A local court in Mexico has ordered an import and sell ban on Roku media players as these could give people access to pirated materials.

The decision was made by Mexico's Superior Court of Justice after a complaint from Cablevision. According to TorrentFreak, the order in question prevents stores including El Palacio de Hierro, Amazon, Liverpool, and Sears from importing and selling the products.

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Furthermore, banks like Banorte and BBVA Bancomer were also ordered to stop processing payments for the pirated services on Roku. This is done because pirated contents on Roku, just like the popular add-on Kodi, are shared by third-party pirate channels, outside the Roku Channel Store. In fact, Roku also offers a huge selection of legal streaming options such as HBO Go, Hulu, and Netflix.

So far, Roku has not issued an official statement following the court's order.

Streaming players appear to be a target for copyright companies. "If you think of old-fashioned peer-to-peer piracy as 1.0, and then online illegal streaming websites as 2.0, in the audio-visual sector, in particular, we now face challenge number 3.0, which is what I'll call the challenge of illegal streaming devices," Stan McCoy, president of the Motion Picture Association, said.

Meanwhile, several of the world's largest entertainment groups such as Amazon, Netflix, HBO, and BBC have launched alliance to crack down online piracy on a global scaled.

Dubbed as the Alliance for Creativity and Entertainment (ACE), the coalition aims to present a united front of all major contributors and distributors instead of taking a fragmented anti-piracy approach. Its anti-piracy resources will also be used "in concert" with the existing anti-piracy departments employed by ACE members separately.

The group said it will cooperate with authorities to shut down pirate sites and services, file civil litigation, and form new relationships with other content protection groups.