DoDear – A Pakistani Portal Shuts Down after getting caught with Copyright Violations

After being discovered with offering pirated content on their entertainment portal “DoDear“, the Pakistani ISP Connect Communications removed every sign of or the link to the portal from their internet services website as well as the portal itself stopped responding.

DoDear is the online entertainment portal of Connect Comm where the ISP had been offering their customers a handful of free entertainment content including TV shows and movies – that too with categories like software, games, movies, videos and music.

The portal also was offering links to the torrent clients such as uTorrent, BitTorrent and the video players like VLC media player. Couple of days ago, Torrent Freak published about the two websites, specially the entertainment portal – DoDear which was legitimately involved in offering pirated stuff to their internet services customers. Later ProPakistani picked up the story and published exactly about the copyright violations of the ISP.

But now, the ISP seems to have the links to its portal completely removed as well as the portal is now shutdown. We don’t know if some action will be taken against the ISP or not but it was a serious criminal act.

This discovery was just made after a month when USRT (United States Trade Representative) moved Pakistan from the Priority Watch List (as listed in 2015) to the Watch List in 2016 considering its significant improvement in Intellectual Property Rights protection.

Pakistan has taken significant steps to improve IPR protection and enforcement including establishing specialized IPR courts, establishing a timeline to draft and implement amendments to IPR laws, improving border enforcement procedures, undertaking public awareness programs on IPR protection, and committing to regular action-oriented engagement with the U.S. government and stakeholders.  As a result Pakistan is upgraded from the Priority Watch List to the Watch List with an OCR to monitor ongoing progress.