Security News > 2022 > March > VPN provider bans BitTorrent after getting sued by film studios
"No logs" VPN provider TorGuard has reached a legal settlement this month with over two dozen movie studios that sued the company for encouraging piracy and copyright infringement.
Last year, over two dozen film studios had sued TorGuard, claiming the VPN provider maintained no logs and encouraged online piracy through its marketing efforts.
The same set of plaintiffs had earlier demanded $10 million in "Damages" from another log-less VPN provider, LiquidVPN. According to court documents obtained by BleepingComputer, both the film studios and VPNetworks, LLC d.b.a. TorGuard, have now agreed to reach a settlement in which the VPN provider will block torrents on its network.
Since June 2012, TorGuard had been leasing servers and IP addresses from hosting provider QuadraNet, until late 2021 when the VPN provider notified QuadraNet that it was terminating the service.
Records produced by the film studios show that 97,640 copyright infringement notices were sent to QuadraNet confirming instances of piracy at the SOCKS5 IPs assigned to TorGuard.
"If QuadraNet had null routed one of the IP addresses assigned to TorGuard where plaintiffs sent notices or at least forwarded the notices to TorGuard's DMCA agent, TorGuard would have taken immediate steps to stop further piracy such as suspending users and adopting a firewall to filter out BitTorrent traffic as it has now begun to do," explains the VPN provider.