Alliance for Creativity and Entertainment shuts down two pirate sites

The Alliance for Creativity and Entertainment (ACE), the world’s leading coalition dedicated to protecting the dynamic legal ecosystem of creative content and reducing digital piracy, today announced it has shut down the popular streaming sites Watchseries.ninja and Watchsomuch.org.

Both domains, which affected all ACE members, are offline following ACE’s enforcement actions. ACE’s trusted notifier agreements and outreach to domain name registries and registrars led to the domains’ suspension.

Watchseries.ninja was launched in June 2020 and had a database of nearly 10,000 HD movies and 60,000 HD TV show episodes.  It received an average of 7.4M visits per month for a total of 85M visits since its launch. The site was particularly popular in English-speaking markets with 23% of traffic originating from the US, 15% from the UK and 14% from Canada.

Watchsomuch.org was launched in March 2019 and offered more than 100,000 hours of HD TV and film content. It received an average of 6.5M visits a month or 121M visits in the last two years. Traffic to the domain was worldwide, with 10% of traffic coming from the United States, the United Kingdom, Australia, and South Africa respectively. In addition, Watchsomuch.org offered a “VIP” subscription for $8 USD per month which offered faster streaming speeds.

ACE continues to use all tools in its toolkit to identify the operators of pirate sites, including leveraging its relationships with intermediaries and collaborating with law enforcement authorities around the world, as well as legal options such as DMCA subpoenas.

The theft of digital content harms both local and foreign films and businesses, threatens jobs, undermines investment, reduces tax contributions to governments, and stifles creativity.