A federal court in Florida has awarded the Chinese streaming service iQIYI $1.96 million against the pirate streaming platform Aiyifan, roughly 1 per cent of the sum it first requested, and has declined to hand over the site's domain names.
iQIYI sued last year, using the same court and the same legal team that its rival Tencent is using against another pirate site, Olevod. Aiyifan, which also operates under the names YFSP and IYF with domains including aiyifan.tv, yfsp.tv and iyf.tv, never appeared in court, and none of its operators were named as defendants. A default was entered in July 2025. According to Similarweb, yfsp.tv alone drew roughly 14 million visits last month.
The damages request was $196.55 million. Most of that came from applying the $150,000 statutory maximum to 776 registered works, with thousands of unregistered works adding a further $78.55 million.
In January, Judge Melissa Damian ruled that Aiyifan was indeed liable, but rejected the damages award because it lacked support. iQIYI responded with a revised request for $54.4 million. That was still too much for the court.
In an order issued last week, Judge Damian awarded $1,000 per registered work, doubled for willfulness, for a total of $1.8 million, covering 901 works as more copyright registrations had been processed while the case moved on. The trademark claims added $160,000, and nothing was awarded for the roughly 5,000 unregistered works, bringing the total to $1.96 million.
The injunction was trimmed as well. iQIYI had asked the court to hand over the pirate site's domain names and redirect them to iQIYI's own site, and had also wanted internet service providers, hosting companies, content delivery networks, payment processors and WeChat to stop serving Aiyifan. The amended motion dropped most of those third parties but still requested the domain takeovers.
Judge Damian was not convinced that this would be appropriate. iQIYI admitted that it could not say how much of the content on the sites was infringing, or whether any of the other content was licensed. Aiyifan streams plenty of material iQIYI does not own, so taking over the domains entirely would go too far.
The order acknowledges that "some other judges in this District have a more liberal approach to the dispensation of injunctive relief", but sides with the Eleventh Circuit's requirement that injunctions must be narrowly tailored.
Instead of transferring the domains, the judgment orders domain registrars to cancel the pages and subdomains that feature iQIYI's shows or trademarks, once iQIYI provides a list. If a registrar fails to comply, the registry must move the domain to a registrar of iQIYI's choosing, which changes the registrar but would not transfer ownership.
Whether registrars can comply is another matter. TorrentFreak notes that a registrar controls the domain registration and not the pages on a website, so the only tools at its disposal are suspending or redirecting a domain as a whole. The publication also points out that two of the seven addresses listed in the judgment, m.yfsp.tv and www.yfsp.tv, share a single domain.
In a parallel case in China, the Shanghai Third Intermediate People's Court upheld a criminal conviction against one of the site's operators. That ruling is final.
It is worth being precise about the remedy. The court's objection to the domain transfer was that it was too broad, because the sites carry work belonging to people who are not party to the case. The instrument it has chosen instead can be operated only at exactly the width it rejected.
A registrar can suspend a domain or redirect it, in each case as a whole. It has been ordered to switch off part of one. The narrowest remedy available in the judgment is therefore the broadest one in existence, and compliance consists of doing the precise thing the order was written to prevent.
The sanction improves on this. A registrar that cannot do the impossible must surrender the domain to a registrar of iQIYI's choosing, which then acquires the same two tools and the same instruction. Ownership does not move. Neither, on the evidence, does the site. The Department of Unnecessary Research notes that two of the seven listed addresses are a single domain, so a registrar asked to remove one of them narrowly would be removing the other one broadly, and has asked which of the two outcomes the Eleventh Circuit would prefer.
For now the Aiyifan sites remain online, at an address the court has gone to considerable lengths not to take away.