14 DAY TRIAL // After a notable leak took place last week, namely “The Expendables 3” ended up on torrent sites many weeks before the official launch, Lionsgate decided to sue six file sharing sites.
The movie studio claims that the sites in question have failed to comply with takedown requests, and Lionsgate is now demanding a permanent injunction to stop any more downloads of the movie, but also the seizure of the sites’ domain names and bank accounts, hoping to hit two birds with one stone.
According to TorrentFreak, Lionsgate hasn’t exactly been vocal about the massive leak that took place, but it hasn’t exactly been sitting around and doing nothing either. Instead, the movie studio has been sending takedown requests to various torrent sites.
Some of them complied and removed links or copies of the movies, but others chose to ignore the demands, as they always do.
So, Lionsgate is suing the people behind six sites – Limetorrents.com, Billionuploads.com, Hulkfile.eu, Played.to, Swankshare.com and Dotsemper.com – all of which are being accused of contributing to copyright infringement.
Technically speaking, Limetorrents is the only torrent site in the case, and the movie studio claims that the copies of “The Expendables 3” were still there when the complaint was being drafted.
“As of the date of this filing links to the torrents allow users to access ‘swarms’ where the Stolen Film is being shared remain on the site, including in the fifth-ranked position for ‘Movie torrents’ on the site’s home page,” the lawyers wrote.
Not only is the studio looking to take down the copies, but also to have the domains of these sites suspended or transferred to Lionsgate, while also asking financial institutions to freeze these sites’ assets.
It is unclear at this point what the studio is doing to identify the actual source of the leak, but chances are they’re looking into this aspect as well. Days after the leak took place, information surfaced that about ten days prior to this someone was looking for help to distribute a movie anonymously without getting caught. No names were given, but since no other major leaks have taken place in the meantime, it is probably safe to say that “The Expendables 3” was the film involved.
Over two million copies have already been shared via BitTorrent, so it is unlikely that Lionsgate will be able to go after them all, like it has done in the past, after the first movie of the series was launched.