NEW YORK — A federal judge last week ordered a far-reaching preliminary injunction against the operators of DVDFab from marketing their DVD ripping software.
DVDFab has operated for about 11 years, offering consumers technology that purportedly removes all known protections from videos — including adult entertainment films — allowing clean rips of DVDs.
Last week, ACCS — a licensing group founded by Microsoft, Warner Bros, Disney, Intel and others — successfully argued for a preliminary injunction against DVDFab, with the federal judge hearing the case granting the seizure of domain names, bank funds and social media accounts belonging to DVDFab.
DVDFab's operators, including principal Lanny Shen, failed to appear at a hearing earlier this year over charges that the company trafficked its technology circumventing copyright protections. Those protections include ACCS' technology used to protect content from unauthorized access.
According to ACCS, "the DVDFab group admits on its websites and in its product promotions that its software products are designed to 'remove nearly all Blu-ray protections, no matter the old ones or newly emerged ones, like all known AACS copy protections,' and to permit a user to 'decrypt and copy any Blu-ray."
The injunction granted by U.S. District Judge Vernon Broderick is broad and unusual, aimed at disabling all aspects of DVFab's business, including its affiliate program and websites — DVDFab.com, DVDFab.net, DVDidle.com, 3D-VideoConverters.com, 3dBluRay-Ripper.com, Blu-Ray-Ripper.us, Blu-Ray-Software.us, BluRayRipper.jp, BluRaySBS3D.com, BluRaysoft.jp, CopyBiuRay.us, DVDFab.jp, DVDFab9.com, DVDVideoSoft.jp, KopierSoftware.com, MacBluRayCopy.com, MourLife.com, ReadTechNew.com, DVDFab.de and SBS3Dripper.com, among about a dozen others.
PayPal, Amazon Payments, Western Union, Visa and MasterCard accounts used by the company also have been frozen. So have its online accounts, including Facebook, YouTube Twitter and Google+.
In its original suit filed at New York federal court in February, AACS asked the court to award it all profits derived by DVDFab and its operators, as well as attorneys fees.
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