Series.ly, a platform that once stood as one of Spain’s most prominent pirate link indexing websites, has found itself firmly back in the crosshairs of international copyright enforcement. Although the original administration behind the platform famously stripped away all piracy-related links back in late 2014—ultimately leading to years of high-profile legal battles that eventually culminated in an acquittal for its former operators—the domain itself was given a second lease on life when a new team acquired it at auction in 2021.
According to the new operators, they have no institutional or personal connection to the original creators who ran the site during its controversial heyday. Under its new management, Series.ly morphed into a gated community requiring a mandatory user login to access its features. This fresh iteration quickly regained a substantial footprint on the web, pulling in nearly two million monthly visits, with roughly 90 percent of its user traffic originating from Spain. However, this resurgence of popularity did not fly under the radar of intellectual property rightsholders, who quickly mobilized to dismantle the resurrected project.
In May, the Spanish film and TV producers’ collective EGEDA formally filed a complaint with the Second Section of Spain’s Intellectual Property Commission, an administrative body operating under the Ministry of Culture. The complaint initiated formal proceedings aimed at forcing the shutdown of the domain. Following the filing, an investigator assigned by the Commission reviewed a randomized sample of 42 titles out of a total of 110 works cited in EGEDA’s grievance. The findings revealed that 35 of those copyrighted titles could be directly streamed or downloaded via links provided on Series.ly at the time of the check. In July, the Commission formally ordered the site administrators to purge the infringing material. According to regulatory authorities, Series.ly never formally responded or complied with the removal directive.
From Google to a Libyan Registrar
With the administrative warnings allegedly ignored, the Commission escalated its enforcement strategy at the end of July by sanctioning a comprehensive suite of anti-piracy measures directed squarely at third-party internet intermediaries. The sweeping resolution mandated that major search engines like Google and Bing completely delist the domain from their search results. Furthermore, local Internet Service Providers (ISPs) commanding a market share greater than one percent were ordered to implement stringent network-level blocks against the Series.ly domain name.
Under the terms of the administrative directive, these ISPs were instructed to actively redirect curious web visitors away from the pirate destination and toward an official government landing page. This state-administered notice explicitly informs citizens that the domain has been blocked by order of the Commission “for having illegally facilitated access to content protected by intellectual property rights.”
Beyond search engines and domestic ISPs, the regulatory net cast by the Commission snared several vital technical infrastructure providers. The official order explicitly named major content delivery network Cloudflare, Ukrainian hosting company Virtual Systems—whose data centers located in Kyiv were notably impacted by missile strikes earlier in the year—and Series.ly’s designated domain registrar, the Libyan Spider Network. Crucially, the enforcement provisions were structured to apply not only to the platform’s primary domain name at the time of the ruling, but also to any alternative or future domain names that the operators might attempt to spin up for the exact same purpose.
Because administrative bodies in Spain require judicial endorsement to execute sweeping blocking orders against internet infrastructure, the Commission’s resolution was submitted to the judiciary for formal review. On September 28, a judge presiding at the Central Court of First Instance in Madrid evaluated the proposed sanctions, concluded that the requested measures were legally sound and proportionate to the violations, and granted full judicial approval for their execution.
The Libyan Registrar Acts
The judicial green light quickly translated into tangible offline action. A little more than a week after the Madrid court issued its approval, at least one critical intermediary swiftly complied with the directive. Series.ly experienced a sudden and unexpected outage when its domain registrar, Libyan Spider, intervened directly.
Public WHOIS registry records confirmed that the series.ly domain had been transitioned to a "clientHold" status—a specialized administrative flag set by a domain registrar to effectively take a website offline by halting its operation within the domain name system. This action pulled the address entirely out of the regional ".ly" zone, rendering Series.ly completely non-resolvable across the global internet.
While Libyan Spider refrained from issuing a public statement regarding the abrupt technical maneuver, representatives for Series.ly reported that the registrar’s notification explicitly cited the Spanish copyright resolution and the accompanying court order authorizing the suspension measures. According to the site operators, this critical piece of administrative communication reached them indirectly through the digital auction house that had originally sold them the domain, which acts as a local reseller for the registrar.
It remained unclear immediately following the action whether other targeted intermediaries, such as domestic ISPs or search engines, had fully enforced their respective blocks at that exact moment, but the underlying court order remained fully valid and enforceable. Interestingly, almost in lockstep with the suspension of the Series.ly domain, a remarkably similar platform bearing the brand name Cinubo emerged online. Simultaneously, the official Series.ly community channels on Telegram and Discord were quietly rebranded to reflect the new Cinubo moniker.
No Plans to Appeal
Addressing the sudden disruption, the operators of Series.ly maintained that they were entirely unaware of the regulatory warnings prior to the domain being seized. They explained that an earlier warning email sent by EGEDA had been directed to an administrative inbox that was rarely monitored, while a separate address was publicly listed on the website itself for general correspondence.
Defending the operational model of the platform, the management insisted that Series.ly functions strictly as a non-profit community project that has generated zero revenue since its relaunch. Emphasizing a familiar defense in copyright litigation, the operators pointed out that the site does not physically host any video files on its own servers; instead, external links pointing to third-party streaming services are contributed entirely by the registered user base.
"Our position is that complaints about those video files should be directed at the services that host or distribute them," the operator stated, arguing that it is entirely disproportionate for a grievance concerning content hosted elsewhere by independent third parties to result in the complete shutdown of an entire domain, including auxiliary infrastructure like personal email accounts and user-curated libraries.
Despite the severity of the enforcement action, the operators initially indicated they had no immediate intention of mounting a formal legal appeal against the Spanish ruling. They pointed out that the corporate entity legally behind the project is incorporated in the island nation of Nevis, raising substantive questions regarding the extraterritorial reach and jurisdictional limits of Spanish administrative orders.
"We question whether a procedure handled in Spain justifies suspending our domain worldwide, which also affects email and services that have nothing to do with the works in question," the operator noted.
The legal saga, however, proved far from finished. The sweeping nature of the Spanish court order meant that new domain names adopted for identical purposes—such as the newly minted Cinubo project—remained exposed to potential regulatory crackdowns, while other regional intermediaries retained the legal backing to expand their blocking measures.
In a dramatic twist following the initial enforcement, WHOIS and operational updates revealed that the administrative saga took another unexpected turn. A few days after the initial takedown, the series.ly domain was quietly restored to the direct control of its original owner. The site operator confirmed that the registrar ultimately lifted the domain suspension, though this administrative relief came with the strict understanding that the domain could no longer be utilized to host or index links pointing to copyright-infringing content.
Reflecting this permanent operational pivot, the resurrected Series.ly web portal transitioned away from its streaming identity entirely. Instead of offering a directory of external links, the domain now hosts a static documentation page detailing the historical evolution and timeline of the controversial web address.
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