Extreme-Down Pirate Site Shut Down by ACE – What Happened?

After many years of providing a safe haven for illegal downloads, Extreme-Down – one of the most notorious pirate sites on the web – closed its doors this week without warning or explanation.

The domain was first registered back in 2005 and changed hands multiple times over the subsequent 15 years.

In common with other successful sites, Extreme-Down regularly switched to new domains. While the reasons were not always made clear, legal action by rightsholders was rarely far behind.

Some of these domains included extreme-down.lol, extreme-down.video, extreme-down.tv, extreme-down.pro, extreme-down.live, and others.

The last owner of Extreme-Down was a French man, and the site had grown to attract millions of visitors each month before its sudden shutdown.

Various copyright holders had tried to take down Extreme-Down for years, sending complaints to hosting companies and payment processors in an attempt to curb illicit activity – however, their efforts largely fell on deaf ears. That is until now.

The anti-piracy organization ACE (Alliance for Creativity and Entertainment) claimed that their relentless pursuit of justice was responsible for shutting down the notorious pirate site.

If you visit the original domain (Extreme-Down.com) you will now be presented with the following screen.

This didn’t come as a surprise. ACE has already successfully taken down high-profile sources such as Torrent9 and Cpasbien in addition to two prominent streaming portals, as well as numerous other smaller sources throughout recent years.

The Executive Vice President of ACE, Jan van Voorn, commented on the shutdown:

“Extreme-down offered a large library of TV series and movies in French and original versions; we counted more than 40,000 movies and TV series episodes affecting ACE members. That library is now closed. The elimination of this website is a massive success for the protection of rights holders in French-speaking countries.”

Unfortunately for those who frequented these websites for downloading content illegally, there seems to be a trend year after year with more illicit resources being shut down every day by organizations such as ACE and others supporting them worldwide.

Despite this reality, however, it looks like it’ll take much more than that to keep all pirate sites from emerging – though it might be impossible to ever prevent them entirely.