From hunters to the hunted: an anti-pirate group acts against others

The Alliance for Creativity and Entertainment (ACE) is the world’s largest industry coalition fighting piracy. ACE also operates a site designed to introduce users to legal offers, but this site has itself become a “victim” of anti-piracy efforts.

Watch Legally

There is certainly no doubt which side of the piracy issue ACE is on, after all its members include Amazon, BBC, Sky, Netflix, Apple, Warner Bros. and many more – including Dazn as of last week. This industry alliance has many different initiatives and campaigns, one of the most important being a page called Watch Legally.

There, visitors get an overview of all legal streaming portals and content providers. Users can browse there, but also search offers by categories such as films, TV series and sports. This page is also used if the ACE manages to seize a relevant page. Because in such cases, visitors are not only shown an error code, after which the previous piracy site is no longer available, but a redirection is set up that leads them to Watch Legally.

This also gives the offer more than a decent number of visitors and shows that the anti-piracy strategy “switch off and show alternatives” is successful. Google also supports this initiative and places it at the top of the results in many cases or search terms.

AiPlex vs. ACE

But how TorrentFreak reported, ACE itself has now become a victim of piracy hunters. Because Watch Legally was removed from Google search results – at least for a short time – after a takedown by another organization of this kind. Specifically, the Indian anti-piracy group AiPlex was responsible for it.

This was not an isolated case either, AiPlex has repeatedly complained about ACE links in the past few weeks. The ACE site was in the midst of a list of takedowns of illegally hosted Bollywood films. There is no official statement on this yet.

A possible, or even probable, explanation is that redirecting seized websites plays a role here. So ACE could be some sort of collateral damage from a bot tagging piracy sites on behalf of AiPlex – which are no longer operational and being redirected by ACE.

Summary

ACE is the world’s largest industry association dedicated to the fight against piracy.
Members include Amazon, BBC, Netflix, Apple, Warner Bros. & Dazn.
ACE runs “Watch Legally”: Overview of legal streaming portals and content.
Seizure of a page will redirect to “Watch Legally”.
Google supports ACE initiative, places it at the top of search results.
ACE itself has now become a victim of piracy hunters.
Reason: takedown of another organization; Bot collateral damage?

See also:

File sharing, piracy, keyboard, filesharer, piracy, software piracy, skull and crossbones