[Cotomovies shut down] Tweakbox Twitter account suspended following removal of Popcorn Time, CotoMovies & MediaBox from store

New updates are being added at the bottom of this story….

Original story (from September 05) follows:

Tweakbox is undoubtedly one of the most popular illicit software distributors that provides ad-free and pirated versions of apps and games on iOS devices. It’s basically a free third party app store for non-jailbroken iOS that can be easily sideloaded on Apple units.

Simply by misusing Apple’s enterprise certificates, these distributors offer the ability to download hacked apps without jailbreaking. However, the revoke episode that apps like Tweakbox undergo on weekly basis are hidden from none. Reason? Well obviously, companies like Apple and others are against this.

But followers of Tweakbox are pretty much used to these revokes, as every time the devs manage to bring the apps back up soon after the revoke. But hey hey, looks like this time, something more serious as happened. Tweakbox’s official Twitter account has been suspended.

Yes it is, and users are baffled as to what could have caused this. Going by a report from TorrentFreak, few days back Tweakbox took down some of the movies apps saying “apps had to be removed,” as they had no choice. However, they didn’t speak much on what caused them to take this step.

And now it has come to light that it was all because of a legal matter that they got dragged into after the company behind the popular movie Hellboy targeted them indirectly with a subpoena. The federal court ordered Digital Ocean and Hivelocity (hosting providers) to come up with personal details for the account connected to Tweakbox.

With apps like Popcorn Time, CotoMovies, and Mediabox HD, the movie company has dragged Tweakbox into the court for copyright infringement. Coincidental or intentional (?), it was soon after this incident, that Tweakbox took down these movie apps.

Sure the app devs have managed to sneak out from the Apple’s revoke for long, but this legal matter following which the app’s official Twitter account got suspended isn’t a good sign. Things haven’t come up out of the blue, rather all this has been going on for past few days, just that the account’s suspension has now got users talking.

What’s relieving is that the official site is still up. How are things going to turn up, well, we can’t comment on that, but right now Tweakbox’s future seems bleak. Rest like always, we’ll be keeping a close watch on the matter and will keep you updated with other developments on the matter.

P.S. For more Tweakbox-related news and stuff, route here.

Looks like CotoMovies has shut down. Users seemingly got a notification regarding this.

Cotomovies’ Twitter account has also been suspended. We are looking for more info.

Even the team behind AppValley Even the team behind popular Twitter account @AppValley_vip has confirmed that the developer of Cotomovies has shut down the service.

[NOTE: The language of this para was changed on September 16 after the team behind Twitter account @App_Valley_vip reached out to us highlighting an ongoing legal dispute between the two teams].

Now if you try opening the official CotoMovies website, you are greeted by the following message:

I want to express my sincere regret to the owners of the motion pictures Hellboy and Angel Has Fallen as well as all rights holders for inducing and contributing to copyright infringements by my operation of the app CotoMovies. From this stressful legal experience, I have learned to appreciate the damage apps such as CotoMovies do to those who invest their time, effort and money to create motion pictures. I now plan to fully respect intellectual property laws and strongly urge those who used my app to use legal apps to watch movies. To this end, I have agreed to transfer to counsel for the rights holders user data and communications under my possession and control so that they can enforce their valuable intellectual property.

So apparently, this is the CotoMovies developers’ official take on the shutdown episode.

User information has been exposed by developers of CotoMovies, which could mean legal trouble for some. Complete story here.

Developing…

Follow @PiunikaWeb

PiunikaWeb is a unique initiative that mainly focuses on investigative journalism. This means we do a lot of hard work to come up with news stories that are either ‘exclusive,’ ‘breaking,’ or ‘curated’ in nature. Perhaps that’s the reason our work has been picked by the likes of Forbes, Foxnews, Gizmodo, TechCrunch, Engadget, The Verge, Macrumors, and more. Do take a tour of our website to get a feel of our work. And if you like what we do, stay connected with us on Twitter (@PiunikaWeb) and other social media channels to receive timely updates on stories we publish.