Copyright enforcement against streaming piracy is shifting focus from individual users to infrastructure operators. A recent Delhi High Court order targeting multiple pirate streaming domains — including PlayIMDb and vidsrc — illustrates how courts now view registrars, ISPs, and hosting providers as enforcement points rather than neutral carriers.
The PlayIMDb Model and Domain Masquerading
PlayIMDb and similar services exploit a simple but effective technique: they register domains that mimic or extend legitimate services. By prepending 'play' to IMDb links or registering lookalike domains, these sites trick users into thinking they're accessing official content. The actual infrastructure — the servers hosting video streams, the API endpoints, the redirect logic — sits elsewhere, often in jurisdictions with lax enforcement.
The Delhi court order targeted seventeen domains in total, including vidsrc and moviesapi, which function as embed services feeding pirated video to aggregator sites. These embed layers are critical infrastructure: they abstract the actual server location and make it trivial for dozens of downstream sites to plug in pirated content without hosting it themselves.
Registrar and ISP Compliance Orders
What distinguishes this order from older takedown notices is the breadth of the directive. Rather than targeting a single provider, the court ordered domain registrars and internet service providers to block access by any means available — typically DNS sinkholing or BGP filtering.
For registrars, this creates operational friction. A registrar must identify which of its domain clients own the listed domains, and then either suspend, transfer, or simply point them to a null response. For ISPs, the compliance burden is higher: they must intercept DNS queries for those domains across millions of subscribers' traffic and return a block page or null record.
The challenge for infrastructure operators is that these orders often lack clarity about scope. Does blocking apply only within Indian jurisdiction, or are foreign ISPs expected to comply. What happens to DNSSEC-signed zones. Are proxied DNS providers like Cloudflare expected to block from all their edge locations, or only those serving India. The order itself is silent on these details, leaving registrars and ISPs to interpret and implement unilaterally.
Jurisdictional Complications and Evasion
Pirate streaming operators respond to such orders with familiar tactics. They migrate to new domain registrars outside India's jurisdiction, use privacy registration services, or shift to ccTLDs in countries with minimal DMCA or local copyright enforcement. Some register via proxy entities, obscuring the true operator. Others simply register the same domain across multiple TLDs — if .com is blocked, the operator switches to .io, .ws, or a country-code domain.
The infrastructure layer also adapts. Rather than running centralised video servers, modern pirate streaming relies on embed APIs (like the moviesapi service in this order) that aggregate streams from multiple sources. When one domain is blocked, the streaming continues via a different domain pointing to the same backend infrastructure.
Offshore hosting providers — those operating in jurisdictions that do not recognise or enforce Western copyright claims — become attractive precisely because they sit outside the reach of these court orders. An infrastructure operator in a country without copyright treaties or enforcement capability can host pirate content with minimal risk of direct legal action.
The Broader Pattern
These court orders reflect a strategic shift in anti-piracy efforts. Rather than pursue individual site operators (who are often judgment-proof or based in non-cooperative jurisdictions), copyright holders now lobby courts to compel third-party infrastructure providers — registrars, ISPs, DNS providers — to break the access path.
For hosters and infrastructure operators, the implication is clear: expect increasing regulatory pressure to block, suspend, or refuse service to domains flagged by copyright holders. The legal framing treats infrastructure operators as responsible for the content their customers host, even if that framing remains inconsistent across jurisdictions.
Operators running shared hosting or reseller platforms face particular risk. A single customer's pirate streaming activity could trigger abuse complaints that affect the entire IP block. Jurisdictional arbitrage — offering hosting in regions where such enforcement is weak — becomes a business decision with long-term reputational and legal costs.
