In 2019, Hb productions, the producer of the superhero movie "hell Baron", filed a lawsuit against torrent website mkvcage in a federal court in Hawaii. The film company accused the website and its operators of promoting and disseminating pirated films and demanded the termination of the activity.
The lawsuit had an almost immediate effect because soon after the case was made public, mkvcage became disconnected. At the same time, the uploader also stopped pushing resources to other websites. This means that part of the program has been successful, but HB production wants more.
The company believes that the pirated resource website has caused irreparable losses and demands compensation from a Pakistani named Mohammed faizan, who is alleged to be the mastermind of the operation.
Since faizan did not appear in court, Kerry Culpeper, the film company's lawyer, requested a default judgment. First, he asked for compensation of $270000, but after the court questioned the calculation method, the figure was reduced to $150000. However, the amount is not the only problem.
The Hawaiian federal court also questioned whether defendants who did not defend could really be prosecuted in the United States. In 2020, the court concluded that the United States courts had no jurisdiction over the defendants in Pakistan.
According to the court, the filmmakers failed to prove that mkvcage's activities were specifically directed at the United States. In addition, the defendant's contact with the United States was not sufficient to invoke national jurisdiction.
The ruling was a setback for the obligee and his lawyer. However, the case was not closed because the court had left room for the submission of a revised complaint to make up for deficiencies in its allegations. The filmmakers seized the opportunity to add more details to their claim and believed that the U.S. courts had jurisdiction over the defendant.
At first, this new effort seemed to have failed. In January, magistrate Mansfield issued a report and recommendation that the evidence provided was still insufficient. However, U.S. District Court judge Seabright had a different view of the matter.
In a 45 page detailed order, judge Seabright highlighted the novelty and complexity of these types of jurisdictional issues. In this case, the defendant allegedly operated a pirated website from another mainland and uploaded pirated seed files to a third-party website.
Judge Seabright wrote: "the defendant was not in the United States when carrying out the alleged acts. On the contrary, the defendant sat behind the keyboard in gujranwara, Pakistan."
To be held accountable, the filmmaker must prove that the man has substantial ties to the United States. In legal terms, this is called purposeful provision and purposeful guidance test. The court can have different views on this issue. Some requirements actually exist, while others also calculate virtual access, such as through a web server.
The magistrate assessed the case on the basis of more stringent "physical" requirements, but judge Seabright disagreed.
"The infringement that once required international travel, and then the slightly faster international mail delivery process, can now be completed in a few seconds with just a few keystrokes and mouse clicks.". According to the court, the Internet has changed the way foreign defendants interact with the United States. In this case, the defendant used the server in the United States from a remote location, which is enough to bear responsibility.
Judge Seabright wrote: "the court concluded that when the defendant used the Internet to carry out infringement limited to the digital field, the defendant's infringement occurred when the defendant manipulated the computer (such as web server) that carried out the infringement The location of the. Now, the operator of mkvcage can be held accountable, but this does not automatically mean that he will be held accountable. On the issue of direct copyright infringement, judge Seabright found that these allegations were not tenable. "
For example, the filmmaker accused the man of stealing the "hellbaron" movie, but it was unclear whether he used an American server to do so. In addition, the judge held that the defendant's statement that he uploaded the actual copy of the film to torrent website was unreliable.
The latter shows that the judge has a good understanding of BitTorrent's operation. The 'torrent' file shared online is only metadata, not the actual copy of the movie.
"It makes no sense for 'torrent website' to host and provide the download of large movie files. This will defeat the purpose of torrent network's point-to-point architecture, because it is more reliable than the traditional client server architecture when transmitting large files, because it has no bandwidth bottleneck.
"For these reasons, the court found that the plaintiff's allegation that the defendant uploaded the film files to the torrent website in the United States was not credible," judge Seabright wrote.
In addition, the ruling includes another interesting legal opinion. According to the judge, uploading torrent files pointing to pirated films is not considered a direct infringement of copyright.
"If the defendant uploads the torrent file related to the hell Baron movie to the torrent website, there will be no copy infringement, because the resource seed file does not contain copyrighted materials,"
The court held that direct infringement is not credible, but joint copyright infringement is not. Torrent files themselves are not infringing, but they do allow others to pirate the film. Therefore, the operator of mkvcage is responsible for this crime, especially because the server used by the website is located in the United States.
"The defendant hosted his mkvcage website on a server leased to him in the United States. Therefore, the defendant's publication and promotion of infringing torrent documents and the general convenience he provided for the contact between direct infringers took place in the United States," judge Seabright concluded.
After nearly three years, this means that filmmakers can continue their request and make a default judgment. This could bring hundreds of thousands of dollars in compensation to the operators of mvkcage.
Perhaps equally important, copyright holders have a favorable ruling that they can use in similar cases that may arise in the future.
Read the full text of the judgment: