A pirate streaming site that serves Chinese-speaking viewers outside China must answer a copyright case in Florida, a federal judge has ruled, rejecting a magistrate's recommendation that it be thrown out.
Tencent Video, one of China's streaming giants, filed a copyright complaint against the site Olevod at a federal court in Florida last October. The complaint lists more than 150 of its shows, including hits that have reportedly been streamed as many as 30 billion times.
According to the complaint, Olevod.com and Olevod.tv offer full-length copies of Tencent's films and series, watchable free with advertising or without it for a paid VIP membership. The content, it said, includes "newly released movies, archived movies, and television show episodes—all available at the click of a button and often made available immediately after the original premiere".
Tencent also alleged trademark infringement, noting that advertising for gambling and counterfeit diplomas appeared alongside its name and logos. It listed 670 registered episodes and sought up to $150,000 in statutory damages for each, putting the theoretical maximum above $100 million, and asked the court to order internet providers, hosting companies, DNS resolvers, VPN providers, banks and payment processors to cut the site off within seven days.
Where many sites accused of piracy simply never appear, Olevod hired Florida lawyers, and in January asked the court to throw the case out on the grounds that a U.S. court had no jurisdiction over it.
The company behind the site identified itself as Jiayi Network Technology SL, a Spanish company with no U.S. connection. Its servers, the defence said, are in Germany and France. Its prices are in yuan and euros. Most payments run through Alipay and WeChat Pay. It has no employees, no offices and no contracts in the United States.
Tencent countered with evidence that the site accepts U.S. dollars through PayPal, sells advertising space, and uses IP addresses managed from a mail drop in Destin, Florida. It also noted that Olevod advertises itself in Google search results as an "online video media platform for overseas Chinese", and blocks visitors from mainland China.
In June, Magistrate Judge Panayotta Augustin-Birch sided with Olevod. Tencent had shown that Floridians could reach the site, she concluded, but not that a single one had actually watched a Tencent show there. If mere access were enough, she wrote, it would "subject every company or individual that has a website anywhere in the world, and whose website can be accessed in Florida, to suit in Florida".
Last week District Judge David Leibowitz rejected that recommendation. Tencent had by then produced fresh traffic data from Semrush showing that Olevod.com attracted 123,400 visits from Florida in June alone, making the state its fourth-largest source of U.S. visitors. Decisive, though, were the advertising and the subscriptions.
"The core of Tencent's claims is that Jiayi traffics in pirated Tencent content. And the record shows Jiayi has built a business doing just that in Florida—both by selling ad space visible to Florida residents and by selling premium subscriptions to U.S. consumers, including Florida residents," Judge Leibowitz wrote. He compared the site to an online seller of counterfeit designer bags who had lost a similar jurisdiction argument, adding that Olevod is "a sophisticated company running interactive websites".
The ruling decides only that the court may hear the case. Whether Olevod infringed Tencent's rights, and what that should cost, remains to be determined. It has until 2 October to file its answer, and both domains are still online.
It is worth laying out where this business has arranged to be. It is registered in Spain. Its machines are in Germany and France. Its prices are in yuan and its payments in Chinese apps. It deliberately excludes the one country whose language it is written in. Of all the places it has taken trouble not to be, the United States is merely the most recent.
And yet it is in Florida, because 123,400 people there opened it in June. That was enough to make Florida the site's fourth-largest American source of visitors, and the fourth-largest American source of visitors is now an address.
The ranking is the awkward part. A fourth place implies a first, a second and a third. On the reasoning applied here, three states have a stronger claim on Olevod than the one hearing the case, and not one of them has asked for it.
A company that has gone to such lengths to be nowhere can, on this reasoning, be relocated by the viewing habits of strangers. Olevod could leave Florida tomorrow without moving a single server, provided enough people in Texas took an interest.