A sustained campaign by U.S. authorities has led to the seizure of a growing number of pirate sports streaming domains. The IPR Center is now listed as the owner of dozens of .DEV domains, which were signed over as part of the seizure operation. Previously, close to a hundred .APP domains linked to piracy suffered the same fate.
IPR Center sealEarlier this month, U.S. authorities quietly initiated a new round of domain name seizures, targeting dozens of pirate sports streaming sites.
The timing of the law enforcement actions coincided with the Super Bowl, presumably to establish maximum impact. Additional domain seizures were carried out in the days after, and then continued this week.
These actions did not focus on a specific pirate streaming site but targeted popular pirate brands instead. Those targeted included Acestream, Buffstream, Crackedstreams, Methstreams, StreamEast, and Totalsportek. In total, more than 200 domain names were taken down across various TLDs
To our knowledge, the authorities are yet to issue a public statement on this enforcement action. There has been no mention from rightsholders either, so it’s unclear whether domain registrars, domain registries, or both were asked to cooperate. A new round of seizures this week has clear links to Google Registry, but doesn’t offer conclusive evidence.
Google Registry / Porkbun
Google Registry manages the domains for several top-level domains (TLDs) including .ADS, .APP, DEV, and MOV. As an American company, it is logical to assume that the registry would comply with valid legal requests from national authorities regarding these domains.
Earlier this month, we observed close to a hundred .APP sports streaming domains being pointed towards seizedservers.com’s DNS servers, a clear sign of U.S. Government involvement.
Targeted .APP Domains
Attachment 70376
That all of these domains changed their DNS entries at the same time, just days after the initial seizures began, suggests that the action was carried out by a single entity. In this case, Google Registry would be the likely candidate, but there might be another explanation.
All seized .APP domains happen to be registered through the American company Porkbun. That means that these domains may have been registered by a single account holder, potentially as backups, which would be another valid reason why they all went down at once.
Whether Google Registry or Porkbun took action doesn’t change the outcome in any way; the domain names are definitely seized.
Target: .Dev Domains
This week, the sports streaming domain seizures continued, again without public fanfare. This latest move targeted many .DEV domains which are also managed by Google Registry. Again, these domains were registered though Porkbun.
The targets include methstream.dev, markkystreams.dev, gostreameast.dev, formula1stream.dev, footybites.dev and dozens of others. Like previous seizures, domain nameservers were switched to those of seizedservers.com, but the domains don’t necessarily display the well-known seizure banner.
Targeted .DEV Domains
Attachment 70377
Instead, many domains return an SSL certificate error, as we’ve also seen with the .APP domains. This is likely a result of how these seizures were technically processed. While ownership of the domains has changed, SSL certificates are not necessarily updated, triggering an error.
New Owner: The IPR Center
The changed ownership of the .APP and .DEV domain names is undisputed. The Whois information for the seized domains now list the National Intellectual Property Rights Coordination Center (IPR Center) as registrant, with Virginia as the registered state.
Registrant: IPR Center
The IPR Center has experience with these types of enforcement actions and is also listed on the seizure banner of other seized domain names. Earlier this month, the organization announced the seizure of counterfeit sports goods ahead of the Super Bowl, but there was no mention of domain seizures.
As these seizures are ongoing, more domains may be added in the future. It’s difficult to compile a full list of all affected domains, but based on our research, complemented by Mat’s excellent domain seizure resource, we have compiled the non-exhaustive and unverified list below.
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