Pirate sites taken down. Or were they?

Yesterday Homeland Security’s division of immigration and customs enforcement (ICE) was involved in shutting down nine online movie sites. The list includes, TVShack.net, Movies-Links.TV, FilesPump.com, NinjaVideo.net, NinjaThis.net, Now-Movies.com, PlanetMoviez.com, ThePirateCity.org and ZML.com

So here we have homeland security spending money and time on a futile attempt at stopping illegal uploads and downloads of videos. Instead of spending it on, what homeland security should be doing… PROTECTING ITS CITIZENS.

Now some may say that is what they are doing seeing that the movie industry is claiming a loss in revenues forcing them to Lay people off. But I just do not buy this at all seeing that the industry is pumping out record breaking box office movies left and right as if there is no tomorrow. And yet they are still able to pay millions of dollars to actors and other people within the industry. So despite the movie industry’s claims. I just don’t see it. So I do not buy their excuses. But do not get me wrong here. I am not advocating downloading movies like this. Personally I just do not care.

Downloading movies from such sites is illegal here and in many places of the world. And doing so can result in fines and even prison time. However to many people, something being illegal does not mean it is wrong. And so I do understand their reasoning and how they rationalize what they are doing. After all I myself do feel that if I was to break certain laws here. It does not mean that I have done something wrong. It only means I broke the law. And so only breaking the law is what is wrong, not the act itself.

In many cases, if not perhaps the vast majority of the Pirates do not feel that they are doing something wrong, matter-of-fact. Many of them even see themselves and others who do this, as heroic. As if they are some kind of modern-day Internet version of Robin Hood. Either way, right or wrong, our government once again is wasting time and money and putting our own citizens at risk. So instead of being out there and protecting us from the big threats. Instead are chasing after Internet Pirates, revealing where they are priorities are at.

According to ICE. It was supposed to take years for sites like the ones above to grow back just as big. But instead, what we see is just as the pirates themselves predicted, long before the busts took place and the removal of the site. And that prediction was that if any of the movie websites have been taken down then two others would take their place and become just as popular within just a matter of days. Or the websites would just be redirect to a new domain as if it never happened at all.

And that seems to be exactly what has happened. As sites like Movies-Links.TV was taken down only to return in a mere 24 hour period under the new domain Watch-Movies-tv.info. As if nothing happened.

The same goes for TVShack.net. All they did was redirect their domain to TVShack.cc. And apparently everybody who used to visit these original sites seem to know about the new ones immediately after they were put back up because word spreads fast on the Internet. So fast and so powerful was the word going around the Internet that even I had gotten wind of these new domains and I never even was aware of the original websites existence.

Heck I used to believe this only happened on those peer-to-peer websites and was not so readily available elsewhere. So the only thing that ICE has achieved was wasting time and taxpayers money. As well as helping spread the word about such sites. If illegal downloads was such a problem before. Then all they did was help spread the word of such websites because now apparently everybody and their mother knows about them when they previously did not.

So it is no surprise to me that our government is crumbling around us today when their actions are showing that there priorities are not with the people but with the movie industry.