The government of the Philippines has taken action to curtail movie piracy in the country.

Following an agreement in April 2022 between the Motion Picture Association (MPA) and the Intellectual Property Office of the Philippines (IPOPHL), several sites using the SFlix and MyFlixer domains have been blocked in the last week by the country’s site-blocking programme aimed at parties disseminating pirated media.

The Motion Picture Association is a industry body based in the US comprising movie studios and relatively new members Netflix and Amazon Prime Video, who joined the Association in 2019 and September 2024, respectively.

The Philippines’ site blocking programme officially launched in January 2024, and means that movie piracy sites engaged in contraventions of domestic Philippines copyright laws can be blocked voluntarily at local level by ISPs (internet service providers) without needing a court order. Several sites were blocked in May 2024 (PDF) after a review of their activities by the IPOPHL’s IP Rights Enforcement Office.

The two latest targets, SFlix and MyFlixer, occupy several TLDs (top level domains) and access to them has been blocked after complaints from the rights-holders as represented by the MPA..

“A thorough examination of the evidence presented and the evaluation report submitted reveals that all the cited websites are hosting pirated versions of movies or TV shows, allowing users to access these illegal copies by downloading or streaming them,” the IPOPHL said in a statement.

Movie piracy measures in detail

The complaint cited several items, including Top Gun: Maverick and Jumanji: The Next Level as among the material being distributed over six domains; “a small, non-exhaustive sample of the widespread infringement,” the submission to the IPOPHL said. ISPs taking part in the blocking include Globe Telecom, SkyCable, and DITO.

The anti-piracy section of the MPA, the ACE (Alliance for Creativity and Entertainment), has provided technical training and equipment to IPOPHL in the past, to help it develop the necessary facility to prevent access to sites IPOHL wishes to act against, including methods such as DNS and IP address filtering and blocking.

Copyright holders such as Hollywood studios and streaming services, as well as trade bodies like the MPA, also continue to lobby search engines to get sites they claim infringe their intellectual property de-listed from SERPs (search engine results pages), with de-indexing taking place in specific countries from 2022. The COVID epidemic saw a large rise in instances of piracy, with the Philippines quoted as being a country where media piracy has taken place on a large scale since.

In a posting on the Office of United States Trade Representative website (PDF) from the MPA dated October 28, 2021, the industry body stated “[…] the Philippines has been known to serve as a safe haven for some top piracy websites.”

A YouGov survey commissioned by the Coalition Against Piracy (another trade body, one that represents content creators and media distributors in Asia) stated that 61% of consumers in the Philippines admitted to using pirate media services in 2022, up from 49% two years previously.

While the opaque nature of actions taken to block sites and remove search engine listings worries some campaigners, the resulting blocks are quicker to be implemented than those progressing through legal channels.

In a paper (PDF) published by the Office of the United States Trade Representative in 2022 detailing “Foreign Trade Barriers”, the Philippines is detailed in general terms as follows:

“Corruption is a pervasive and longstanding problem in the Philippines. […] Both foreign and domestic investors have expressed concern about the propensity of Philippine courts and regulators to stray beyond matters of legal interpretation into policy making, as well as the lack of transparency in judicial and regulatory processes.”