LOS ANGELES — A U.S. district court in California issued an amendment judgment on Monday, awarding Aylo Premium a permanent injunction against three people named as operators of Goodporn and several mirror sites, which hosted full, streamable versions of the company’s content.
As XBIZ reported, in February Judge Mark C. Scarsi awarded Aylo Premium $2,157,000, ruling that Amrit Kumar, Lizette Lundberg and Emilie Brunn have no rights to the content owned by Aylo Premium, which was known at the beginning of the lawsuit as MG Premium.
Monday’s injunction expands the previous verdict to include an order to third-party providers to block U.S. access to the infringing sites at the domain level.
Unlike usual IP infringement orders, which are directed only at the defendants, Judge Scarsi’s blocking order is permanent, extending to third-party providers like Cloudflare, Google and domain registrars. ISPs, search engines and other intermediaries were ordered to take actions to block access to not just content but rather the domains themselves.
Judge Scarsi wrote, “Defendants, their agents, servants, officers, directors, employees, attorneys, privies, representatives, successors and assigns and parent and subsidiary corporations or other related entities, and any or all persons or entity acting in concert or participation with any of them, or under their direction or control, including any internet search engines, web hosting and Internet service providers, domain name registrars, domain name registries and other service or software providers are ordered,
within five business days from the service of the Judgment to block or use reasonable efforts to attempt to block access by United States users of the Goodporn websites by blocking or attempting to block access to all domains, subdomains, URLs, and/or IP addresses that have as its sole or predominant purpose to enable to facilitate access to the Goodporn websites.”
“We take any infringement of our content and brands seriously and remain committed to protecting our intellectual property rights,” an Aylo rep told XBIZ. “We believe this amended judgement will contribute to deterring piracy and will help ensure consumers find our content through legitimate channels.”
Battleship Stance’s Jason Tucker, who consulted on the case for Aylo, told XBIZ in February that the Kumar case stands out to him as one of the most peculiar he has ever been involved in.
“The Defendant flagrantly exhibits full-length movies without proper licenses and ignores takedown notices,” Tucker said. “In response to legal action, Amrit Kumar made the audacious claim of owning the entire past and future library of movies and images belonging to Aylo Premium, citing a ridiculous ‘agreement’ as justification.”
The judge previously ruled that the document introduced by Kumar to justify his refusal to stop streaming Aylo’s content “lacks any indicia of reliability or authenticity.”
Tucker confirmed that mirror sites would begin going offline starting Wednesday.