Available in English Website putlocker.is | Revenue Advertisements Registration None | |
Type of site Online file hosting index Alexa rank 12,416 (As of February 2017) | ||
Putlocker is an online index of hosted files and a website used for streaming entertainment media such as films and television series. In May 2016, the website was blocked in the UK by a High Court order, and at its peak prior to a temporary closure in late 2016, Alexa Internet listed Putlocker as ranking among the top 250 most-visited websites worldwide. Putlocker has been reported by the Motion Picture Association of America as a major piracy threat.
Putlocker's domain address has changed multiple times throughout its history, with the most recent domain seizure being the url putlockers.ch, which was suspended and transferred ownership under EuroDNS, by order of a Luxembourg court.
History
Putlocker originated in the United Kingdom under the url putlocker.com. In early January 2012, the website received about 800,000 visitors a day, but after the popular website Megaupload was shut down due to copyright infringement, Putlocker began receiving approximately 1.6 million visitors a day. The website's operations officer, Adrian Petroff, found Megaupload's closure worrying, stating "who needs SOPA when a studio exec can make a wish/hit list and sites ‘voluntarily’ shut down?" In March 2012, Putlocker was identified by Alfred Perry, vice president for worldwide content protection at Paramount Pictures, as one of the "top 5 rogue cyberlocker services". The website's url was changed to putlocker.bz, an address which was seized by the Police Intellectual Property Crime Unit of the UK in June 2014, and was subsequently changed to putlocker.is, a domain located in Iceland. Since early October 2016, the putlocker.is address, currently displays an error stating that the website's host service is inaccessible. Around this time, the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) reported Putlocker to the Office of the United States Trade Representative as a piracy threat. The MPAA revealed that Putlocker operates from Vietnam, and its servers are hosted by the Swiss company Private Layer.
Prior to its closure, putlocker.is was listed among the 250 top websites globally and the top 150 in the United States, according to Alexa data. A mirror site under the address putlocker.today appeared shortly after the assumed termination of putlocker.is, and on October 17, 2016, an address under the name putlocker9.com was reported to be available.
On November 2, 2016, the putlocker.is address became active again, redirecting its users to the updated url putlockers.ch. On February 27, 2017, the putlockers.ch address was suspended after a ruling by a Tribunal d'arrondissement of Luxembourg in favour of the Belgian Entertainment Association, and the url transferred ownership to EuroDNS. The chief legal officer of EuroDNS, Luc Seufer, stated that EuroDNS is required to "prevent any ‘reactivation’ of this domain name [putlockers.ch] until its expiration date". Following the seizure of the putlockers.ch address, the previously used putlocker.is domain was made functional again.
In March 2017, it was reported that Ted Osius, the current United States Ambassador to Vietnam, held a meeting with Truong Minh Tuan, Vietnam's Minister of Information and Communications, in which Osius urged for the criminal prosecution of Putlocker, along with the websites 123movies and KissCartoon, for copyright infringement.