I guess that some Digital Ocean users were (potentially) sailing a different kind of virtual sea, if you catch my drift.
On May 1, Funimation Entertainment filed and obtained a Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) subpoena from the United States District Court for the Northern District of Texas. The subpoena, which was served to cloud service host Digital Ocean, requests contact information for an account that’s allegedly committing copyright infringement from an IP address served by Digital Ocean.
The filing alleges that the IP in question is being used to serve illicit streams of the One Piece anime. The subpoena claims that the IP address’s content violates Funimation’s intellectual property rights, as well as rights granted under the Copyright Act.
Funimation lawyer Evan Stone sent a notice to Digital Ocean, stating:
Through our investigations, we have a good faith belief that a web server for which Digital Ocean, Inc. provides service, located at 138.68.244.174, is being used for the unauthorized copying and distribution (downloading, uploading, file serving/swapping, streaming, stream embedding, torrent seeding, torrent tracking, torrent linking, other linking, link aggregating or any similar activities) of digital files embodying [One Piece]
Stone’s letter to Digital Ocean also states that Funimation “hereby requests that Digital Ocean expeditiously causes all such infringing materials to be removed or blocked or freezes the account at issue until the account holder removes all infringing materials or disables access thereto.”
Digital Ocean has until June 5 to respond to the subpoena.
News service TorrentFreak reached out to Funimation lawyer Evan Stone about the issue. He replied, stating that “We are targeting someone associated with disseminating infringing content on a MASSIVE scale, for profit. This is not a prelude to an end-user lawsuit, nor does this involve your typical fan uploader.”
this isn’t the first time Funimation’s had a high profile copyright case hit the headlines. In 2011, the company made the news when it filed suit against 1,337 “John Does” for copyright infringement via BitTorrent.
Source: TorrentFreak
Full Disclosure: Anime Herald has been hosted with Digital Ocean since 2014.
