14 DAY TRIAL // Following the notorious leak of “The Expendables 3,” Lionsgate went out at war against the sites that host the copies of the DVD screener. While a few bowed down and agreed to remove the files, others stood their ground and ended up being shut down following a court order.
Another victim of Lionsgate’s war is the shut down of Hulkfile, a cloud hosting provider. The service is no longer available in the United States and will soon close its operations in the rest of the world too.
TorrentFreak reports that Hulkfile is quitting because it was severely damaged by a Lionsgate lawsuit. Hulkfile.eu is among the six websites that were accused of infringing on copyright. Aside from Limetorrents.com, all were file hosting services, which makes the Judge’s decision quite concerning because these are sites that are supposed to offer users a place to store their files and who should not be held accountable for the content in there.
A few days ago, the court granted Lionsgate a preliminary injunction to seize the financial assets of all six sites. Left without bank accounts, Hulkfile and the other sites in the same situation, have very little choice.
“Hulkfile.eu is no longer accessible in the U.S. and will shut down completely soon. We can’t keep building our business on the weak base the preliminary injunction left us with,” Hulkfile says.
The service says that it has already disabled access to all visitors in the US and it will shut down globally in the days to come.
Hulkfile is baffled by what happened to the service because it honors all takedown requests. What’s more, as pointed out above, it’s a service just like any other cloud service in the world.
“If Hulkfile was started to support piracy, then why would we have created a takedown system which provided access to more than 40 copyright holders and piracy fighters?” its operators want to know.
It seems that Lionsgate’s requests were not processed because it was a vacation period. However, if the studio or MarkMonitor, the takedown partner, really wanted to take care of the situation, they could have used Hulkfile’s removal tool and taken down the files themselves.
Hulkfile sees no other way out of this mess after the court’s decision. Users will be granted the chance to transfer their files to a different hosting provider.
Unlike other sites that were taken down following various scandals revolving around copyright ownership, Hulkfile says it won’t be making a return.