Hanoi-based video streaming company Fmovies has been shut down after industry groups called the site home to the world's largest piracy ring.
The Alliance for Creativity and Entertainment, a global anti-piracy coalition, said Hanoi police had shut down the streaming operation and related sites. Authorities coordinated with ACE, which includes studios and other content companies, to launch legal action against piracy sites.
MPA Chairman and CEO and ACE Chairman Charles Rivkin said Fmovies' closure was “the largest closure in history and a major win for IP holders.”
According to ACE, Fmovies and associated sites generated more than 6.7 billion visits between January 2023 and June 2024. The site featured recently released movies and TV shows with easy streaming links and the tagline, “The best place to watch movies online for free.”
Website TorrentFreak reported on the Fmovies outage earlier this summer, noting that the service had stopped releasing new content and was inaccessible.
Fmovies launched its service in 2016 but has previously suspended it due to the “increasing complexity” of investigations and the “means and methods available to targets to identify and detect tax evasion,” according to an MPA official. No charges have been filed yet, but this is the first time a case of this magnitude has been prosecuted under Vietnam's penal code, the official said.
“Fmovies had dozens of domains, so it was a real challenge,” Rivkin said, “…instead of wiping out a few chapters here and there, the team completely eradicated a global piracy ring. They say piracy is like whack-a-mole, but we've beaten the whole game here.”
Philippine media conglomerate ABS-CBN sued Fmovies in federal court after the company launched, and a federal judge in 2017 ordered the company to pay $218,200 to defendants John Doe and others.
Karin Temple, MPA's executive vice president and international legal counsel, demonstrated the Fmovies site during testimony before a congressional committee last year. Temple and a delegation traveled to Vietnam last summer to meet with the Ministry of Public Security about the matter.
The Office of the United States Trade Representative also included the site on its annual “notorious markets” list from 2017 to 2023. Rivkin noted that before Fmovies was shut down, the top five English-language piracy sites were all based in Vietnam. “This is a really important moment for us,” Rivkin said.
Last year, Vietnam's Ministry of Information and Communications and Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism formed departments to crack down on pirate sites, according to Torrent Freak.
Other agencies involved in the shutdown include the Department of Homeland Security and the Department of Justice.
“These prosecutions demonstrate Vietnam's commitment to enforcing intellectual property rights, contributing to an economic ecosystem in which creators and inventors can thrive,” U.S. Ambassador to Vietnam Mark E. Knapper said in a statement. Ngo Phuong Lan, chairman of the Vietnam Film Development Association, called the closures “a milestone that will greatly contribute to the development of Vietnam's film industry.”
Rivkin also said there are signs that the scale of piracy in North America is shrinking. In 2017, when he joined the MPA, there were 1,444 IPTV pirating services operating in North America; this year that number has fallen to 220. “Our fight is not over, and it probably never will be over, but I think we are winning,” he said. “This is a real turning point, and we're going after them.”
