Judge Margaret Morrow at the California federal court has granted a preliminary injunction to Lionsgate against the six file-sharing sites named in the Expendables 3 leak lawsuit, allowing the film distributor to request freezing of sites’ and its owners’ bank accounts. Chances are that the sites’ domains names are also at risk.
A DVD-quality copy of Expendables 3 surfaced online between third and fourth week of July and garnered a whopping 180,000 downloads within 24 hours. Within hours, several copies of the same print started surfacing online making it hard to identify the original source of the leak.
Lionsgate started requesting takedown of the links for the Expendables 3 downloads and about a week later the film distribution company filed a lawsuit against unknown individuals who shared a DVD-level copy of Expendables 3 and six file-sharing sites known to have the links through which copies of the movies are being downloaded illegally, but by the time the film was downloaded over 2 million times.
With none of the file-sharing sites named in the lawsuits responding to the allegations, Judge Morrow granted a broad preliminary injunction to Lionsgate. The injunction will prevent sites from hosting and linking to copies of the movie and on top of that the court has also ruled that Lionsgate can demand freezing of all bank accounts as well as other financial assets of the sites.
The ruling applies to all companies that provide services to or in connection with the sites indicating that the file-sharing sites are at risk of losing their domain names as well notes TorrentFreak.
Judge Morrow argued that the sized funds may be needed to compensate Lionsgate for the losses it suffered as a result of Expendables 3 leak.
“Such an asset freeze is appropriate in this case to preserve Lions Gate’s right to such recovery against Defendants, who are trafficking in the Stolen Film and may secret assets to insulate them from judgment,”Judge Morrow notes.
