Top pirated movies website shut down

Top-rated website movie2free.com streamed about 3,000 pirated Thai and foreign movies online. It has been shut down by the DSI and the administrator arrested. (Photo: DSI)
Top-rated website movie2free.com streamed about 3,000 pirated Thai and foreign movies online. It has been shut down by the DSI and the administrator arrested. (Photo: DSI)

Officials have arrested the administrator of a website that streamed 3,000 pirated movies online and earned about 5 million baht a month from advertisements.

The Department of Special Investigation director-general said on Thursday that investigators found that website movie2free.com, which streamed pirated movies, was run by a Thai man living abroad. The website operator, aged around 30, had hired a 22-year-old man living in the North as administrator.

The administrator was arrested at his house early this month and the website was shut down.

The site had used sophisticated equipment that made it hard for authorities to track it down, and had set up a server abroad. 

Movie2free.com earned about 5 million baht a month from online gambling advertisements, the DSI chief said.

The action followed a request by the Motion Picture Association in the US and Hollywood copyright agents, who asked the DSI to investigate the website, saying it  streamed more than 3,000 pirated films.

Investigators found out the website, which opened in 2014, drew about 10 million views a day. It was Thailand’s most-visited pirated movie website and also was also on the global top-list of pirated movie sites. 

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Vocabulary

  • administrator (noun): someone whose job is to manage a business, organisation, institution or website - ผู้บริหาร
  • copyright: the legal right to control the production and selling of a book, play, film, photograph or piece of music - ลิขสิทธิ์
  • gambling: the activity of betting money, for example in a game or on a horse race - การพนัน
  • investigator: someone whose job is to officially find out the facts about something - ผู้สอบสวน, ผู้สำรวจ, ผู้ตรวจสอบ
  • pirated: illegally copied - ละเมิดลิขสิทธิ์
  • server (noun): computer hardware and software that performs some service for all the computers on a network - เครื่องบริการ, ตัวบริการ๒. โปรแกรมบริการ [คอมพิวเตอร์]
  • sophisticated: complicated and advanced in design - ที่มีการออกแบบให้ซับซ้อน
  • stream: to play video or sound on a computer by receiving it as a continuous stream, from the Internet for example, rather than needing to wait until the whole of the material has been downloaded -

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