ABS-CBN receives $25 M from US ruling against NZ pirates

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MANILA – ABS-CBN Corporation, ABS-CBN Film Productions, Inc. (Star Cinema) and ABS-CBN International won $25 million after the US Federal Court in the Southern District of Florida favored with the station against Vonn Ryan Motomal of New Zealand.

Motomal, who owns more than 90 pirates sites, was charged guilty of infringing the copyrights and trademarks of the said network including its TV shows and movies. Based on the judgement, everything in the pirate sites of Motomal will be given to ABS-CBN.

“This is another example of our relentless campaign to enforce against all pirate sites wherever in the world the pirate is located. This time we have found the pirate operating out of Auckland, New Zealand,” said ABS-CBN International assistant vice president of Global Anti-Piracy Elisha Lawrence.

Some of the pirate sites being managed by Motomal include pinoy-ako.re, webpinaytambayan.com, pinayshowbiz.com, pinoy-tube.com, and watchpinoy24.net.

“This is another instance wherein ABS-CBN pursued a pirate, a content thief, and won,” said ABS-CBN Global COO Raffy Lopez.

He added that they “will continue to challenge anyone who will undermine the integrity of our copyrighted body of work to rightfully protect the talented creative teams that worked hard to produce them.”

“We are continuing to receive reports that these pirate sites contain dangerous malware which cause substantial harm to people including identify theft of their financial information, phishing attacks where people receive emails from their banks asking for passwords and attacks on their email contacts,” said Lawrence.