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| Hotfile, 1000 Users and PayPal Named In Piracy Lawsuit Posted: 18 Jan 2011 01:36 PM PST
Liberty describes Hotfile Corp as a Panamanian company with no physical presence there and one that takes steps to “obfuscate the facts of its location, address, and principals.” The studio states that Hotfile’s owner is a Russian named Anton Titov, who may or may not be a resident of Bulgaria and/or The Netherlands, and who also may have a residence in Florida. A company called Lemuria Communications is also listed as a defendant. The company is claimed to be Hotfile’s webhost and an alter ego of Anton Titov. Hotfile is said to operate servers in Dallas, Texas and Florida. The studio goes on to list 1000 ‘John Doe’ defendants who it’s claimed “jointly and severally, with actual or constructive knowledge of or with willful blindness, reproduced and distributed certain LIBERTY-owned works through www.Hotfile.com.” PayPal is also named as a defendant on the basis that it offers financial services to Hotfile, Titov and Lemuria. Liberty demands that the court freezes defendants’ assets held by PayPal pending the outcome of the case. Liberty Media says that while Hotfile may have legitimate uses, its aim is “to profit from the illegal sharing of copyrighted materials, many of which are the intellectual property of LIBERTY,” material which the studio says is placed there by “an army of assistants.” These assistants, Liberty claims, are otherwise known as affiliates which together form a business model described as a “massive pyramid” of cascading payments from which Hotfile, but not copyright holders, profit. Liberty says it discovered more than 2,400 links to 800 of its titles stored on Hotfile and that the file-hoster used Lemuria Communications’ servers to achieve its “unlawful goals”. “Hotfile.com cleverly avoids cataloging or indexing the files in order to be willfully blind to their users’ uploads and downloads, while profiting from the site’s web traffic,” the lawsuit states, adding: “Demonstrating that Defendant Hotfile.com is aware of the illegality of its conduct, it offers two methods for download services. For its first option, Defendant Hotfile.com permits its partners to download a stolen movie at a very slow transfer speed for no charge. The other option allows users to pay a premium to download the movie ten times faster.” In respect of safe harbor, Liberty Media claims that while Lemuria had a registered agent as required under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) at the time of the infringements, Hotfile did not. As such it is “not entitled to the DMCA’s safe harbor provisions for the complained of infringements.” Liberty describes Hotfile as a massive copyright infringer which encourages affiliates to upload copyright material in order to attract further visitors to its website from which both the company and affiliates profit. With demands for a jury trial, Liberty Media claims Hotfile is guilty of inducing, contributory and vicarious infringement and wants statutory damages of $150,000 per infringed work. Furthermore, Liberty requests that the court seizes Hotfile’s domain name pending the outcome of the case. Article from: TorrentFreak, Covering Torrent Sites and News since 2005. |
| No Ads, Domain Seized and No Anonymity For Pirate Site, Judge Rules Posted: 18 Jan 2011 05:57 AM PST Just a few days ago we discussed several strategies that can be employed to take down or hurt sites that are associated with online piracy. One of those strategies is pursuing the ad-networks of these sites, in order to cut off their revenue streams. Another is to target domain registrars and push these services to disable access to the sites. In a recent case filed at the Massachusetts District Court both these strategies were used by book publishers Elsevier and John Wiley & Sons. The two publishers filed a case against the Clicksor and Chitika advertising networks and the domain registrar Enom’s Whois Privacy Protection Service. The defendants were chosen because all provided services to Pharmatext.org, a site that offered pirated e-books. Instead of going after the people behind the site itself, the publishers chose to sue the advertisers and registrar, and this hasn’t been without result. U.S. District Court Judge Richard Stearns has now issued a preliminary injunction which orders Whois Privacy Protection Service to reveal the identity of the Pharmatext owner, including his or her bank accounts. In addition the registrar “shall take all steps necessary to disable the website,” and prevent the domain from being transferred, according to the injunction. The site’s advertising networks, Clicksor and Chitika, have further been ordered to stop any outstanding payments to the operator of Pharmatext.org. The networks are also prohibited from doing business with the operator of the site, either in relation to Pharmatext.org or any other copyright infringement related site that he or she may start in the future. As far as we are aware, this is the first case where advertising networks have been prohibited from providing services to a site that is accused of facilitating copyright infringement. Last year there was a case where Disney and Warner Bros. went after the advertising company Triton Media, but this outfit was believed to be more heavily involved in the day to day operations of several ‘online piracy’ related sites. The current ruling against the advertising networks and the registrar undoubtedly set a unique precedent which may lead to more of these cases in the future. Going after the registrar turned out to be an effective tool to get a website offline quickly, which Pharmatext.org now is. As suggested earlier, we will probably see these strategies being used by anti-piracy outfits against torrent sites at an increasing rate, instead of suing the operators of these sites directly. The preliminary injunction
Article from: TorrentFreak, Covering Torrent Sites and News since 2005. |
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