By James A. Loyola ABS-CBN Corporation has scored a landmark legal victory in its anti-piracy efforts in the United States (US) and has been hailed as the first media company to ever been awarded advertising revenues illegally earned by sites pirating its content. Torrent Freak, a major publication dedicated to bringing the latest news about copyright, privacy, and everything related to filesharing, recently came out with an article that praised ABS-CBN for the “massive impact” of its anti-piracy efforts. It was mentioned that ABS-CBN has “filed a series of lawsuits against pirate sites in the US… (and) has already won several cases with damages ranging from a few hundred thousand to millions of dollars. However, the associated injunctions in these cases are perhaps even more significant.” “We previously covered how ABS-CBN managed to get court orders to seize domain names, without the defendants getting actively involved,” wrote Van Der Sar of Torrent Freak. It noted that, “what’s most interesting, however, is that the advertising revenues of these sites were previously frozen. This was done to ensure that ABS-CBN would at least get some money if the defendants failed to respond, a strategy that seems to have paid off.” After the targeted site owners failed to respond, ABS-CBN requested a default judgment with damages for trademark and copyright infringement. US District Court Judge Cecilia Altonaga awarded ABS-CBN over a million dollars in statutory trademark infringement damages. In addition, several of the sites must also pay copyright infringement damages. The default judgment also orders associated registrars and registries to hand over the domain names to ABS-CBN. Thus far several domains have been seized already, but some foreign companies have not complied, most likely because they fall outside the US jurisdiction. “The most interesting part of the order, however, is that Judge Altonaga grants ABS-CBN the previously seized advertising revenues. “The sites in question used advertising services from a variety of well-known networks, including Google Adsense, MGID, Popads, AdsKeeper, and Bidvertiser. None of these companies responded in court after the initial seizure order, suggesting that they did not object,” Torrent Freak said. It noted that, “this is the first time, to our knowledge, that a copyright holder has been granted advertising revenue from pirate sites in this manner.” “This could be a common legal tactic going forward because, generally speaking, it is very hard to get money from defaulting defendants who are relatively anonymous, or living in a foreign jurisdiction. By going after the advertisers, copyright holders have a good chance of securing some money, at least,” said Torrent Freak.