Judge orders 3 sites to pay hefty sum for torrenting a terrible movie

Did you torrent ‘Expendables 3’ instead of — well, spending money on a terrible movie? If you did, three of the larger sites that distributed it have been ordered to pay $450,000 for their troubles.

In California, a Judge has ordered defendants from three sites — Muhammed Ashraf of Lime Torrents, Lucas Lim of Swakshare and Tom Messchendorp from Dotsemper (Swankshare and Dotsemper are now shuttered) — each pay $150,000 for torrenting the movie. The cash is going to Lions Gate, the studio behind Expendables 3.

The three sites aren’t directly responsible for leaking the movie, but didn’t do anything in response to takedown requests from the studio.

In the judgement, United States District Judge Otis Wright wrote the following:

In light of the fact that the film garnered over $575 million dollars in worldwide box office revenues, the ‘value of the copyright’ strongly favors a high award of statutory damages.

Defendants hosted the anticipated film available online prior to its theatrical release for the purpose of enabling users to illegally download it, which more than likely diminished Plaintiff’s revenue substantially.

He continued “Moreover, an award of the enhanced statutory damages will likely serve to deter Defendants and others from infringing Plaintiff’s rights in the future,” which seems to be the real missive here.

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Ashraf told TorrentFreak “We want to keep the site up and running, and we don’t care about default judgment because we don’t have any faith in the United States.” He went on to say that his site blocked ‘Expendables 3’ from search result, and “we don’t have a penny to pay them for their own leak problem.”

Sadly, he’ll have to fork over $150,000 — so he has to pay them many pennies for the leak problem he helped facilitate.