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“Hellboy” Sues Torrent Site YTS and Several Users


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HB Productions, the company that owns the copyrights to the movie Hellboy, is suing the operator of torrent site YTS.lt. The complaint, filed at a federal court in Hawaii, also targets 19 "John Doe" users who allegedly shared YTS's Hellboy torrent. Through the lawsuit the movie company hopes to recoup some of its claimed losses.

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YTS is the most-visited torrent site on the Internet. It specializes in uploading movies, which are widely shared online.

The site ‘unofficially’ took over the YTS brand after the original group quit four years ago. Since then, it has amassed a rather impressive user base of millions of daily visitors.

The site is a major source of frustration for the movie industry but, thus far, copyright holders haven’t been able to do much about it. Recently, however, pressure has been mounting.

A few weeks ago trouble started when a group of movie companies sued the site’s operator, who they accused of inducing massive copyright infringement. Following this lawsuit, the site moved to a new domain name, YTS.lt, but that didn’t end the problems.

In a new lawsuit filed at a Hawaiian Federal Court, the site is now being targeted by HB Productions. The company, which is an affiliate of Millennium Media, owns the copyright to the popular movie “Hellboy“. Among other things, it accuses the site and several of its users of copyright infringement.

“Plaintiff brings this action to stop the massive piracy of its motion picture Hellboy brought on by websites under the collective names YTS and their users,” the complaint reads.

“Defendant JOHN DOE promotes its website for overwhelmingly, if not exclusively, infringing purposes, and that is how the users use the websites,” it adds.

According to the movie company, YTS.lt has sufficient ties to the US and Hawaii to warrant jurisdiction. Among other things, it uses or used services of US-based companies, including Cloudflare, Level 3 Communications, Inc., and QuadraNet, the complaint clarifies.

hellboycomplaint.png

To conceal its identity, the site operator allegedly used the American VPN provider London Trust Media, which owns Private Internet Access. For the same purpose, it also used the tunneling service from Hurricane Electric and the TOR service.

Despite the attempts to conceal, the Hellboy rightsholders managed to find some breadcrumbs. For example, the WHOIS details list “TechModo Limited” as the registrant of the YTS.lt domain. Whether this will lead anywhere is unknown, as that UK-company was dissolved late April.

Another lead comes from Hurricane Electric. After Cloudflare revealed that the YTS operator used Hurricane’s tunneling service to login, the movie company sent a subpoena to Hurricane, which revealed that the person in question used a Hotmail account and an IP-address from the Canadian ISP Cogeco.

“Hurricane has indicated that an individual who identified himself by a verified Hotmail email address from a location in Ontario, Canada subscribed for the so-called tunneling service with Hurricane to tunnel its true IPv4 address to the IPv6 address of Hurricane,” HB Productions notes.

The movie company plans to use this information to find the YTS operator. At this point, it’s unclear if it actually belongs to the person who runs the site, but the rightsholder believes that it points to at least one of the operators.

The complaint further alleges that the defendant created the “Hellboy (2019) [WEBRip] [1080p] [YTS.LT]” torrent, which was made available through YTS.lt and other torrent sites. The other defendants, who are all Hawaiian subscribers of ISP Spectrum, then downloaded and shared this file.

While the mastermind behind the site might not be easy to track down, the 19 “John Doe” users being sued might be easier to find. They are all known by Spectrum IP-addresses. While the account holders are not necessarily the people who shared “Hellboy,” it’s certainly a more concrete lead.

That said, these individual downloaders are small fish compared to the YTS operator.

The movie company hopes that, through this lawsuit, it will be able to recoup some of its alleged losses. It accuses the YTS operator and its users of contributory and direct copyright infringement, while tagging on a claim of intentional inducement against the former.

HB Productions also requests an injunction to stop the defendants’ infringing activities and to prevent third-party intermediaries such as hosting companies, domain registrars, and search engines, form facilitating access to the YTS domains.

Whether the court will grant these requests remains to be seen. In the other lawsuit against YTS we mentioned earlier, the Hawaiian Federal Court wasn’t convinced that it has personal jurisdiction over the alleged operator of the site.

A copy of the complaint filed by HB Productions is available here (pdf).

 

p4WORWl.gif VIEW: Original Article.

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I don't understand the commotion of those movie companies. First of all a cam version is always released and that is always of very poor quality. And people who download/stream movies never go to the movies like that. It's the same as downloading music, people who can't afford it will download it. So they don't go to the movies or media market to buy music. So they can remove those missed sales

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A productions sues... B productions sues... C production sues... What about John Doe's rights to sue these companies for producing bad movies (false advertising)?

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These kind of movie companies always trying to sue someone ,They knew the  risk making this movie  and suing them people they will never see that  28 million dollars they lost on making this movie . very little people ever seen a million  are they would not be pirating stuff.  I seen  movie companies do this a 100 times over the years . Anymore it always a movie that flop that didn't do good. so they  try to cash in on pirates .  It never amounts to anything that's why 95%  of movie companies don't bother to sue any more they lose more by taking it to court than they will ever gain . 19 users out of all the people who downloaded this movie?  YTS versions alone have 1000s of seeds  that's not counting all the other release groups who released it  and all those downloads . I would be ashamed  you have to sue 1000s of downloaders to even get 19 users settle out of court . Back in 2010 they tried it and it just stopped and they switch to suing people who download porn instead because they hardly fight back.

 

Indie Filmmakers Sue Thousands of BitTorrent Users

https://www.wired.com/2010/03/bittorrent-legal-attack/

 

Quote

 

I always wondered why all of a sudden in 2010, the MPAA/RIAA stopped filing the copyright infringement lawsuits.  Now, I am starting to understand that if I am correct about the MPAA/RIAA being the entity behind the adult film lawsuits, they never did stop their activities.  Rather, they just devised a clever scheme to get the porn industry to file lawsuits and blaze the trail to create case law across the US (because most pornography-based defendants do not fight back, and judges laugh when they see the explicit porn titles sued upon, and through this uncomfortable laugh, judges undermine their legal sense and allow the ‘repressed, stigma-based industry’ to proceed with protecting their rights to sue “just like everyone else

https://www.torrentlawyer.com/2017/03/17/why-i-believe-the-mpaa-riaa-used-guardaley-in-a-scheme-to-break-copyright-law/

 

YTS is just a symptom of the problem ,  They just re-encode other groups sources down small and  even my old PC that came with Vista can re-encode a movie down in H264 in like and hour . So even if they didn't exist life would go own.  There's like a one in a  million chance you would get sued even for downloading movies were they sue people . Many people just stream it in Kodi direct download  or download it from a blog  were they 0 chance of getting sued .

 

Only stupid people  get caught and it don't seem  like the YTS admin is too worried about HB Productions there last release posted was like 27 minutes  ago.  I never have downloaded  Yify or YTS  for new main stream  movies, the releases for them are a dime a dozen posted on 100s of sites . All new movies for years now like this one i download in x265 witch YTS don't even do x265  they use and outdated encoding format  Only way i download H264 if its some old movie that i can't find in x265.:tooth:

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Hellboy was a box office bomb. They have to somehow make up for the losses.

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People who put their time and effort in movies or any other business/profession deserve returns on their work. The logic that people who can't afford to purchase should be allowed to pirate is very retarded, they got home, food, job etc but they haven't got money to purchase it and even if they really ain't got no money, aren't they supposed to find work to support themselves rather than search for shortcut to easy life and entertainment.

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