Streaming project Movie-Web has lost its domain, apparently suspended by registrar Namecheap, following complaints from several major film studios. The developers have no intention of fighting back, but the app's code remains available on GitHub for others to use.
In recent months, Movie-Web has quickly gained popularity among a certain group of movie lovers.
The software is open source, (it's still on GitHub), and allows anyone to build a movie search engine capable of streaming content from third-party sources. These external sources have large libraries of pirated entertainment.
The developers of Movie-Web are not unaware of the legal implications, but since they do not host files, they hoped to avoid legal trouble. The software merely provides a search engine for third-party content, they argued. Only he was also streaming.
“Think of it like Google, we search the internet for videos, but we don't own the sites, we don't own the content. We just link to them," Movie-Web said in its FAQ.
This “Google” argument has been used by torrent sites in the past. However, history has shown that justification does not make such prpject immune to legal issues. So as the Movie-Web grew, Hollywood took action.
BTW, if you're still seeing the page, you might still be able to because the nameservers haven't been updated.
So yesterday the movie-web.app domain suddenly went down. According to a message posted on the official Discord server, this is the result of a “legal action” by various film companies, including Warner Bros. Netflix, Paramount, Universal and Disney.
It is very likely that the registrar Namecheap suspended the domain after a complaint from the aforementioned Hollywood companies.
Although this seems to be the end of the popular movie-web.app site, projecyt is not dead. The code remains available on GitHub and users can still use it to run their own “search engines”.
