Lionsgate was granted a permanent injunction against several torrent site on Friday over The Expendables 3 leak.
U.S. District Judge Margaret Meadow ruled in favor of Lionsgate since none of the defendants came forward to try and argue against allowing the restraining order to become permanent, Deadline reports.
Attorney Dennis L. Wilson, representing Lionsgate, said that one site, Played.to, had reached out and has offered its cooperation and will not host the leaked file on its site.
Though successful against six torrent sites, the mini-studio is still looking online for other sites hosting the file and was granted permission to question GoDaddy and other domain name companies for information on any sites they find with the file.
Lionsgate also has the ability to freeze the bank accounts of the six torrent sites initially targeted, but there has been no word whether the studio has done so.
The Expendables 3 initially leaked three weeks ahead of the Aug. 15 release date and in good quality. Earlier in the week, Meadow granted Lionsgate a restraining order against limetorrents.com, hulkfile.eu, swantshare.com, dotsemper.com, billionuploads.com and played.to, in an effort to try and get a handle on the situation as the movie has been downloaded more than 2 million times.
According to Torrent Freak, stars Sylvester Stallone and Kellan Lutz were asked their opinions of the leak ahead of the theatrical release.
Stallone was the more unhappy of the pair. "I think it's unfortunate because it isn't about me, I'm ok, but there's thousands of people that won't make movies. They won't get a chance because they've lost a lot of money."
Lutz was more upbeat about the leak and expressed belief that many of those who downloaded the film will still head to the theater. "They’re gonna watch it online, then they’ll be like ‘I gotta watch this in theaters now’, because all the one-liners that kind of go under-layered throughout the action, you just can’t hear that on a little iPad or computer."
image courtesy of INFphoto.com