With millions of visitors per day, 123movies(hub), also known as Gomovies, is one of the largest pirate streaming sites on the web.

However, according to a new message posted on the site, this will soon end. The site’s operators say that they will shut down at the end of the week.

“We’ve been providing links to movies and shows for years. Now it’s time to say goodbye. Thank you for being our friends and thanks for staying with us that long,” the 123movies team writes.

In addition, 123movies encourages its users to “respect” filmmakers by paying for movies and TV-shows instead of pirating them.

“PS: Please pay for the movies/shows, that’s what we should do to show our respect to people behind the movies/shows,” the team adds.

123movies shutdown notice

The shutdown announcement, which is currently only visible on the classic homepage, comes a few days after the MPAA branded the site as the the most popular illegal site in the world.

“Right now, the most popular illegal site in the world, 123movies.to (at this point), is operated from Vietnam, and has 98 million visitors a month,” MPAA’s Executive Vice President & Chief of Global Content Protection, Jan van Voorn said.

That wasn’t the first time the site had been called out. Last year the US Ambassador to Vietnam called on the local Government to criminally prosecute the site’s operators on their alleged home turf. In addition, the site was also on the radar of the office of the US Trade Representative, which featured 123movies in its latest Notorious Markets report.

While 123movies has changed names several times over the course of the last few months, it was still a relative newcomer. It first emerged less than three years ago, but quickly became a dominant player.

According to the announcement, however, it will be all over in a few days. With millions of potential estranged users, that will leave a huge gap to fill.

The reason for the planned closure decision is unknown. Speculation would suggest legal pressure being high on the list, but the 123movies team hasn’t commented on its motivation.

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When Spotify launched its first beta in the fall of 2008, many people were blown away by its ease of use.

With the option to stream millions of tracks supported by an occasional ad, or free of ads for a small subscription fee, Spotify offered something that was more convenient than piracy.

In the years that followed, Spotify rolled out its music service in more than 60 countries, amassing over 160 million users. While the service is often billed as a piracy killer, ironically, it also owes its success to piracy.

As a teenager, Spotify founder and CEO Daniel Ek was fascinated by Napster, which triggered a piracy revolution in the late nineties. Napster made all the music in the world accessible in a few clicks, something Spotify also set out to do a few years later, legally.

“I want to replicate my first experience with piracy,” Ek told Businessweek years ago. “What eventually killed it was that it didn’t work for the people participating with the content. The challenge here is about solving both of those things.”

While the technical capabilities were certainly there, the main stumbling block was getting the required licenses. The music industry hadn’t had a lot of good experiences with the Internet a decade ago so there was plenty of hesitation.

The same was true of Sweden, where The Pirate Bay had just gained a lot of traction. There was a pro-sharing culture being cultivated by Piratbyrån, Swedish for the Piracy Bureau, which was the driving force behind the torrent site in the early days.

After the first Pirate Bay raid in 2006, thousands of people gathered in the streets of Stockholm to declare their support for the site and their right to share.

Pro-piracy protest in Stockholm ^{(Jon Åslund, CC BY 2.5)}

Interestingly, however, this pro-piracy climate turned out to be in Spotify’s favor. In a detailed feature in the Swedish newspaper Breakit Per Sundin, CEO of Sony BMG at the time, suggests that The Pirate Bay helped Spotify.

“If Pirate Bay had not existed or made such a mess in the market, I don’t think Spotify would have seen the light of the day. You wouldn’t get the licenses you wanted,” Sundin said.

With music industry revenues dropping, record labels had to fire hundreds of people. They were becoming desperate and were looking for change, something Spotify was promising.

At the time, the idea of having millions of songs readily and legally available was totally new. Many immediately saw it as an “alternative to music piracy” and even Pirate Bay founder Peter Sunde was impressed.

“It was great. It was always what was missing in the pirate services, that intuitive interface,” Sunde told Breakit.

Sunde also believed that The Pirate Bay and all the buzz around piracy in Sweden was a great boon to Spotify. But while the latter turned into a billion-dollar business that’s about to go public, Sunde and the other TPB founders still owe the labels millions in damages.

“Without file-sharing, The Pirate Bay and the political work done by Piratbyrån, it was not possible to get the licensing agreements Spotify received,” Sunde said. “Sometimes I think I should have received 10, 20 or 30 percent of Spotify, as a thank you for the help.”

In addition to creating the right climate for the major record labels to get on board, The Pirate Bay also appears to have been of more practical assistance.

When Spotify first launched several people noticed that some tracks still had tags from pirate groups such as FairLight in the title. Those are not the files you expect the labels to offer, but files that were on The Pirate Bay.

Also, Spotify mysteriously offered music from a band that decided to share their music on The Pirate Bay, instead of the usual outlets. There’s only one place that could have originated from.

The Pirate Bay.

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Earlier this month, fans of Dragon Ball Super in Mexico started a movement on social media which suggested that everyone should be able to watch episode 130 (titled “The Greatest Showdown of All Time! The Ultimate Survival Battle!!”) together in public.

Surprisingly, this movement started receiving support from various local governments, many of which agreed to erect large screens in public places, from town and city squares to football stadiums.

Official government Twitter accounts lit up with announcements from the authorities, with posters like the one below issued for many of the events.

AYUNTAMIENTO CAPITALINO TRANSMITIRÁ FINAL DE DRAGÓN BALL EN PLAZA DEL CARMEN – El próximo sábado 17 de marzo, el evento dirigido a los fans de las series animadas japonesas y de los cómics… https://t.co/NhMn42toqj pic.twitter.com/meJiojPk65

— Ayuntamiento de SLP (@AytoSLP) March 10, 2018

<script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8">

While this all sounded wonderful in practice, there was a huge problem. According to Toei Animation, the Japanese company behind the hit anime show, no one had the licensing rights to show Dragon Ball Super in public.

The company issued a statement condemning the plans, branding the proposed performances as “illegal screenings that incite piracy” while urging people to support the creators by only watching on officially licensed platforms.

As Saturday drew near, some regions announced that without permission from Toei, their screenings would not go ahead. Others, however, offered no cooperation whatsoever, effectively informing Toei that it was powerless to do anything to stop what would amount to government-approved mass piracy.

Whether Toei had anything to do with it or not isn’t clear, but on Friday the ambassador of Japan took the highly unusual step of writing to various local governments with a demand for them to cancel the events. El Espanol obtained a copy of the letter, as shown below.

The letter from the Ambassador of Japan

“The Government of Japan is aware that episode 130 and 131 of the Dragon Ball Super series, whose copyright belongs to Japanese company Toei Animation, will be shown in public places and places without the author’s due authorization,” the letter reads.

“In the event the exhibition is illegal, the Government of Japan wishes that it be suspended.”

It seems that as a result of the letter, some of the screenings were canceled, causing much disappointment for the fans of the series. However, in some areas of Mexico the events went ahead anyway, with tens of thousands of massively enthusiastic people in attendance.

But it didn’t stop there. The DBS fever also spread to Chile, Peru, El Salvador and Ecuador, with outdoor events attracting huge cheering crowds.

Whether there will be any diplomatic fallout from these shows of defiance isn’t yet clear but if anyone needed a visualization of what torrent sharing might look like if it took place in the physical realm, there are no better examples than these videos. In Ecuador, where more than ten thousand people gathered in just one location, fun was had by all.

BREAKING NEWS: over 10,000 #DragonBallSuper fans gather in Machala, Ecuador to see #DragonBallSuper130 (episode 130) public live-stream hosted by local government! Im so proud of mi gente across Latin America for showing @ToeiAnimation @FUNimation @Crunchyroll the power of fandom pic.twitter.com/XgtktAVVeG

— 🔥Oppai Senpai🔥 (@MrOppaiSenpai) March 18, 2018

<script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8">

Why Toei didn’t make the most of this opportunity is anyone’s guess but it looks like the company could have made a killing selling official t-shirts alone. Nevermind, maybe next time.

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This week we have two newcomers in our chart.

Star Wars: The Last Jedi is the most downloaded movie.

The data for our weekly download chart is estimated by TorrentFreak, and is for informational and educational reference only. All the movies in the list are Web-DL/Webrip/HDRip/BDrip/DVDrip unless stated otherwise.

RSS feed for the weekly movie download chart.

This week’s most downloaded movies are:

Movie Rank	Rank last week	Movie name	IMDb Rating / Trailer
Most downloaded movies via torrents
1	(2)	Star Wars: The Last Jedi	7.4 / trailer
2	(…)	Annihilation	7.2 / trailer
3	(1)	Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle	7.7 / trailer
4	(4)	The Shape of Water	8.0 / trailer
5	(…)	Maze Runner: The Death Cure (HDTC)	6.8 / trailer
6	(6)	Black Panther (HDTS)	7.9 / trailer
7	(8)	The Greatest Showman	7.9 / trailer
8	(5)	Thor Ragnarok	8.1 / trailer
9	(7)	Ferdinand	6.7 / trailer
10	(9)	Justice League	7.1 / trailer

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In recent years copyright holders have been rather concerned with the health of pirates’ computers.

They regularly highlight reports which show that pirate sites are rife with malware and even alert potential pirates-to-be about the dangers of these sites.

The recent “Meet The Malwares” campaign, targeted at small children, went as far as claiming that pirate sites are the number one way through which this malicious software is spread. We debunked this claim, but it’s hard to deny that pirate sites have their downsides.

While the operators of pirate sites are usually unaware, advertisers and malicious uploaders sometimes use their sites to distribute adware or malware. But does that put people at significant risk? Research from Carnegie Mellon University Professor Rahul Telang provides some further insight.

For a year, Telang observed the browsing and other computer habits of 253 people who took part in the Security Behavior Observatory. The results, published in a paper titled “Does Online Piracy make Computers Insecure?” show that there is a link between pirate site visits and malware.

“We find that more visits to infringing sites does lead to more number of malware files being downloaded on user machines. In particular doubling the amount of time spent on infringing sites cause a 20 percent increase in malware count,” Telang writes.

This effect was only visible for pirate sites, and not for other categories such as banking, gambling, gaming, shopping, social networking, and even adult websites.

Through the Security Behavior Observatory, all files on the respondents’ computers were scanned and checked against reports from Virustotal.com. This also includes adware, but even without this category, the results remain intact.

“Even after we classify malware files into adware and remove them from analysis, our results still suggest that there is a 20 percent increase in malware count due to visits to infringing sites. These results are robust to various controls and specifications.”

Interestingly, one would expect that people who frequently visit pirate sites are more likely to have anti-virus software installed. However, this was not the case.

“We also find that users who visit infringing sites do not take any more precautions than other users. In particular, we find no evidence that such users are more likely to install anti-virus software. If anything, we find that infringing users are more risk taking,” the paper reads.

A 20 percent increase in malware sounds dramatic, and while we don’t want to downplay these results or the risks involved, it’s worth highlighting the absolute numbers.

The research estimates that, when someone doubles the amount of traffic spent on a pirate site, this person adds an extra 0.05 of a piece of malware per month, with the average being 0.24. So, most people encounter no malware in a typical month. This means that pirate sites are an increased a risk, but it’s not as extreme as sometimes portrayed.

There is also no evidence that malware is predominantly spread through pirate sites. Looking at the total sample, the average number of malware files found on a pirate’s machine is 1.5, compared to 1.4 for those who never visit any pirate sites at all.

While there’s certainly some risk involved, it’s doubtful that the results will deter many people. Previous research revealed that the majority of all pirates are fully aware of the malware risks, but that they continue nonetheless.

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