I know that these sites eventually get banned and shut down so it’s not that there’s a legal loophole but why does it take so long? There can be sites up that clearly illegally steams shows or live sports that are up for months or even years at a time. How do they manage to beat these billion dollar industries and stay up?
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Primarily by operating in a different country, where the copyright laws of the US do not apply and american law enforcement has no jurisdiction.
Well first they can hop into legal greyzones and say “nah we don’t do illegal things, we’re just a platform, our users upload stuff and we aren’t responsible. Sure we will delete anything you complain about (after 3 months)”
Then they are often in foreign countries. It’s hard to shut a server down if the local police doesn’t cooperate.
And you can force ISPs to block the domain. But thats easy to circumvent for users (by using an alternate DNS server) and also for the website (by just getting a new similar domain) so why even bother with this?
Also you have to abide laws. You can’t just shut down websites for alleged copyright infringements. The authorities and copyright holders have to go through the slow legal system, and after a few years they get to shut down the site, wich will be replaced within weeks.
To add on to what others have said, they also change domain names constantly. So instead of .com you’ll find things like .se, .mom, .yut, etc so they’re harder to track
Fighting internet piracy with shutdowns is like chopping heads of an hydra. You shut down one source, another 3 will popup elsewhere. It’s part of the decentralized nature of the web.
Famous example: after years and years of investigation and burocracy, the FBI took down Megaupload and all the pirated files it contained in their servers (with also private files of normal people also, but hey, who cares right?).
I remember people saying it was the end of internet piracy because if Megaupload was takeng down, then other similar service will follow out of business.
What happened?
Other services are still up and running, like mediafire, with more legal coverage. The torrent network got a massive boom in popularity, from an obscure and mostly not know form of file sharing, to a mega mainstream source of illegal content.
But hey, they did bring Kim Dotcom to justice right? Well no, he’s still free and made a even better service called Mega, wich have more legal disclaimers but in all means, it’s still used mainly for piracy.
So after all the hardwork of the FBI and the US law enforcers, there was no gain, only loses.
The only good way we know of fighting piracy is with good services at an affordable price. This is why subscription service got a massive boom during the 2010’s decade. It’s not like normal people love piracy, it’s complicated and you have to know what to do and where to search, during the 00’s this was the norm for almost every internet user, but not everyone used internet for entertainment like these days.
But, Netflix, Spotifyi, and more services came up and said, hey, do you want tons of content for this small fee per month? And people loved it, because the alternatives were buying physical movies at an higher price that wouldn’t justify for almost every movie you’ll watch in your home.
That’s the fault in the logic of copyright owners that believes every pirated copy of something it’s a sell that was lost. Nope, if people wouldn’t pirated it, they’ll certainly wouldn’t buy it because the price and expectetions didn’t match.
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