YTS Under Increasing Pressure as Another Lawsuit is Filed Against it

• YTS received yet another lawsuit from a copyright owner, and so did 16 individual pirates.
• The plaintiffs are after the identity of the website’s owner and provide IPs as evidence.
• YTS has momentarily stopped the uploading of new titles, but no announcements were made.

It looks like copyright holders have agreed to take down YTS through coordinated action, as the hugely popular movie torrent site has just received the third lawsuit from a US company since the beginning of the year. Following a trodden practice, the plaintiffs are also targeting sixteen Hawaiians who have had involvement in the pirating of the firm titled: “Extremely Wicked Shockingly Evil and Vile”. The plaintiff is the production studio “Wicked Nevada LLC”, and the attorney who has submitted the complaint to the Hawaii US District Court is the usual suspect, Kerry S. Culpepper.

YTS.lt is the “go-to” platform for people who are looking for a movie to watch, currently the 285th most popular website on the internet. It features 720p and 1080p torrents, a user-friendly interface, a dedicated platform with synchronized subtitles, user reviews, comments, trailers, and all that one could ask for from a pirate website. This is why it counts millions of visitors, and why film production studios want to wipe it out. Last month, we saw that this pressure started to take its toll to the current owners of YTS, as a representative approached Kerry Culpepper to discuss an extrajudicial settlement. In the same time, the movies that were presented in that lawsuit were removed from the YTS database.

The lawsuit uses the fictitious name “John Doe” because the plaintiffs have no way of knowing the real name of the owner of the platform. As they point out, the domain was registered by a London-based organization called TechModo Limited which was dissolved by the Registrar of Companies for England and Wales on April 30, 2019. However, the plaintiffs did take note of the defendant’s IP address when he logged into the website’s Cloudflare account, and actually provide five samples of this evidence. Now, the plaintiffs ask the court to allow a third party to investigate and find the real identity of “John Doe”.

In regards to the individual pirates, they are accused of participating in the BitTorrent swarm that shared the aforementioned film, thus inducing, causing, and contributing to its distribution without having a permit or consent from the owner of the copyrights. This act is considered direct copyright infringement, so the damage compensation that is proposed involves not only the losses from potential sales but also price erosion and the diminution of the copyright value of the particular work.

Do you believe that YTS is approaching its end, or is all this just a minor bump on their road? Let us know what you think in the comments down below, or share your thoughts on our socials, on Facebook and Twitter.