"The Expendables 3" doesn't hit theaters until August 15, 2014, but the movie was leaked online at least three weeks prior. A digital file leaked by a single individual has spread via multiple torrent sites and has been downloaded more than two million times so far.
Distributor Lionsgate, seeing dollar signs going down the drain with every download, has filed a massive lawsuit in California holding multiple parties responsible for the leak.
According to The Hollywood Reporter, the suit targets ten "John Doe"s, aka torrent downloaders, and the owners of torrent sites including LimeTorrents.com, BillionUploads.com, HulkFile.eu, Played.to, SwantShare.com and Dotsemper.com. Lionsgate sent letters demanding restraining orders and injunctions against the operators of those sites that forbid them from "hosting, linking to, distributing, reproducing, performing, selling, or making available copies" of "The Expendables 3." It also demands that the torrent site owners be required to "take all steps necessary to recall and recover all copies of the stolen film or any portion thereof that they have distributed."
Beyond the torrent sites, Lionsgate has targeted anyone tangentially involved in making the movie available to spread. Lionsgate wants domain registrars to lock the domain names of the websites involved. It's even thinking of subpoenaing internet service providers that furnish the torrent sites with hosting and storage, as well as banks associated with the torrent sites.
This is hardly the first time a Hollywood studio has gone to war against piracy, but Lionsgate's lawsuit feels much more stern and resolute than any that's come before. The very nature of torrent file sharing would seemingly make it all but impossible for a film to be recalled from every computer or hard drive it's been downloaded to. Yet Lionsgate is adamant that these torrent sites "take all steps necessary to recall and recover all copies of ['The Expendables 3'] or any portion thereof that they have distributed."
The law suit claims that every copy of the movie circulating online can be traced back to a single stolen file. It's unknown how the company can be so certain of this, since the digital watermarks usually used for this sort of thing have the user's name encoded on them, yet the original source of the leak has never been discovered.
"The Expendables 3" releases in theaters on August 15. We'll have to wait until then to see if its box office results are noticeably lessened due to the pirated leak. Some have speculated that the publicity from this leak could actually improve the movie's box office take.
Lionsgate is represented by Dennis Wilson at law firm Kilpatrick Townsend & Stockton.
