Hollywood’s chief lobbying body has reportedly ordered piracy sites across the globe to shut down immediately or face legal action.

The Motion Picture Association of America, the body which represents the six major studios, has written to top torrent sites warning them to remove infringing material within 24 hours or face unspecified consequences.

Piracy news site TorrentFreak reports that top European torrent providers have all been hit with a uniform notice from the organisation’s vice-president of global content protection, internet operations, Jan van Voorn. They are warned that EU law makes it illegal to link to pirated films and television shows.



“This Notice requires you to immediately (within 24 hours) take effective measures to end and prevent further copyright infringement,” reads the notice. “All opportunities provided by the Website to download, stream or otherwise obtain access to the Entertainment Content should be disabled permanently.”



Hollywood has won a number of battles against piracy operators, both torrent and streaming based, over the years. The world’s best known torrent site, Pirate Bay, is inaccessible in many territories - though some users still use a variety of proxy sites to access it. The streaming site Megaupload was shut down in 2012, though its New Zealand-based owner Kim Dotcom is still dodging US courts and a number of other services have sprung up to replace it. The MPAA has also won battles against sites such as isoHunt and Hotfile.



It is not known if the MPAA’s latest legal threat is the prelude to more direct action or simply another shot across the bows of pirates, but the issue remains a huge one for studios. The most pirated film of 2014, Martin Scorsese’s The Wolf of Wall Street, was downloaded 30.04m times during the year, according to piracy tracking firm Excipio. Frozen and Gravity were just behind with 29.92m and 29.36m downloads respectively.