TorrentFreak Pair Behind 400 Block-Evading Pirate **** Sites Face Prosecution

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When governments prohibit, outlaw, or otherwise restrict certain activities or access to products, some believe that can make the forbidden even more interesting.

Coincidentally, perhaps, forbidden is a theme the adult industry has always found quite lucrative, ironically in countries where there are few restrictions.

In Vietnam, making, possessing and distributing ****ographic material is illegal, so the underground market today is fueled by sites offering pirated **** from which third parties profit. Running these types of sites is not without risk, however.

Two Men Prosecuted​

In an announcement on Wednesday, police provided an outline of crimes allegedly committed by two men said to operate hundreds of sites.

The Investigation Police Agency at Tuyen Quang Provincial Police first announced the prosecution of Thái Nguyên province resident Vũ Văn Thìn. Born in 1988, he allegedly launched the first of his sites in 2018.

Stocked with “****ographic and depraved” content, the sites reportedly attracted a large, but unspecified number of visitors. Since many **** pirates prefer not to pay, especially in a country where explicit adult material is illegal, the sites offered free content to generate revenue from advertising.

Easy Money​

Vũ Văn Thìn’s successes reportedly led to others wanting to work with him, including Đinh Mạnh Dũng (born 1989), a resident of Thanh Hóa province. Working as partners and independently, Thìn and Dũng are said to have expanded their site portfolios when generating revenue came easily.

As the government source explains:

Realizing that making money is easy, the subjects multiplied the number of websites; using high-tech technical means with sophisticated tricks to commit criminal acts, in order to increase profits and evade the censorship of telecommunications service providers in Vietnam.

At the time of his arrest, Vũ Văn Thìn had reportedly “created, managed and operated” 287 websites to which he’d posted 21,000 videos.

Đinh Mạnh Dũng reportedly created and operated more than 100 similar sites offering similar content, although he personally uploaded fewer videos, around 1,000 according to police.

Very Serious Crimes​

While prosecutions of regular pirate site operators in Vietnam fall well short of Western rightsholders’ expectations, the distribution of prohibited content is described by police as a very serious crime that “infringes on fine customs and social ethics.”

Whether the alleged volume of sites will have any bearing on the prosecution’s case is unknown. Site names have not been released for obvious reasons, but in practical terms, it seems unlikely that the defendants operated 400 distinct sites.

Circumvention of Government Blocking​

A more likely scenario would see hundreds of domains linked to a very limited number of sites, for the purpose of circumventing ISP blocking measures, among other things. Having become ubiquitous in the broader streaming piracy landscape, large pirate sites with strong connections to Vietnam use similar tactics to avoid blocking in multiple jurisdictions.

Deployed at local ISPs either owned by the state or operated by those closely connected to the Vietnamese government, blocking is supposed to prevent access to prohibited content of various types, which in practice can be broadly defined.

Circumvention of blocking measures ordered by the state, for the purpose of distributing content banned by the state, has the potential to prove costly. The revenue generated through ads may also factor into the equation but depending on the nature of the ads, the cost may be felt more acutely by users.

From: TF, for the latest news on copyright battles, piracy and more.

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