Damages of $20.7M ‘Proportionate’ to PrimeWire’s Infringement: Studios

The major studios, plus Netflix, seek a final default judgment against PrimeWire and its co-conspirators that includes $20.7 million in “maximum statutory damages” for willful infringement of 138 copyrighted works, said their motion Tuesday (docket 2:21-cv-09317) in U.S. District Court for Central California in Los Angeles. The court previously granted the studios partial default judgment for liability and permanent injunctive relief, leaving the question of money damages for a future motion.

The $20.7 million award is “proportionate” to the “massive, long-running copyright infringement enterprise” run by PrimeWire and its co-conspirators, said the motion. The sanction is necessary to deter the defendants, “whose actions prove that they will continue trying to infringe,” it said.

PrimeWire and its allies “have been relentless in their commercially scaled piracy,” said the motion. Despite the studios’ efforts to thwart PrimeWire’s activities, the defendants offered PrimeWire in various forms for nearly a decade, it said. Each “iteration” granted visitors immediate access to “a vast catalog of links to infringing streams of movies and television shows,” it said. PrimeWire’s crimes continued, “despite being the subject of blocking orders around the world,” it said.

PrimeWire and its co-conspirators “have sought to avoid accountability,” said the motion. The court gave them “every opportunity to appear and defend their conduct,” but they deliberately refused to identify themselves or appear, “instead hiding behind anonymous emails,” it said. They also forced the studios to engage in third-party discovery for damages, “only to encounter intermediaries and shell companies” designed to hide the actual profits the defendants gained from their illegal conduct, it said. The studios’ investigation found that the defendants “have connections to money-laundering schemes and other infringing enterprises, further underscoring the willfulness and scale of their infringement,” it said.

The harm that PrimeWire is causing the studios is “palpable,” said the motion. A declaration from Jan van Voorn, Motion Picture Association executive vice president and chief-global content protection enforcement and operations, cited U.S. Chamber of Commerce estimates that online infringement, including that facilitated by PrimeWire, causes at least $29.2 billion annually in lost revenue to the movie industry.

MPA investigators believe two of PrimeWire’s domains “remain in operation,” said the declaration. Though the domains primewire.ag, primewire.vc and hydrawire.tv are offline, visitors to primewire.li are redirected to primewire.tf/start, it said. The primewire.tf site continues to display some of the studios’ copyrighted works as part of its offering, it said. “While primewire.tf does not currently link to the cyberlocker sources to which Defendants previously linked at the filing of this lawsuit, the primewire.tf website appears poised to allow Defendants to recommence infringement on a massive scale.”