14 DAY TRIAL // It seems that the last stage of lawsuits following the leak of the DVD screener for “The Expendables 3” has been reached as Lionsgate is looking for people who are sharing the movie via BitTorrent.
TorrentFreak reports that after sending out hundreds of thousands of takedown notices to websites that linked to pirated copies of the movie, the movie studio has started sending similar notices to people who are sharing the movie on the Internet.
Lionsgate is sending the demands over to ISPs who are then urged to forward them to the customers who have been caught sharing the file on the Internet. It seems that the list includes individuals who use BitTorrent seedboxes, which are remote servers thought to keep pirates safe from the piracy monitoring firms.
One customer of Whatbox, a Canadian seedbox provider, received a notice asking for content to be taken down or, in case the message was sent by mistake, to contact the company.
An email was also sent, urging the customer to remove the content or face suspension of the account, although this would probably have been the least of that person’s problems.
Anthony Ryan of Whatbox told TorrentFreak that the entire procedure had followed the standard guidelines for this kind of situation. “When we receive a notice we check for the infohash and email the appropriate customer asking them to remove the file(s). Nothing is passed along to the copyright enforcement group except to confirm that the content was found and subsequently removed,” Ryan says.
He adds that if a customer is targeted by a large number of copyright complaints, the company has the right to terminate their service. A refund will be offered and the user has 24 hours to backup all non-infringing files.
So far, it seems that Lionsgate is only sending out takedown notices. These are basically warnings to the pirates and not actual lawsuits, but it doesn’t mean that it’s not going to get worse for those who downloaded the film.
After all, six sites that didn’t comply with Lionsgate’s requests have been sued and several have already shut down their service. Furthermore, the movie studio has previously sued 23,322 Internet users in the United States for downloading a copy of the first “Expendables” film.
The DVD screener of the third movie in the series landed online weeks before the official release date, which has caused quite a few issues for the film, including being one of the reasons why “The Expendables 3” tanked in the Box Office.