Aside from dragging six file-sharing sites to court, Lionsgate sent out hundreds of thousands of takedown notices to websites that linked to pirated copies of the leaked movie.

While this campaign had some success, the studio has yet to identify who first published the leaked copy online. In a new court request filed at a California federal court Lionsgate states that the weblogs of file-hosting service Swankshare.com may provide more details.

Swankshare is one of the sites that was targeted in Lionsgate’s lawsuit. Following a preliminary injunction the site’s servers were taken down by its hosting company FDCServers. However, the Expendables makers now want to gain access to the server logs to see who uploaded the leaked copy of the film.

“Lions Gate is informed and believes that as the website host for Swankshare, FDCServers is likely to have weblogs and other data evidencing traffic on Swankshare that will be useful to Lions Gate in its investigation of the source of the infringement at issue in this lawsuit,” Lionsgate’s lawyers inform the court.

The request suggests that there is reason to believe that Swankshare may have been used by the initial leaker. However, it’s currently unknown whether the movie studio has any concrete leads to proof this or if it’s merely grasping at straws.

The court filing also shows that the movie studio has been able to track down the owner of Swankshare, Mr. Lucas Lim. They are currently trying to resolve their dispute, and as part of these discussions Mr. Lim agreed that Lionsgate can access the sites server logs.

“Lions Gate and Mr. Lim have discussed whether a resolution of the dispute between them might be possible, and to further those discussions Mr. Lim has stipulated that Lions Gate may seek authority from the Court to serve a subpoena on FDCServers for the production of weblogs and other data evidencing traffic on Swankshare,” they explain.

Hosting provider FDCServers is willing to cooperate but requested clarification from the court that it’s permitted to grant access to the servers, as they were ordered to take them offline in the previous injunction.

Whether the server logs will indeed expose the initial leaker has yet to be seen, but Lionsgate has clearly not given up the effort to track down the source.

Meanwhile, the movie studio continues to stop the distribution of The Expendables 3 via various file-sharing sites.

Earlier this week the court approved a request to add Limetorrents.net and Torrentdownload.biz to the injunction as these sites are connected to the owner of Limetorrents.com. Both sites currently remain online but no longer list any copies of Expendables 3.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

Aside from dragging six file-sharing sites to court, Lionsgate sent out hundreds of thousands of takedown notices to websites that linked to pirated copies of the leaked movie.

As a result all traces of the movie were completely wiped from many file-sharing sites. However, the movie studio still isn’t satisfied and is now going after individual downloaders as well.

Lionsgate has started sending takedown notices targeting people sharing the movie via BitTorrent. The notices are being sent to various ISPs who are urged to forward them to the customers whose accounts were monitored sharing the movie.

Interestingly, this also includes those who use remote servers known as BitTorrent seedboxes. While many believe that seedboxes keep them safe from the prying eyes of piracy monitoring firms, this is not always the case. Yesterday, a customer of the Canadian seedbox provider Whatbox received the following notice.

Via an email Whatbox urged the customer to delete the file in question, or face account suspension.

“A copyright complaint has been received for content existing on your account. To prevent account suspension, please delete the affected content within the next 24 hours,” the notice reads.

TorrentFreak contacted Whatbox, who explained that this takedown procedure is standard policy. As an Internet access provider it properly processes all incoming requests form copyright holders.

“When we receive a notice we check for the infohash and email the appropriate customer asking them to remove the file(s). Nothing is passed along to the copyright enforcement group except to confirm that the content was found and subsequently removed,” Anthony Ryan of Whatbox says.

“If a customer causes a large number of copyright complaints, we reserve the right terminate their service with a prorated refund and 24 hours of complimentary service to backup all their non-infringing files,” Ryan adds.

The above notice confirms that Lionsgate’s takedown efforts are now targeting individual downloaders, through their ISPs. The action appears limited to warning letters and at least for now there are no signs that Lionsgate will drag file-sharers to court.

Nu Image, another studio involved in the production of The Expendables 3, hasn’t taken any legal action either. However, they are more familiar with the topic than Lionsgate, as they sued a record breaking 23,322 U.S. Internet users for downloading a copy of the first Expendables film.

To be continued?

