From eMule to Playdede how piracy survives despite regulatory pressure

[Chewy_fox]

"We were happy and we didn't know it." Surely many feel identified with that phrase when remembering the times when Messenger was our WhatsApp and YouTube videos were rated with stars. It was also the time when the Ares and eMule programs were used to download movies that, on more than one occasion, turned out to be something else. These were P2P programs that revolutionized the internet at the time, although P2P continues to lead the digital forefront, in a sense, considering that the Bitcoin system is based on it.

Piracy was in its golden age to gradually atrophy in a path that Apple led by distributing iPods and linking them to iTunes, the online music store that knew how to start fighting against illegal downloading. Two decades later, P2P BitTorrent is very popular, even though a taste for immediacy takes some of the patience out of downloading files and prioritizes streaming web pages instead .

Thus, websites that link to pirated content continue to appear ... and die, very quickly. Legal pressure against piracy has been increasing in recent years in favor of the entertainment giants (Amazon, Netflix, HBO, Disney, Movistar + in Spain ), making it increasingly difficult for websites to survive that allow free watching series and movies to change from a few (too many) punctures to advertising pop-ups and junk links that bring them profit per click.

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Precisely in Spain, the number of pirate websites that end up eliminated has increased exponentially in 2020, after the Mercantile Court 7 of Madrid considered valid a claim from Telefónica Audiovisual Digital (owner of Movistar +) motivated by the websites that stole the sign of their football matches.

By virtue of the ruling, Telefónica now has the ability to draw up a weekly list of pirate websites that all telecommunications companies in Spain (Vodafone, Orange, MásMóvil ...) have to isolate their URL by blocking their URL in no more than three hours from the sending of the ready. List that, in addition, does not even have to go through the judicial system, but is sent directly to the rest of the providers.

To this must be added the success of the  Second Section of the Intellectual Property Commission of the Ministry of Culture and Sports , also called the Anti-Piracy Section, which between 2019 and 2020 brought down up to 640,000 cultural contents that were being offered online. According to the 2019 balance , the Commission has managed to block 138 domain names, including pelis24.com, cuevana2.com or seriesflv.net.

In this context, pirate link websites fight against companies and regulators to continue operating. Faced with the blocks, many continue to reappear with different domains (from cuevana2.com to cuevana.se), but it involves extra work when having to move content, and also for users, who lose sight of their favorite websites.

Something similar also happens with torrent link websites , a format with which it is possible to download not only movies, but also music, programs, books, video games and all kinds of heavy files. BitTorrent is one of the most used P2P programs, becoming another bastion of modern piracy.

The Pirate Bay portal, known for being the largest torrent aggregator in the world, suffers from constant technical problems and blockades from the authorities, including Spanish ones: the Spanish Anti-Piracy Section has four of its domains blocked (thepiratebay.com,. org, .se and .net). Other torrent platforms such as grantorrent.com and elitetorrent.com are also blocked.

Even so, the public continues to find a way to access it by making some adjustments to the computer, such as changing the VPN or using the deep web browser Tor. Indeed, in recent years, companies that offer to adjust the VPN of a device have flourished, such as ExpressVPN, NordVPN or Surfshark, since doing this allows access to many more websites and content restricted by countries, as well as availing themselves of cheaper rates in some services.

PLAYDEDE

A well-known case is that of Pordede, the most famous Spanish online series and movies website, which was renamed Plusdede, then Megadede, and now Playdede, although in his case, rather due to technical failures or internal conflicts between administrators, according to an interview for Engadget.

The current Playdede , born at the end of January, rises among the most visited websites in Spain , currently ranking 489, according to the analysis portal Similarweb. Visits in February amounted to 2.74 million.

The 'dede' project continues like this, growing and becoming professional. The new website enhances the community factor (it is still necessary to register to access), and through Twitter the portal invites users to become a moderator or uploader of the page.

With these efforts, Playdede tries to be, as its predecessors were, a website characterized by cleanliness and order, compared to other chaotic pages with so much publicity that navigation through them was almost impossible.

With these numbers, the 'dede' empire confirms that it continues to lead the anti-copyright resistance, far surpassing other Spanish websites such as seriesly.org, with 1.27 million visits in February, seriespapaya.tv, with 167 thousand, or pelis-online.tv, with almost 450 thousand visits in February. Also HDfull or seriesflv.me are used in our country. Another high-impact website is Gnula , a Mexican portal that adds almost 10 million visits in February.

Also Mexican is the domain that confirms the mass anime phenomenon, www3.animeflv.net, which ranks no less than 26 on the list of most visited websites in the country, with a whopping 167 million visits in February.

THE CREATORS OF SERIESYONKIS ARE SAVED

With the current legal framework, managing a website of this type is difficult. Fortunately for the creator and subsequent owners of Seriesyonkis and Peliculasyonkis, other of the most famous pirate pages, having gone ahead of the law has freed them from accountability. At the beginning of this month, the Murcia Court confirmed the acquittal of the founder, Alberto García Sola, and of the subsequent managers of these domains, because during the years in which the websites were active, what they did was not yet a crime .

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