Millennium Films and its daughter companies have been rather active with their anti-piracy efforts in recent months.
The movie companies have targeted some of the largest piracy apps and websites in court with the ultimate goal of shutting them down.
Last week this resulted in a major success when the popular app CotoMovies decided to shut down. This was a direct result of legal pressure from Millennium Films which, in the process, brokered an unusual deal.
In addition to shutting down and issuing a public apology, CotoMovies confirmed that it will share user data with the movie companies. According to the movie company’s attorney, Kerry S. Culpepper, this data can “more than likely” be used to go after users of the streaming piracy app.
While no further details have emerged since, the CotoMovies aftermath continues. A few days ago Millennium Films obtained a subpoena which requires Cloudflare to hand over the personal details of people connected to several file-hosting and streaming sites.
These targets include Verystream and Streamango, two very popular hosting services with millions of users each, which were reportedly used by CotoMovies to serve videos. The other sites, Fembed, VShare, Vidlox, Flix555, Streamplay, and 0123movies, all have a CotoMovies connection as well.
“The above web domains have been identified as streaming copies of Owner’s motion picture(s) and supplying said streams to the piracy app ‘CotoMovies’,” Culpepper informed the Hawaii Federal Court.
Culpepper requests the name, address, telephone, email, payment records, and IP address log history for each associated customer. This will likely be used to conduct follow-up investigations.
The services and sites are informally accused of making Millennium’s copyrighted content available without permission. That said, it’s not clear whether the operators of these domains can be held directly liable. After all, most sites rely on user-uploaded content.
Millennium, however, seems determined to keep digging for more information, perhaps hoping that more apps and services will fold.
“Millennium greatly values their and other’s intellectual property. Millennium cannot keep making new movies if people steal Millennium’s movies through apps like these,” Millennium Media co-president Jonathan Yunger informed TorrentFreak last week, following the CotoMovies shutdown.
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A copy of the subpoena directed at Cloudflare is available here (pdf).
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Source : Millennium Films Goes After Verystream, Streamango, and Others