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

A massive list of 23,322 U.S. Internet users were targeted by the film studio NU Image, all of which were suspected of downloading and sharing the Hollywood blockbuster using BitTorrent. The movie studio later lost this record to The Hurt Locker makers, but their case was still very significant.

Until now.

In a recent order District Court Judge Robert Wilkins ruled that NU Image can only go after those individuals who are reasonably likely to be living in the District of Columbia. This means that the movie studio can’t send any subpoenas to ISPs when the IP-addresses are located in other districts.

“Plaintiff has only shown good cause for, and will only be entitled to discovery related to, those John Does for whom there is a good faith basis to believe may reside in the District of Columbia,” Wilkins writes.

As a result, well over 99 percent of the defendants are off the hook.

The main reasoning behind the decision is that the alleged infringement has to take place in the district people are sued in, which is only the case for a small percentage of the defendants. Where and to whom the files are uploaded after that is irrelevant, the Judge argues.

The Judge advises NU Image to use one of the many IP-location databases to find out who they can go after in his court.

“Plaintiff can establish such a good faith basis for residence or personal jurisdiction by utilizing geolocation services that are generally available to the public to derive the approximate location of the IP addresses identified for each punitive defendant,” he writes.

Previously Nu Image had claimed that these IP-lookup services are far from accurate, but Judge Wilkins contests this. He states that the movie studio selectively quoted an online resource to make it look like the data is useless, which it is not.

By doing so they left out the paragraph below:

Even when not accurate, though, geolocation can place users in a bordering city, which may be good enough for the entity seeking the information. This happens because a common method for geolocating a device is referencing its IP address against similar IP addresses with already known locations.

“It therefore appears that while these geolocation services are not 100% accurate, these services can place a user no farther away than a city that borders the user’s actual location,” the Judge wrote replying to NU Image’s attempt to mislead the court.

TorrentFreak took up the Judge’s suggestion and ran the 23,322 IP-addresses through a IP-location database to find out how many defendants would remain. We found that of all IP-addresses listed as defendants only 84 are likely to belong to persons in the District of Columbia.

This means that the remaining 23,238 individuals are no longer at risk in this particular lawsuit.

If other judges side with Wilkins, these pay-up-or-else schemes may become increasingly more expensive. Suing defendants in multiple districts is not how the copyright lawyers and their clients would like to work, so they will have to get more creative to get the information they need.

Until then, this ruling can be counted as a win for the alleged BitTorrent users.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

Their aim is never to take any of the cases to court, but to get alleged infringers to pay a substantial cash settlement to make legal action go away.

Recognizing the potential profitability of the scheme, which some equal to extortion, other law firms across the country were quick to replicate the strategy. While these newcomers mostly focused on adult content, USCG stuck to more mainstream film producers such as the makers of The Hurt Locker.

In February of this year the lawyers filed a new mass lawsuit on behalf of another major client, Nu Image, the studio behind the action flick The Expendables. Initially this case included 6,500 John Doe defendants, but this group has now expanded to a massive 23,322 sharers, making it the biggest BitTorrent lawsuit ever.

After filing the initial suit USCG and their tracking partner kept scouring the Internet for more BitTorrent users who were sharing the film. With hundreds and thousands of copies still being shared in recent months, the pool of potential defendants was almost endless. Thousands of these individuals have now been added to the original lawsuit, adding the total number up to 23,322.

Those who wonder what the motive of the movie is to start this massive case only has to look at the revenue potential. A simple calculation shows that the profit can be enormous. If only 75 percent of all defendants pay a $2,000 settlement, the plaintiffs would earn more than $35 million, which equals more than a third of the total box office grosses ($103 million) in the US.

The chances of this happening are not slim either.

Contrary to several other cases we reported on lately, the District Court of Columbia gave the green light to subpoena the ISPs for the personal details of the account holders associated with the ‘infringing’ IP-addresses. This means that in due time these defendants will receive a settlement proposal in their mailboxes.

The question USCG lawyers will ask these alleged defendants is simple, and something along those lines:

“Pay us $2,000 to make the trouble go away, or we will get you involved in an expensive legal battle where we may demand $150,000.”

The full 371 page list of the ‘suspected’ IP-addresses can be found below.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.