In a huge win for the Hollywood studios, a federal court judge in New York has found the film piracy sites PubFilm and PidTV are guilty of trafficking in recent film releases and has ordered them both to be shut down. U.S. District judge Victor Marrero issued a restraining order against the sites forbidding them from distributing pirated films.
The court documents have just been made public. There was a temporary restraining order issued against the piracy sites on February 7 and it was decided on February 17 that the sites were to cease their illegal distribution operations. The court also ordered Enom, VeriSign and GoDaddy to formally disable their sites.
The legal action was pursued by the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) which said in a prepared statement that, “The ring of large-scale piracy sites known as PubFilm/PidTV distributed vast numbers of stolen movies and television shows for streaming and downloading — all for the financial benefit of its operators, without paying a dime to those who worked so hard to make them. By seeking legal orders to stop these illegal commercial enterprises, we are protecting the hard work of the millions of people who contribute to the American creative economy.”
While the defendants did not show up in court, and the studios really don’t know their exact location, it is believed that the piracy sites originated out of Vietnam. PubFilm has around eight million monthly users and nearly half of them have IP addresses in the USA. The lawsuit that was filed against the pirates was brought by several major Hollywood studios including Disney, Paramount and Warner Brothers.
The legal claim made by the MPAA alluded to at least six pirate sites operating world wide in conjunction with PubFilm and the MPAA also stated that such piracy operations, “…operate at the shadowy margins of the internet, easily to disappear or move their operations beyond this court’s jurisdiction, thereby rendering plaintiffs’ enforcement efforts futile.”
It has been noted that the piracy site has moved to pubfilm.ac and that they even ran a Google AdSense campaign to advertise the move and to try and retain its customer base. With this win, the MPAA hopes to target other film piracy sites for copyright infringement in the future but the chances of tracking them all down and shutting down their operations appear bleak at best.
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