Around a year back we saw popular free streaming websites like 123movies and Putlocker being put to the bed by order of government officials.
While the fact that this could happen to websites that averaged over 1.6 million hits a day still baffles us, it also causes us to think hard about what exactly was the reason behind the websites being well and truly “shut down”?
Websites that host pirated content are known to shift from domain to domain all the time, thepiratebay torrent being the best example of this. But when a website like Putlocker, who in all honestly has had its share of different domains over the years gets shut down like that, one genuinely starts questioning what exactly went wrong and where. Why couldn’t they simply move to a new domain? What caused this sudden disappearing act? Why was the website shut down?
Well we did some digging and have found answers to some of the most asked questions regarding the website shutdowns of 2018, and it may have taken us slightly over a year to get all this information together, but here it is.
Also check: convert magnet link to IDM
The Scoop
A website such as Putlocker was always known for being the host of several thousands of pages of pirated content available for free download, and the fact that the website actually stayed up for so long(it was launched in 2011, and by 2012 it was already averaging over 800,000 hits a day on their website.) only confirmed reports of it being originated somewhere in Vietnam where the laws for intellectual property rights were not as strict as in the US or UK. Had the website been based in either of the two countries it would’ve faced serious action a long time back.
That being said, the website was still shutdown 2018 which meant that somehow, after avoiding pressure for so long, someone in Vietnam had gotten behind the government to start taking its copyright laws more seriously.
That someone being the US Ambassador to Vietnam, Tes Otius. Otius apparently had a private meeting with Truong Minh Tuan, Vietnam’s Minister of Information and Communications and compelled him to go after the people behind 3 websites, namely 123movies, Kisscartoon and PutLocker who were all based in Vietnam. Tuan assured Otius that Vietnam would take copyright laws more seriously and any violators would be prosecuted.
Unsurprisingly so, almost a year later 123movies put up a notice on their website alongside a countdown timer that counted down the time till when the website would be officially shut down for good.
Kisscartoon literally disappeared off the face of the internet whereas Putlocker, which recently resurfaced, is now a shadow of its former self, redirecting users to another website to stream movies and shows instead of hosting them and providing service themselves.
What the future holds…
Well for websites like 123movies and Kisscartoon literally nothing can be said because while one website actually shut down and made a big deal out of it the other simply disappeared without any notice. Now with these websites, the future does sadly look pretty bleak with little to no hope of seeing them back up again. Also, there are some clones of almost all popular torrents available which can be accessed with proxy. For example, you can access kickass with kickass proxy.
Whereas for Putlocker, as we mentioned earlier the current website is a shadow of its former self, redirecting users to another website instead of hosting the content like they used to do.
If you are however stuck up on using Putlocker or something similar that makes things just as simple, you should probably check out this link where we’ve listed down some of the best alternatives to Putlocker.