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VeePN puts in place some anti-piracy blocks to settle copyright litigation
By Chris Cooke | Published on Tuesday 2 August 2022
The latest VPN to be targeted by a group of litigious film producers over allegations it was facilitating rampant copyright infringement – VeePN – has reached a settlement with the movie-makers and committed to instigate some anti-piracy measures on its platform.
VPNs are working their way up the piracy gripe lists of both the music and movie industries, as they can be used by people accessing unlicensed content online both to hide their infringing activity and to circumvent any web-blocks put in place against piracy sites by internet service providers.
The independent film producers that sued VeePN said that not only did it help copyright infringers hide their piracy activity and circumvent any anti-piracy blockades, but it actively promoted those aspects of its service via its marketing communications.
As the lawsuit was going through the motions, the producers got an injunction ordering payment processing companies PayPal and Alipay to freeze the assets of the VPN company that they controlled, which might have motivated VeePN’s owners to get some sort of settlement agreed sooner rather than later.
And that settlement has indeed been agreed, meaning both the lawsuit and the injunction can now be dismissed. In order to reach a deal, VeePN has seemingly agreed to put in place measures to restrict piracy on its platform, mainly by targeting those sharing files via BitTorrent, and by instigating its own web-blocks against certain piracy sites.
A legal filing confirmed the settlement last week in a rather long sentence that says: “Pursuant to the confidential settlement agreement, plaintiffs have requested, and defendant VeePN Corp has agreed to use commercially reasonable efforts to block BitTorrent traffic on its servers in the United States to prevent customers of its VPN service from using the BitTorrent protocol to download and/or share content from servers in the United States under defendant’s control, and to use commercially reasonable efforts to block access from servers in the United States under defendant’s control to the certain notorious piracy websites located outside of the United States”.
