We would like to apologize to all independent creators, it should be noted that not all titles shared on this website are copyrighted, we support many students and independent content creators to promote their films or short films,” they add.
Time will tell whether Cuevana.biz will indeed throw in the towel and transfer its domains to the MPA in the near future. The only thing that’s guaranteed at this point is that the popular Cuevana brand will survive, one way or another, as it has done for the past fifteen years.
From: TF, for the latest news on copyright battles, piracy and more.
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