Federal court has recently ordered the owners of a number of small streaming services to pay about $10 million in damages to the entertainment and media conglomerate ABS-CBN, which welcomed the outcome as a landmark victory.
screenshot_98.png

The entertainment and media conglomerate launched lawsuits against several website owners who link to pirated streams of its programming back in August 2014. The company filed a suit in Oregon and demanded millions of dollars in damages from a local married couple.

5 of the portals the husband and wife operated barely had any visitors. The man claimed that he just designed them for his wife to allow her enjoy entertainment from her home country, the Philippines. It is also known that those websites stored no infringing media, only provided links to other sites, and the couple shut them down voluntarily when they were notified about the lawsuit. However, ABS-CBN for some reason treated them as hardcore criminals.

Finally, the case is over, and the court handed down the decision in favor of the plaintiffs and ordered the couple to pay an enormous $10 million in damages. Of course, ABS-CBN was very happy with the ruling and claimed it would continue to pursue action against pirate websites. The company revealed that it has begun a relentless campaign against all pirate sites because of the multiple reports that those services often carry or distribute dangerous malware that may cause harm like identify theft and phishing attacks.

Although those $10 million may look good for PR purposes, the company forgot to mention that this was not a regular court ruling, but a consent judgment between the media conglomerate and site operator which the court signed off on. This means that the $10 million is a figure both parties agreed on, without any fight. Of course, it’s likely that a separate deal was made behind the scenes. Moreover, a few weeks before the consent judgment the court had been notified that the parties had settled the case. This can be confirmed by the response of the couple after they were “hit” by the judgment – they simply warned not to mess with the company, but didn’t complain about the size of the damages.