You may remember Movie88.com from last year, you could log on to the Taiwan-based site and play complete Hollywood movies for around US$1. The Hollywood studios got upset about this and leaned heavily on the Taiwanese Government to get them shut down, which the were successful in doing in February this year.
They’ve now open up again under the name Film88.com and the clever-cookies have based their servers in Iran – which hasn’t had a diplomatic relationship with the US for a few years. This article suggests that the only approach to get the site shutdown is to ask the naming authority, Verisign, to rescind the domain – which I personally can’t see a legitimate justification for.
The unauthorised placing for copyrighted material on the Internet has always been a threat to copyright holders and a concern, but the idea of it actually happening from a country that they have absolutely no influence over must have movie world crying in their cocktails – and other copyright holders.