Studios are cracking down on some of the internet's most popular piracy sites

For several years, the Alliance for Creativity and Entertainment (ACE) has teamed up with Hollywood's Motion Picture Association (MPA) to crack down on digital piracy, and this week, it seems the organizations have taken a major step toward reaching their goal.

Today, ACE — a coalition of more than 50 major entertainment companies and production studios, including Amazon, Disney and Warner Bros — took partial credit for shutting down Fmovies, a popular network of streaming sites that hosted pirated films and television shows. In a statement, ACE called Fmovies and its affiliated sites "the largest pirate streaming operation in the world," and according to the Hollywood Reporter, Hanoi police have arrested two suspects who are believed to be connected to the operation.

MPA CEO and ACE President Charles Rivkin called the closure of Fmovies "a wonderful victory for the cast, crew, writers, directors, studios and the creative community around the world." MPA Chief Content Security Officer Larissa Knapp said the organizations see the move as "sending a powerful deterrent message" to others currently running (or thinking about starting) similar piracy sites that stream copyrighted content.

Fmovies, launched in 2016, has been shut down as other illegal streaming sites such as Aniwave and AnimeFlix have suddenly shut down - leaving their regular visitors panicked. Aniwave's website currently features a brief message (presumably from its former operators), as well as an embed of Wiz Khalifa's "See You Again," explaining that their goal with the site is to "create better products that provide a better user experience and promote competition to motivate the market to improve products."

The message ends with a specifically worded call to action: "If possible, please use legal paid services. This is something we must do to show our respect for creators and content producers."

ACE has not taken responsibility for Anywave's shutdown, but as the Los Angeles Times notes, the wording of the call to action matches statements posted on other sites that have been followed by the anti-piracy trade organization.

For obvious reasons like lost revenue, studios have never been in favor of the idea of people consuming their intellectual property without paying. But piracy is still thriving for reasons other than people not wanting to pay their own money to see the latest blockbusters. Pirating (read: stealing) things is cheaper, yes, but the sites' value also stems from the fact that they offer a much larger catalog of things to consume than their legal competitors.

While studio-owned streamers have made a habit of making their content disappear or dividing it up among themselves in a way that makes it both difficult and expensive to track, piracy sites are essentially big buckets in which users can easily find anything they want. And while copyright infringement is a crime, one of the reasons people do it is that studios haven't made the legal option attractive enough that people adopt it by default.

This has always been a challenge for studios, and it's clearly become a lower priority as streamers have turned to price gouging. But at this point in the streaming wars and Hollywood’s heavy pursuit of financial gain, it’s not surprising that pirates are suffering some losses.