The MPAA has revived its legal campaign against piracy sites with a new lawsuit against movie streaming platform MovieTube. The people behind MovieTube allegedly operate a group of infringing sites and the studios are demanding millions of dollars in damages. The first success may have already been booked, as all mentioned sites are currently offline.The six major studios have gone after a group of nearly 30 or more movie streaming and download sites operated under the name MovieTube. Disney, Paramount, Sony/Columbia, Universal, 20th Century Fox and Warner Bros on Friday filed suit in federal District Court in New York, charging various MovieTube entities with copyright and trademark infringement. Identities of the MovieTube operators are not known so the lawsuit targets John and/or Jane Does and companies XYZ and so forth until such time as the operators’ identities can be discovered.
The pirated material includes TV shows as well as movies, some of which have been posted while the movies are still in theaters. The MovieTube sites do not deny their activity is illegal, according the the suit (read it here) which says “defendants openly admit that their actions constitute ‘piracy'” and acknowledge they “have partial responsibility called ‘Copyright Infringement’ according US law. Luckily we are not a US company so we do not need to respect US laws.”
The studios’ suit also asks the court to force social media such as Facebook and Twitter as well as user-generated and online content services such as YouTube, Flickr and Tumblr to stop providing or to disable such services to MovieTube Defendants in relation to copyright or trademark infringement.
The MovieLink defendants, the suit also says, also “profit from their misconduct by displaying advertisements adjacent to” the illegally copied content. The studios seek recovery of any profits earned by the defendants’ copyright infringement as well as maximum damages under the law including $150,000 for each separate instance of infringement.
Additionally, studios seek to force any third parties to cease or disable services for the MovieTube websites including “hosting providers, cloud services providers, digital advertising service providers, search-based online advertising services” and similar support such as paid search results, and Internet keyword advertising.
