3 Count: Victory in China
When anti-piracy cooperation goes really wrong...
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1: Hollywood Studios Prevail In China Copyright Infringement Case
First off today, Nancy Tartaglione at Deadline Hollywood reports that Motion Picture Association (MPA) has scored a key court victory against the Shenzhen Xunlei Networking Technologies Company as a court in Shenzhen has ruled the large tech company infringed the copyright of some 28 film titles on two separate websites.
The MPA is the international arm of the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) and filed a lawsuit against Xunlei claiming that the company facilitates piracy, in particular through its popular BitTorrent client. Though the amount of the verdict, worth about $210,000, is small compared to similar cases the MPA hopes it will be enough to discourage future piracy.
The lawsuit, which was filed in 2015, followed on the heels of a failed content protection agreement that was signed in 2014. That agreement was to see Xunlei agree to help protect the work of U.S. content creators, including film and television, though it seems it never actually took hold.
2: It Just got a Lot harder to Track Down a Free Stream for Floyd Mayweather’s Fight with Conor McGregor
Next up today, Luke Brown at The Independent reports that Showtime has emerged successful in its bid to secure injunctions against websites seeking to stream the upcoming Floyd Mayweather vs Conor McGregor fight.
The move follows a complaint by Showtime against some 44 different websites that were advertising the fight. According to Showtime, they all contained some variation of Mayweather vs. McGregor in the URL and were also engaging in keyword stuffing so they appeared high in Google searches for the fight.
The judge has now agreed that injunction, which will enable Showtime to approach web hosts, search engines and other third parties to disable these sites until the fight is over. The action closely mirrors as similar one Showtime (then in conjunction with HBO) took ahead of the Mayweather vs. Pacquiao fight in 2015.
3: TVAddons Decimated Without Trial, Here’s a View of the Damage
Finally today, Andy at Torrentfreak writes that, even though an earlier injunction against TVAddons has been rescinded, damage to the site appears to already be done with traffic to the site reduced and the site’s social media accounts still silent.
The case was brought by a collection of Canadian telecoms against Montreal resident Adam Lackman, the person behind the site. TVAddons is a site that distributes Kodi add-ons that are routinely used to access pirate streaming channels. On June 9th a Federal Court in Canada awarded an interim injunction against TVAddons but a later ruling found that the injunction, which was done without a defense by TVAddons, was premature.
Despite that, much of the damage seems to be done. Despite moving to a new domain, the site’s traffic has taken a severe hit. Down from over 1 million users per day before the takedown to just above a fifth of that after. Also, the site’s original social media accounts remain dark with new ones orly receiving a fraction of the follows.
Suggestions
That’s it for the three count today. We will be back tomorrow with three more copyright links. If you have a link that you want to suggest a link for the column or have any proposals to make it better. Feel free to leave a comment or send me an email. I hope to hear from you.
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