DISH Networks Sues East IPTV and its Host Serverlogy Corporation

• DISH sues both the infringer and its hosting service, as they ignored its infringement notices.
• The broadcaster is asking for millions in damage compensation, but the platform is still up and running.
• IPTV services are increasingly looking for notice-ignoring hosting services, and there are many of them out there right now.

DISH Networks has sued East IPTV on a Delaware federal court, accusing them of illegally capturing, transcoding, and then transmitting content that belongs to the Colorado-based broadcaster. Moreover, DISH is also including the hosting company of East IPTV in their lawsuit, so Serverlogy Corporation is also in trouble and accused of ignoring numerous take-down requests and copyright infringement complaints that were sent to them in the recent past. DISH has been targeting East IPTV for quite a while now, but the pirating service was proven to be especially elusive, moving to other providers, trying to find a hosting service that would disregard any complaints.

According to DISH, they have sent a total of 34 copyright infringement notices to East IPTV from January 2017 until today. As the lawsuit points out, this fact is enough on its own to prove that East IPTV was beyond any doubt fully aware of the copyright infringements that they were involved in. When East IPTV hopped to the Serverlogy infrastructure, they did so solely because the hosting service provider promotes itself as a notice-ignoring entity, like many others are doing right now. This phenomenon is what compelled the NBA and UFC to ask US legislators to pass new stream link blocking laws, as hosting providers aren’t cooperating with the official broadcasters.

As DISH points out in their lawsuit: “DISH Networks sent eight notices of infringement to Serverlogy advising Serverlogy of East’s blatant and systematic use of Serverlogy’s services and servers to transmit, distribute, and publicly perform the Protected Channels to Service Users. Rather than work with DISH to curb this infringement, Serverlogy willfully blinded itself to East’s repeat infringement, failing to terminate them or take any action to remove or disable the infringing content.”

In addition to the above, DISH claims that Serverlogy doesn’t maintain any kind of a repeat infringer policy or does not have a registered DMCA agent and is willfully and intentionally disregarding the rights of the copyright owners. All that said, the statutory damages that are demanded by DISH from both defendants reach a figure of $150k per work that was infringed, presenting proof for at least 21 works. This takes the total amount of compensation to $3.15 million from each entity. At the time of writing this, the East IPTV website is up and fully operational, so neither of the defendants have been shaken by the lawsuit yet.

Do you think that it would be fair for DISH to have their request granted by the Delaware judge? Let us know of your opinion in the comments down below, or on our socials, on Facebook and Twitter.