In a departure from our regular style, Life Daily thought you’d be interested to have an insight into the slightly murky world of downloading movies online.
There is no better example of the uncertainties of using this form of entertainment than the case Movie2K.
Movie2K was a movie sharing website originally based in Germany. It allowed people to view films on their computer, tablet or smartphone using the Internet. Although originally created for the German market it very rapidly expanded to a much wider English-speaking audience.
The web ranking company, Alexa, rated it as being in the top hundred sites carrying the highest volume of traffic in Germany. It had links to many other file hosting websites.
Without prior warning, Movie 2K suddenly disappeared from the web on May 29th 2013.
Those attempting to gain access to the site were re-directed to Google, or simply got an error message.
Later it was learned that the Motion Pictures Association of America (MPAA) had obtained a court order to have site access blocked. Virgin Media issued a statement which read: “Virgin Media has received an order from the Courts requiring us to prevent access to this site in order to help protect against copyright infringement…. this is a legal obligation we must comply with.”
However, the Movie2K blog was still operating and it was possible to access movies there.
The site closure was short lived. A proxy service, called Pirate Bay, quickly provided an alternative way to access the Movie2k site. This effort was soon blocked, however, and the site vanished again. At the time, some Twitter users circulated a rumor that the site offices had been raided.
Whoever is behind Movie2K is unquestionably resourceful: within a few days, the original site was up and running again. Prior to the closure, the site servers were registered in the Virgin Islands. Now they have been transferred to a place hardly anyone in the world has ever heard of!
If you look carefully you will see the suffix “SX” after the name Movie2K; this stands for “Sint Maarten”, an autonomous country, formerly part of the Dutch Antilles. It is situated on the Caribbean island of Saint Martin, which it shares with Curacao; it became independent in 2010. It appears to derive a large part of its income from selling web domains to customers who don’t want to answer awkward questions.
The site owners criticized the efforts to close them down, which they say are money driven.
They feel that the police have the wrong priorities and pursue them as if they had committed a violent crime. They say that according to current piracy laws it seems that: ” money is way more important than a unique human life.”
Update:
According to a report from the website Softpedia.com, Movie2k is returning in a different form. Their headline reads: “Confirmed, Movie2K Is Coming Back from the Dead as Movie4K [Update]”.
The article goes on to say: “Movie4K is indeed the new home of Movie2K, the new site is live and running, though some movies may still be missing.”
This is the latest news from the web but it’s not current. If you know of any further developments, you can contact us via the comments feed below.
Anyway, do you think these companies provide a real service, or should they be stopped? How do you feel about copyright infringement? Use the comments feed to tell us.
