I received an interesting e-mail from the Movie88 folks this morning. If you look at previous entries, you’ll remember that these are the folks who are streaming movies at a price of $1 for 3 days of viewing. Here’s the e-mail:
We have been shut down without notice!!!
At about 4pm (Eastern Time), all our servers have been shut down by our ISP, Hinet of Taiwan without notice.
This is outrageous, a breach of the ISP professional conduct and nature law. This is quivalent to execution without trail and an absolute abuse by the ISP!
As result, thousands of registered users who have paid some money to rent movies are stranded. Movie88.com cannot be accessed at all.
We have never been approached by any authorities in Taiwan and have never received any court documents.
We are now doing whatever we can to restore our access and protest against the outrageous act of Hinet.
We have given notice to Hinet to restore our access but the same has refused to do so.
This must not be a precedent. Even if there are issues about our content, we must be given a fair trial. Our registered users must not be made to suffer.
We call upon all website owners to protest against this outstrageous conduct of an ISP and fight for the basic and fundamental rights of a Website owner.
Movie88
That’s pretty much the note. I attempted to access the site this morning and found that it was not there. Looks like someone (MPAA perhaps?) pressured the Taiwanese government to shut them down. This probably came through the State Department since there’s been a great deal of negotiation lately around copyright and patent issues between countries. This would be one of those areas where WIPO might even play a role.
Another interesting thing about this note is that it was personally addressed to a number of webmasters. In addition to this site, CNet, Time Inc., Slashdot, and ABCNews were all addressed directly.
My take — I’m assuming that this e-mail is true. If they were shutdown without notice, then Movie88 should have legal recourse by looking at the terms and conditions of their contract. If they were not in violation of their contract, then the shutdown was likely because of US government pressure over concerns of intellectual property. It may have even been a threat from the MPAA to stop distributing movies into Taiwan unless the site was shutdown. My big disappointment would be that the Taiwanese government caved so easily — their copyright laws have been on the books for ages and the fault here really lies with the MPAA for failing to understand and abide by those laws.