NinjaVideo

» see ninjavideo.net as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

i was in the file-share orbit during ninjavideo's two and a half years, but the node i used was megaupload, not this one. ninjavideo was english-speaking by audience and US-coded in its forum culture. it specialized in tv shows linked to streaming embeds, and by 2010 it was pulling six million visits a month from the english-speaking web.

the site went up in february '08 as a small bittorrent tracker with a link aggregator on top. as bandwidth improved it shifted toward direct in-browser streaming. matthew smith ran the back-end under the handle dead1ne. hana beshara was the public face under the handle phara, posting on the forum and writing for the front page. that combination made ninjavideo feel like a fan community wrapped around the warez, which is part of why it scaled.

the homepage carried movie posters with embedded players. a forum link and a donate button sat on the sidebar. you could watch in-browser without downloading, which was the relevant feature in 2009, before megaupload finished its own player and before youku-style direct embed was common. i did not use ninjavideo because megaupload had the same content and a turkish-language forum scene wrapped around it. ninjavideo's forum was in english.

~ the chronicle ~

~ the seizure ~

on 30 june '10 the us immigration and customs enforcement service seized the domain under operation in our sites. the homepage was replaced with the now-famous ICE-and-DOJ seal banner that read 'this domain name has been seized by ICE'. warrants were executed at servers in the US and in the netherlands.

nine other sites were seized that same day. ninjavideo was the highest-profile one, partly because of the traffic and partly because beshara had been so publicly visible.

~ the prison part ~

hana beshara pleaded guilty in september '11 to conspiracy and criminal copyright infringement. she was sentenced to twenty-two months in federal prison camp alderson plus two years of supervised release, with $209,896.95 in restitution. matthew smith pleaded guilty later that month, and the rest of the co-defendants took plea deals over the following year.

beshara served the full sentence and was released in '13. she gave interviews after that where she was unapologetic about the operation, which is the part of the story that traveled outside the courtroom.

~ what remains ~

the larger streaming-piracy era continued without ninjavideo. by '12 megaupload was also gone, and the ecosystem moved toward different hosts and kodi-style addons rather than centralized link sites. operation in our sites kept seizing domains every few months for years after.

the lasting piece is the seal-banner image itself. a generation of people who lived through the 2010-2014 piracy wars remember opening a site and finding the homepage replaced with that exact font and that exact eagle. ninjavideo was one of the first sites where the banner appeared.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »