Police ‘Infringing Website List’ Portal Set For a £220K Makeover

A database of pirate sites maintained by City of London Police for more than a decade is set for a makeover. Earlier this year vendors were invited to bid for a contract to supply a new portal for Operation Creative, the anti-piracy initiative responsible for the Infringing Website List. Nominated for inclusion by mainly overseas rightsholders, the list predominantly features overseas pirate sites. The winning bid of just over £221,000 will be settled from the UK public purse.

iwl-2024-s The “Infringing Website List” (IWL) was launched in March 2014 as part of the Police Intellectual Property Crime Unit’s (PIPCU) efforts to combat intellectual property crime.

The IWL is a component of Operation Creative, a multi-agency initiative led by PIPCU at City of London Police, with support from partners across the creative and advertising industries.

Based on input from industry groups including the MPA, BPI/IFPI, FACT, and the Publishers Association, operators of pirate sites are engaged directly by officers from PIPCU. In most cases we’re aware of, site operators receive an email outlining their activities alongside allegations of crimes under various pieces of legislation. They are then advised to shut down before the situation gets worse.

Pirates Can Be Very Persistent

While Operation Creative has been financed from the public purse for over a decade, almost no information is made available to the public. As a result, it’s impossible to say how many sites shut down after the initial contact, or if any do at all. The only thing that can be said with certainty is that many ignore the ultimatum and carry on regardless.

Non-compliance isn’t unexpected; in many cases those behind the targeted sites don’t live in the UK, or even in Europe. Operation Creative says it responds with a multi-stage disruption process that begins with action against domains, hosting providers, and payment providers, and ends in enforcement. The details of that process and the factors used to measure success are not for public consumption.

Operation Creative Portal Set For a Makeover

Stubborn sites are placed on the Infringing Website List, primarily as a reminder for advertisers not to business. The IWL also offers a narrow window of transparency into an otherwise opaque operation. Transparency isn’t intentional but when a list containing thousands of domains is distributed to more than 700 advertisers, gambling businesses, and other interested parties, information can be hard to contain.

The 10th anniversary of Operation Creative and the all-important IWL passed silently earlier this year. In the background, however, important work was underway; the procurement of an all new Operation Creative Portal.

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The process began late 2023 with a soft market testing exercise followed by the publication of the listing above mid-April 2024. The contract was eventually awarded to Bristol-based Calvium Limited, which according to its website already works with the NHS and the Department of Transport. Depending on whether extensions are granted after the initial three years, the contract is worth between £173,600 and £221,600.

The good news for the mostly overseas rightsholders set to benefit from the new portal, is that the cost of tackling the mostly overseas pirate sites on the Infringing Website List, will be paid from the UK public purse. To what extent anyone benefits from the program hasn’t been reported regularly, or even at all.

A report published last year indicated that the program prevented sites on the IWL receiving £6m in ad revenue from the UK. Averaged out, that could mean every platform lost £3000+ in revenue. For some lower end sites that could be devastating but without context, the overall effect could’ve been minimal too, there’s simply no way to tell.

Effective Or Not, The List is Quite Big

When data is withheld from the public as a matter of policy, attempting to assess that a site’s presence on the IWL is detrimental to its health amounts to a fool’s errand. Nevertheless, even without a single shred of evidence it’s safe to assume that no site placed on the list in the last decade will have drawn any benefit from that.

Subject to the caveats mentioned previously, we estimate that from the list’s launch in early 2014 to early October 2024, more than 8,130 domains have appeared on the IWL.

In some cases several domains, each with their own individual entry, relate to the same underlying platform, so 8,130 domains does not mean 8,130 sites have appeared on the list. Without access to every list ever produced, the total number of sites cannot be deduced, period.

Identifying the types of sites that have appeared on the list since the beginning faces the same issues. We can say with some certainty that at the start of October this year, the list contained ~1,800 domains. We can also confirm that new additions in 2024 are dominated by IPTV-related domains, endless web-based live sports streaming portals, the usual movie and TV show platforms, and the bane of the music industry, YouTube-ripping services.

Some Platforms Seem Immune

While the top of the IWL is subject to almost constant change, at the very bottom of the list very little seems to happen.

Without reference to domain extensions, the numbering system indicates that soccer365 was the 16th domain to be added to the IWL back in February 2014. While the 15 domains added earlier have disappeared, between July and September this year, soccer365 pulled in 45.8 million visits.

Others at the bottom include a well known file-hosting site added to the list in June 2014. Due to a UK court order, it’s been blocked by local ISPs for a decade and never appears in local search results after being deindexed by Google. Others include a handful of world-famous torrent sites (also blocked and deindexed), two music sites that simply refuse to die (blocked and deindexed), and at least one sports streaming site.

Something Everyone Could Benefit From

The IWL contains the domains of some very large sites that don’t rely on advertising revenue from the UK, or indeed anywhere else. Money is made by diverting some users of those sites to phishing portals where they’re encouraged to enter their social media and other credentials into look-a-like platforms.

That inevitably generates profit for the sites, at the expense of people in the UK. The remarkable element here is that servers connected to that activity have UK IP addresses. Just an observation really.

Finally, domains on the IWL that suspiciously divert to exactly the same website.