Judge Orders Every U.S. ISP to Block Streaming Sites Accused of Copyright Infringement
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US District Judge Katherine Polk Failla of the Southern District of New York, an Obama appointee, last week ordered every US internet service provider to block three streaming sites for enabling piracy, effectively enacting by judicial decree the SOPA legislation Congress rejected a decade ago…
TORRENT FREAK speaks about new ground being broken:
At least in broad terms, the lawsuits were relatively unremarkable. They followed traditional lines by demanding $150,000 in statutory damages for every copyrighted work infringed and an injunction to prevent infringement moving forward. From the beginning it seemed highly unlikely that the operators of these sites would turn up in court to defend themselves, meaning that a win for the plaintiffs in these cases was never really in doubt.
Late last week, the plaintiffs won all three lawsuits via default judgments. The court ordered the operators of Israel-tv.com, Israel.tv and Sdarot.tv to each pay $7,650,000 in statutory copyright infringement damages related to 51 registered works owned by the plaintiffs.
While almost $23 million in damages isn’t an inconsiderable amount, the injunctions handed down in all three cases are something never seen before in a TV/movie piracy case.
The plaintiffs are United King Film Distribution, D.B.S. Satellite Services (1998), HOT Communication Systems, Reshet Media, and Keshet Broadcasting. While the plaintiffs “transmit their programming in an encrypted form,” the defendants’ “various services and hardware permit end-user consumers to bypass the Plaintiffs’ encryption to view Plaintiffs’ content,” the rulings said.
The judge ordered domain registrars and registries to transfer the domain names to the plaintiffs. The rulings include injunctions against “third parties providing services used in connection with Defendants’ operations,” including web hosts, content delivery networks, DNS providers, VPN providers, web designers, search-based online advertising services, and others.