MPAA has filed a case against operators of alleged piracy sites. Together with major Hollywood studios, the suit pleaded Pubfilm/PidTV operators as the defendants. Google and Microsoft have agreed to help in cracking down pirate hosts.
MPAA et al. allege that the latter were operating a ring of six interconnected large-scale piracy sites. They also applied for an immediate cease and desist order against the defendants to protect their copyrighted works and trademarks. They want domain registries associated with their content to be disabled.
The court granted MPAA's request and issued a TRO halting the operations of the alleged six piracy sites. In a statement, MPAA asserted that it is protecting the hard work of the people who are key contributors to the American creative economy.
"The ring of large-scale piracy sites known as PubFilm/PidTV distributed vast numbers of stolen movies and television shows for streaming and downloading - all for the financial benefit of its operators without paying a dime to those who worked so hard to make them," MPAA said, Deadline reported.
The operators are reportedly operating in Vietnam. The civil suit seeks relief and damages for copyright and trademark infringement, unfair competition and false designation origin amounting to $150,000 per infringed work.
Elsewhere, Google and Microsoft promised the address the issue of piracy over the internet. In a first of a kind agreement, the tech giants announced that they will demote U.K. search results of copyright infringing websites under the "code of practice." Under this agreement, Google and Microsoft's Bing agreed to remove links to sites that may contain links to infringed content, CNBC reported.
The U.K. Intellectual Property Office (IPO) called the "code of practice" a landmark deal. Both companies currently allow copyright owners all over the world to make a request for link removal. In the past year, Google has taken down 915 million links because of requests while Bing took down over 91 million in the first six months of 2016. Watch the clip below for the report:
