The federal government and Hollywood teamed up Wednesday to seize domain names of seven sites that allegedly trafficked in copyrighted movies without due payment.The so-called " Operation in Our Sites " sting targeted TVShack.net, Movies-links.tv, Filespump.com, Now-movies.com, PlanetMoviez.com, PirateCity.org, zml.com, NinjaVideo.net, and NinjaThis.net. The operation was run by the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, in conjunction with several Hollywood studios.The press conference for the announcement was held at Disney Studios, TheWrap reported , with senior Hollywood and MPAA executives on stage.Unlike past anti-piracy efforts, the sites did not actually offer the movies for download, but instead streamed the movies and TV shows against ads. Previously, movie crackdowns had concentrated on sites that distributed movie files, most recently using the BitTorrent protocol. The piracy "reportedly resulted in billions of dollars in losses to the U.S. economy," Preet Bharara, the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York, said in a statement.It was unclear whether or not the federal agencies actually seized and confiscated the servers hosting and streaming the pirated content, although the ICE said that it had worked with officials in the Netherlands to execute search warrants for some of the domain names and content.The ICE did not work alone; it was joined by a number of U.S. law-enforcement and other agencies: U.S. Customs and Border Protection; the FBI; the Department of Commerce; the Food and Drug Administration; the Postal Inspection Service; the General Services Administration, Office of the Inspector General; the Naval Criminal Investigative Service; the Defense Criminal Investigative Service; the Army Criminal Investigative Division's Major Procurement Fraud Unit; and the Government of Mexico Tax Administrative Service.While the government-Hollywood cooperation is sure to chill libertarians, the public-private partnership was signaled earlier this week by Vice-President Joe Biden, who said that the U.S. would crack down on piracy , even overseas. Apparently he knew something at the time.

Originally posted to the PCMag.com security blog, Security Watch.