UK Police Seized Another Streaming Domain

The well-known British Police Intellectual Property Crime Unit has now deprived the popular sports streaming 'franchise' Sportlemon of one of its main domain names – Frombar.com. As usual, it is unclear whether the move will prove effective, because the service is still operating from alternate domains.


For a while now, City of London Police have been cooperating with rights owners to target websites hosting or linking to pirated material. At the beginning, the police unit was sending out notifications to website operators, asking them to go legit or close down. Late in 2013, the police launched a campaign targeted at domain registrars, who were asked to suspend the domain names of a number of “unauthorized” websites.

Although majority of registrars paid no attention to those suspension requests, as they lacked any legal basis, some of them decided to cooperate. As a result, another website suffered from the police campaign a few days ago: the sports streaming ‘franchise’ Sportlemon lost its Frombar.com domain name.

It is known that Frombar.com is a sports streaming website, and a rather popular one, with more than a million monthly visitors. Today, all of them will have to find an alternative, because their favorite streaming site is displaying a prominent police banner.

As usual, it is not guaranteed that this move can deter people for long. It is known for sure that the website operator has a lot of alternative domains lying around, and the service continues its operations on frombar.tv, fromsport.com, gledaisport.com, fromsportcom.com, fromhot.com, and sportlemon.tv.

A lot of many other streaming sites have suffered from the UK police unit as well. Trying to stay out of its crosshairs, the operators of the alleged pirate websites are looking for safe registrars which will not be easily giving in to complaints from British authorities. For example, the practice shows that the Canadian registrar EasyDNS is quite a safe choice, because the company actively protests the efforts of the UK’s Police Intellectual Property Crime Unit.

Of course, the police are not happy with the struggling registrars. For example, they sent EasyDNS a threatening letter a few weeks ago, threatening to hold it liable for aiding and abetting a criminal operation. However, no further action was taken.