The Internet Breaks Huge TV Show Pirating Site

Just when you thought it was getting tougher to download TV shows illegally on the internet, someone came along and did a pirate raid on the biggest pirating sites out here, The Pirate Bay and EZTV. Now, when you illegally download your HBO content, the pirates aren’t even looking out for you after a hostile takeover occurred on EZTV.

So, what happened and why is it now so much more dangerous to illegally download TV content off the internet?

Firstly, Italy’s registry (.it) suspended EZTV’s.it domain. This lead to someone — allegedly a for-profit group — buying the domain name and proceeded to strip the site down, removing all references to the original site while trying to get the original site owner to play along nicely. Novaking, who is the original owner, refused. The EZTV domain was purportedly bought for a five digit number. It seems illegally downloading TV content from the internet is more profitable than first suspected.

While none of what occurred above is particularly nice, it is also something that occurs in business every day: someone who had lots of money took over a company while it was vulnerable. What happens next is starting to become more like what a true pirate would do. While Novaking was trying to keep access to the EZTV.se domain, which is the main site’s true domain, the fake EZTV owners managed to sneak in and change all the passwords for the.se domain site — effectively taking over the entire EZTV company and gaining access to EZTV’s.ch domain, the place where they were still operating from.

Staff from EZTV claim their servers were not compromised. However, it is now uncertain just who is running the EZTV site, and what their true intentions are for people who are using the internet to download TV content.

But what does this really mean for people who regularly download TV shows from the internet?

What it means is that there is no guarantee that what you downloaded last week is as safe as what you might download off the internet this week. While downloading TV content without paying for it is highly illegal, people who did it regularly were fairly confident EZTV was a reliable source.

Now, sites such as The Pirate Bay and KickA** have come out publicly and warned users not to use EZTV for their illegal downloading. As Engadget put it, “if a site where you go to get ‘internet herpes‘ tells you to stay away, we’d advise you to listen.” While it is uncertain if this warning from the illegal torrent sites are because the risk of corrupted files is unknown or if they are publicly siding with Novaking from EZTV, only time will tell.

Another interesting thing to note in the whole internet TV takeover of EZTV is that this company who aggressively took over EZTV just might belong to someone big — after all, who has five figure monetary amounts to throw at illegal TV downloading sites? Could this perhaps be a ploy by one of the TV networks themselves to take down the illegal content downloader from the inside out? Are you, as an illegal downloader, prepared to risk downloading content that could potentially identify you doing so?

If this is the case, perhaps it is finally time for TV fanatics to start paying for all their internet TV, and not just the stuff they can afford?

[Image credit: Getty Images / Michael Smith]