China shuts down movie piracy websites
April 26, 2013
Chinese authorities have shut down two movie pirating websites in a clampdown on both online and offline piracy. YYeTs.com suddenly closed down on April 25th, but a notice on the site’s official Sina Weibo account says that it’s only temporary. The other site, Siluhd.com (Silu HD) was forcibly taken down and CEO Zhou Mou and eight other employees reportedly arrested.
Silu HD is said to be China’s biggest piracy site of HD movies, and has been online in plain sight for over a decade. It claims to have 140 million registered users, Chinese media reports that the Silu HD site was subtle, hiding its movies behind a paywall.
YYeTs was less subtle and operated a blatant movie download site. The service hasn’t gone down without a fight, and its semi-deactivated homepage currently directs users towards other URLs where they can download pirated content.