Who killed Shooter.cn: was it the anti-piracy MPAA, or is censorship to blame?

Late last month, two of China’s most popular websites went down. One of them, Shooter.cn, never got up again. Like the other site that was taken down, Shooter.cn was a search engine for Chinese-language subtitles that made it easier for Chinese users to watch foreign films and TV shows. Those films and TV shows were generally downloaded illegally, although Shooter.cn itself did not host or link to any content beyond the subtitle files.

According to Techweb, China’s copyright authorities released a report yesterday that claims that the Shooter.cn takedown was a response to a complaint from the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA). It’s a claim that does make some sense: the MPAA is perpetually on an anti-piracy crusade, and while Shooter.cn did not host any video files, it did apparently offer a premium service to users selling hard drives pre-installed with lots of HD movies – movies that Shooter.cn did not have the rights for. That service wasn’t at all popular – the company sold less than 100 hard drives a year – but it could have been enough for the notoriously unforgiving MPAA and China’s own copyright authorities.

There is, however, another interpretation of what happened to Shooter.cn: Chinese authorities shut the site down to make it harder for Chinese people to access Western entertainment. China’s State Administration of Press, Publication, Radio, Film and Television (SAPPRFT) has introduced strict restrictions on the foreign entertainment products offered on legal platforms like online streaming sites this year. The crackdown on subtitle sites is seen by some as an attempt to make sure that Chinese viewers have no way of watching Western films and TV shows that aren’t SAPPRFT-approved.

That interpretation seems to be increasingly popular in China. Techweb’s article about the MPAA complaint, for example, is featured on the site’s homepage with the headline: “The Copyright Office says that Shooter.cn was closed because of an MPAA complaint. Do you believe it?”

The top comment on the article right now is a pretty direct response: “Like hell I do.”

So who really killed Shooter.cn? For most, it comes down to a question of who you believe. There’s no doubt the site was offering subtitles to films it didn’t own the rights to, and it was apparently also selling hard drives full of pirated films. That means that it might really have been killed by China’s copyright authorities based on an MPAA complaint. But for longtime China observers it will make plenty of sense that piracy could be being used as an excuse when the actual goal of the Shooter.cn takedown was to serve SAPPRFT’s apparent long-term goal of stopping China’s web users from getting access to Western TV and movies. That would suggest that it was SAPPRFT, not copyright authorities, behind the shutdown.

As is often the case with the actions of the Chinese government, we may never know who is genuinely to blame for the shutdown. And of course, it’s also possible that the truth is somewhere in the middle and that both SAPPRFT and copyright authorities were involved in the site’s takedown.

See: Killing China’s subtitle sites won’t stop movie piracy. Here’s what will.