When the major Hollywood studios, Netflix, Amazon, and Apple, teamed up to file a lawsuit against DoodStream in March, that unlikely took the file-hosting service by surprise. After a Court ordered the removal of hundreds of thousands of links to mainstream movies and TV shows, the collapse in visitor numbers since was probably expected as well.
From: TF, for the latest news on copyright battles, piracy and more.
In 2022, it was public knowledge that the MPA had its eye on video hosting and streaming service DoodStream.
When the MPA’s top lawyer called the site out a year later, DoodStream’s operators may have underestimated how significant that was. What followed was a copyright infringement lawsuit, filed at the Delhi High Court in India, DoodStream’s home turf.
DoodStream Ordered to Remove All Content Owned By The Plaintiffs
The details of an injunction obtained by the studios and the subsequent fallout are available in two in-depth articles published last month.
The bottom line is that DoodStream’s efforts to remove all copies of the plaintiffs’ copyrighted works failed to meet the requirements of the injunction. The site’s operators complained that they weren’t allowed enough time to remove between 500,000 and 1,000,000 links to pirated videos. Needless to say, the Court was unsympathetic.
In light of DoodStream’s rejection of various proposals to limit ongoing infringement, a poor outcome for the defendants seemed increasingly likely. Removing download links, for example, was dismissed as a complete non-starter since that “would end up in the website being completely bare and inept.”
Infringing Content Removal Devastates DoodStream’s Traffic
The Court’s response was to issue an order that banned DoodStream’s owners, Raja Durai and Sarvesh Chandran, from directly or indirectly operating their own website, pending a hearing listed for September 18, 2024.
In the meantime, measures to prevent the plaintiffs’ content being made available via the DoodStream platform appear to be having a catastrophic effect on the service’s traffic.
The MPA previously estimated that DoodStream was good for 82.7 million visits during August 2022 alone. Semrush data indicates that during March 2024, doodstream.com received a very healthy 95.91 million visits. A month into the lawsuit, visits had plummeted to 35.95 million. In May, the number of visits was less than 27 million, almost 25% down on the previous month.
In common with similar sites operating in the same sector, DoodStream has many domains. The order that restrains the site’s owners from operating the site lists around 20. We can’t say with any certainty how many more exist beyond that, but it’s more than a handful. The traffic for these domains shouldn’t be added together due to the way they’re used, but the decline overall is significant.
Traffic Takes a Hammering
One of the domains the Court did list in its order is ds2play.com. According to Semrush data for March, the domain received 102.97 million visits. A month later, visits were down to less than 35 million and in May, a further 43% decrease in visits left the domain with barely a fifth of the visits it had before the lawsuit.
Domains with considerably less traffic include dood.watch; visits in March were roughly 2.73 million, but in May, that had reduced to 977K. Similar levels can be seen for doodstream.co, which in May received 968K, a decrease of 34% on the previous month. Likewise, dood.sh, down 45% on April’s figures in May along with a 22,000 place decline in global site ranking.
There is a domain with more interesting features, however.
Millions of Visits, But to Watch What?
Perhaps the most intriguing domain overall is dood.re. In March, it received almost 143 million visits, but in May, that had collapsed to less than 25 million, a 35% decline compared to the previous month.
What we see with this domain are some apparent gains being made amid the chaos of the headline losses. With links to mainstream movies being removed in their hundreds of thousands, there is at least some content that Hollywood can’t touch; or at least, refuses to touch – pornography.
In May, traffic to dood.re from X actually increased by almost 15%, but the big riser was way out ahead. With a 43% boost over the previous month, adult site PornHoarder became one of the domain’s leading sources of traffic.
On one hand, this might be considered a small positive in a sea of otherwise bad news and collapsing traffic. However, the Delhi High Court recently noted that by storing and distributing material that is illegal in India, any hope of seeking refuge under Section 79 of the IT Act, as an intermediary exempt from liability, is futile.
Perhaps the big question is who, if anyone, is running the site. Some uploaders to the site claim they are being paid as normal. Some uploaders claim they are not being paid at all.
Whatever the truth, the uncertainty appears to be harming confidence, as the wait for September’s hearing continues. It may not kill the site, especially when others seem prepared to pick up the slack, but the studios will settle for the disruption, at least for now.
From: TF, for the latest news on copyright battles, piracy and more.
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