Court Let Movie Studio Seize File-Sharing Websites Assets

The US court has recently granted Lionsgate’s request for a preliminary injunction against 6 file-sharing services which were distributing the Expendables 3 leak. This decision may result in all bank accounts and other financial assets of the websites being frozen. Moreover, the websites’ domain names can suffer as well.

A few days ago, a high quality leak of the upcoming Expendables 3 movie emerged online. Movie studio Lionsgate realized it may face a massive loss in revenue and was quick to issue thousands of takedown requests to limit the leak’s availability. In result, most websites complied and removed links to the pre-release leak, but some of the file-sharing services didn’t pay any attention to the request.

Recently Lionsgate sued the operators of 6 file-sharing websites which allegedly failed to remove the infringing files. The list included Played.to, Limetorrents, Swankshare, Billionuploads, Hulkfile, and Dotsemper.

The movie studio accused the file-sharing portals of a number of copyright infringement offenses and asked the court for a permanent injunction to stop further distribution of the movie, along with the seizure of the websites’ bank accounts and other financial assets. None of the defenders showed up in court and the judge granted Lionsgate’s request for a broad preliminary injunction. The latter prevents the websites from hosting and linking to copies of the movie. Moreover, the injunction also applies to all companies “facilitating the infringement”, i.e. providing services to or in connection with the file-sharing sites – in other words, the domain registrars can be approached by the plaintiffs and the sites run the risk of losing their domain names.

All bank accounts and other financial assets of the portals can be frozen, according to the court ruling. Apparently, the seized funds may be needed to compensate the movie studio for the losses it incurred because of the leak.

By the way, this is not the first ruling in favor of the Lionsgate. A few days ago Lionsgate also obtained permission to subpoena other intermediary online services, including Google, Cloudflare and GoDaddy, trying to obtain personal details on some defendants. After receiving the preliminary injunction, the movie studio has the potential to severely cripple the accused portals. However, this won’t guarantee that the distribution of the leaked film stops. At the moment, all of the services are available, as so does the Expendables 3 leak.