Vodafone forced to block access to illegal video streaming site Kinox.to

German internet service provider “Vodafone Kabel” has to block access to the illegal streaming website Kinox.to, one of Germany's most popular websites. The ISP was forced to prevent its customers from accessing the site after an injunction of the district Court of Munich. A German movie studio requested the site to be blocked.

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“Due to a provisional injunction issued by Constantin Film, issued by the District Court of Munich on February 1, 2018, Vodafone is required to block access to the website Kinox.to for internet customers of Vodafone Kabel Deutschland,” according to a Vodafone spokeswoman to the website Golem.de.

Constantin Film made several copyright claims against the website and refers to the European Court of Justice which ruled that streaming from illegal sources is unlawful.

Customers of “Vodafone Kabel Deutschland” who now want to access the Kinox.to website, are redirected to a page from Vodafone explaining access to the site is blocked.

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Last year, an alleged administrator of Kinox.to was arrested. The 24-year-old man lived outside Germany. He managed the website from a house in Pristina, the capital of Kosovo. Interestingly the man lived close to the German embassy. Despite his arrest, the Kinox.to website is still online and frequently updated with new movies and TV series. The site is, according to Alexa.com, the 109th most visited website in Germany. Globally it's amongst the 2,500 most visited websites.

Vodafone prevents access to the site through a so-called DNS block. This is fairly easy to bypass, Vodafone customers can simply switch to an alternative DNS server, such as the easy to remember DNS server with IP address 8.8.8.8 that is managed by Google.

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