Hollywood studios secure $25m streaming settlement

The Alliance for Creativity (ACE), a coalition of Hollywood film studios and content-streaming platforms, secured a settlement against streaming device maker TickBox yesterday.

As part of the copyright settlement, TickBox will pay the alliance $25 million and has agreed to a permanent injunction.

While ACE’s proposed permanent injunction and damages have yet to be signed by the court, the parties have already reached a settlement.

The settlement is a victory for film studios Universal, Columbia, Disney, Paramount, Warner Bros, and 20th Century Fox, which teamed up with content platforms Netflix and Amazon through ACE to take on TV device makers.

ACE was galvanised in June 2017 when Netflix united with the BBC and 28 other content creators and entertainment companies to fight online piracy, sister site WIPR reported.

In October 2017 at the US District Court for the Central District for California, Western Division, ACE filed its first civil case (in the same year as it was founded) against TickBox.

According to the lawsuit, TickBox sells the “TickBox TV” computer hardware device, which the company “urges its customers to use as a tool for the mass infringement of plaintiffs’ copyrighted motion pictures and TV shows”.

The court issued a preliminary injunction against TickBox in January this year, before the settlement was announced yesterday.

Jolyon Kimble, a spokesperson for ACE, said: “TickBox and many other piracy devices and streaming apps are a threat to the millions of creators around the world who make films and TV shows.”

Kimble added that the orders set an “important legal precedent” that will reduce the harm of illegal and unsafe piracy devices and apps.

ACE has also taken on Dragon Media, which markets and sells boxes pre-loaded with software to enable access to allegedly pirated content.

In January this year, ACE sued Dragon Media, claiming that the company’s advertising for the Dragon Box specifically invites consumers to “stop paying for Netflix and Hulu” and “watch virtually every movie” with “free pay per view”.