Incredible Fmovies Piracy Indictment is Not a “Stunning Victory” For Hollywood

The Hanoi People's Procuracy in Vietnam has issued an indictment against two men said to be the operators of the massive Fmovies piracy empire shut down last year. The indictment offers detail on when the men first met, when their plans for Fmovies began to take shape, and how the site generated revenue. Last year the MPA described the shutdown as a "stunning victory." New revelations are indeed stunning, but extremely puzzling too.

fmovies2023Decade after decade, Hollywood studios have produced many of the greatest movies ever committed to celluloid, together telling some of the most inspiring, terrifying, beautiful, outrageous, spectacular, and funny stories ever told.

Movies make the impossible, possible, and when the Fmovies piracy empire was shuttered in 2024, the MPA showed that with enough time, effort, resources, and persistence, impossible achievements aren’t necessarily confined to the silver screen.

The MPA described the event as a “a stunning victory for casts, crews, writers, directors, studios, and the creative community across the globe,” and in many respects it was.

Rightsholders aiming to deter use of pirate sites, often use the phrase “if it seems too good to be true, it probably is.” Even after years of painstaking work, the circumstances of the sudden implosion of the world’s largest piracy ring could’ve been described using similar terms.

Yet evidence to the contrary, not least the disappearance of the sites, was both compelling and publicly verifiable. The only remaining question marks concerned almost everything else.

Arrests, Prosecutions, and Indictments

After two arrests were reported in the wake of the shutdown operation, Vietnamese authorities confirmed that two men would be prosecuted; alleged “mastermind, leader, creator, operator, and manager” Phan Thanh Cong (34) and accomplice/assistant Nguyen Tuan Anh, also 34, both residents of Capitaland, Mo Lao ward, Ha Dong district, Hanoi.

Taken on face value, two arrests, two confessions, and then an announcement last November confirming two prosecutions, sounded like good news for the MPA. An earlier case targeting the operator of Phimmoi had taken years longer to fail at an earlier stage.

Yet the MPA doesn’t seem especially pleased, all things considered. The operation to shut down the sites still receives obligatory praise, but it’s clear that the MPA would like a more predictable legal environment and “suitably deterrent” sentences in Vietnam.

Punishment Should Fit the Crime

In the Fmovies case specifically, the request is for a sentence that “reflects the unprecedented scale of the criminal activity.”

In broad layman’s terms, any punishment would balance out 6.7 billion visits to the site in a single year, mainly for the purpose of watching Hollywood movies. Then another three years or so of between 70 and 130 million visits to just one of the sites, every single month.

That would leave Fmovies’ first three years of traffic, the planning for which began in 2015.

At Aptech, Defendants Hatched Plan to Exploit Foreign Content

The indictment claims that Phan Thanh Cong and Nguyen Tuan Anh studied together at vocational school ApTech (we’re not linking, site may have been hacked) and in 2015, hatched a plan to launch a site specializing in foreign movies to attract a worldwide audience.

On the site that would eventually become Fmovies, Nguyen Tuan Anh had responsibility for ensuring the site had content to offer – movies mainly – stored on Google Drive accounts according to the indictment.

Phan Thanh Cong was the programmer and manager, who also took care of advertisers and through that, handled the money; he allegedly took 90% of the spoils, leaving just 10% for his partner.

The indictment focuses on one type of revenue, from a single source. It claims that before a movie could be watched, visitors to the site had to view an advert delivered by an overseas partner called MGID Advertising Company.

An investigation cited in the indictment concluded that since August 2016, Phan Thanh Cong received a total of ~US$400,000.

Case Headed in the Wrong Direction?

Mindful of the MPA’s request that the punishment should fit the crime, early estimates suggested that the Fmovies site ring offered around 50,000 video titles. The allegations specifically concerning content owned by the MPA relate to a total of just thirty films.

Given that the indictment states that the benefit to the defendants personally was around US$400,000, any damages payable to the MPA represent just a fraction of that amount.

In fact, the indictment takes the 30 movies in question and estimates benefit to the defendants at ~VND 406 million in total, split ~VND365 million to Cong and ~VND41 million to Tuan Anh.

That’s a benefit of around ~US$14,300 for Cong and ~US$1,600 for Tuan Anh. And it gets worse.

Of the movies taken into account, it appears that 13 were the subject of further inquiry in respect of the cost of distribution rights for those movies in Vietnam. If this figure had been made available, damages would’ve been calculated accordingly.

The MPA didn’t provide that information. As a result, any damages may concern just 17 movies rather than the original 30. Definitely not the thousands that actually appeared on Fmovies and its sister sites for roughly eight years, that much is certain.

And there’s something else severely muddying the waters; we’ll return to that in just a moment.

Much Worse? Indeed

When Fmovies originally went offline last summer, as first reported by TF in July, the reason is easily explained according to the authorities.

No drama – Cong just failed to pay the server bill – potentially the first time since 2016. Why that’s of any importance is unclear.

The importance of what could happen next, however, was demonstrated last year in a case brought by the Premier League. In that matter involving sales of illegal IPTV subscriptions, the defendant reportedly paid back the entire amount of ‘benefit’ he made from the illegal sales. The court appeared to view that as a very good thing, which had a positive effect (for him) at sentencing; in practical terms, no prison time.

The indictment claims that both men in the Fmovies case have already returned the full amount of benefit received from pirating the studios’ films. How this will affect sentencing is unknown but any hope the MPA has of a deterrent sentence seems distant at best.

Unclear and Very Unusual

In foreign cases where court documents may never become available, reporting can be difficult. A unique feature of this case in Vietnam are the videos released to the public featuring police, the defendants, and interviews etc. Whether it’s deliberate or not is impossible to say, but documents are often visible on desks or when being handled in some obvious way.

With patience, some can even be made legible. A fleeting view of the document below appeared in one of the police videos published last year but since it contains no mention of Fmovies, the relevance to the matter in hand wasn’t clear to us at all.

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The only thing we were able to decipher at the time was the possible existence of a copyright complaint of some type involving a film or films, sent to Vietnam-based streaming platform Galaxy Play early 2024. Galaxy Play may have sought further clarification, including film titles and/or other details such as terms of service.

The context remains difficult to decipher, but the 17 films mentioned in the indictment are said to have been “copied, posted, and illegally distributed to Galaxy Play Joint Stock Company, Vietnam Satellite Digital Television Company Limited, and ITB TV LTD,” causing a loss of more than VND920 million. (emphasis ours).

Last year the shutdown was described as a “stunning victory” for Hollywood. Today it looks a lot like something else but what exactly is up for debate. The suggestion is one of infringing movies somehow being supplied by the defendants for commercial use; nothing like that has ever been mentioned by the studios.

Why that’s never been mentioned is a mystery to us. It may even raise doubts over what this prosecution is actually about.