Streaming site PubFilm has to pay MPAA almost twenty million dollars

A New York court has ruled that PubFilm, a site that offers movie streaming, must pay the film industry advocate $19.8 million for copyright infringement of 132 films.

The MPAA demanded $150,000 in damages for each infringing film on PubFilm and a New York judge awarded it Thursday, Torrentfreak writes. In addition, the judge ordered that domain registration companies transfer domain names associated with PubFilm to the MPAA.

The charges were against a large number of domain names, including PubFilm.com, PubFilmNo1.com, PubFilmHD.com, PidTV.com and iDMCA.net. The site has been playing a cat-and-mouse game with the MPAA for some time now. A year ago, PubFilm lost control of the said domain names, but the site then moved on to alternatives and even launched Google AdSense campaigns to let users know which domain names were accessing the site and which names were being used by impostors.

According to TorrentFreak, the chances of the MPAA being able to collect its damages are slim since the administrator is anonymous. It also seems unlikely that PubFilm will be taken offline in the foreseeable future; the site operates through a .is domain name, among other things, and the registrar only takes action after an order from an Icelandic court.