"We took down the mothership," announced Hollywood's joint anti-piracy alliance, ACE.

The Alliance for Creativity and Entertainment (ACE) was formed in 2017 by Hollywood and TV studios to combat piracy. Over the summer, ACE announced that it would be stepping up its anti-piracy efforts.

The current board members of ACE include Amazon, Apple TV+, Netflix, Paramount Global, Sony Pictures, Universal Studios, The Walt Disney Studios, and Warner Bros. Discovery.

ACE does not target consumers but rather the organizations that in this age of streaming offer illegal streaming services with free access to movies and TV series, among other types of content. These organizations are increasingly establishing themselves outside the US and Europe, ACE claimed this summer.


The world's largest piracy ring
In a press release, ACE announced that, in collaboration with police in Hanoi, Vietnam, it had succeeded in shutting down the world's largest piracy network, Fmovies.

- "We took down the mothership here" Charles Rivkin, Chairman of ACE, told Variety. "There was a time when piracy was Whac-a-Mole… Today, we go after piracy at its root."

At its peak in 2023, Fmoviesz.to was the 280th most popular website globally across all categories and the 11th most popular in the TV, Movies & Streaming category, according to data analytics company SimilarWeb.

Together with its associated pirate sites, such as bflixz, flixtorz, movies7, myflixer and aniwave, the network had 6.7 billion visits between January 2023 and June 2024, with nearly 374 million monthly visits.

All of the sites were all hosted by Vidsrc.to, which has also been shut down. Allegedly, it hosted "hundreds" of pirate sites.

- Source: ACE, Variety