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Chinese movie backup software developer DVDFab has seen its website blocked by the movie industry.

The company has just posted on our forums, “The DVDFab website and forum have been blocked by lawyers for the movie industry. Existing bookmarks for either site may not work from some locations, so temporary sites for both are being prepared and will be online shortly. To access the temporary sites, please manually enter the URLs below in your browser’s address bar and make new bookmarks or manually edit existing ones to reflect the new addresses. Someone from the company headquarters in Beijing will have further details within 24-48 hours. I currently have no additional information, other than to assure you that your license and customer data are safe and unreachable.”

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The company is currently reachable through their Japanese URL: http://en.dvdfab.jp

The site suffered from outages throughout the day and DVDFab support staff previously reported they were working on server issues. DVDFab is located in China which was, until now, a pretty safe haven for software companies dealing with movie backups. In order to make backups of movies possible, DVDFab has to deal with copy protections found on DVDs and Blu-ray. Circumvention of these copy protections is illegal in many countries.

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Slysoft, which makes similar software is located in Antigua and has so far been safe. Previously the best known case of movie backup software having issues was DVDDecrypter, which ceased development after legal threats from the movie industry.

Update: We’ve found some documents from a NY court that lists DVDFab, the plaintiff is the AACS LA LCC. The takedown seems to be targeted at multiple domains, including RipperBlu-ray.com, DVDFabb.com. Apparently the AACS LA was unable to find the real names of DVDFab, as names listed are John Doe, Jane Doe, XYZ Company etc.

We’re working hard on getting more details on this story.

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