The Fight Against VPNs in Hollywood Has Turned Ugly

A group of more than two dozen movie studios has taken popular VPN providers to court a lot, sometimes getting huge settlements in the millions of dollars. While piracy remains the major concern, Hollywood studios' new legal claims have gone beyond charges of copyright infringement and into murkier waters.

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Filmmakers seeking to reclaim piracy-related income have long claimed that VPN providers both promote online anonymity and have proof that their clients are abusing the secrecy and security afforded by virtual private networks. However, court records reveal that studio legal teams have also accused VPN providers of aiding criminal behaviour beyond copyright infringement, which, according to legal experts, calls into question the very existence of VPNs.

In March, 26 film studios filed lawsuits against Kape Technologies' ExpressVPN and Private Internet Access (PIA), two popular "no-log" VPN services. Production firms such as Millennium, Voltage, and others are among the plaintiffs, and they are responsible for a number of well-known films. User privacy is at the heart of the complaint. Plaintiffs argue in court filings seen by WIRED that these VPN companies fail to prohibit customers from utilising their services to perform significant unlawful crimes, and that they run marketing campaigns that publicly "boast" that law enforcement cannot retrieve any information about their users.

VPNs, in general, safeguard customers' privacy by encrypting their online activity and redirecting it via the company's servers, masking their IP addresses. Many VPN services, such as ExpressVPN and PIA, promise to keep "no records" of their customers' online activity. As a result, VPN providers are unable to access data in order to pass it over to law enforcement or to comply with copyright infringement allegations. The movie studios portray VPN providers as guilty in any crimes committed while using their services, similar to arguments against total encryption.

"Emboldened by Defendants' claims that their identities would not be revealed," the complaint states, "Defendants' end users utilise their VPN services not only to participate in widespread movie piracy, but also other abhorrent criminal activity such as harassment, unlawful hacking, and murder." "When these acts are made public, the defendants take advantage of the tragedy to brag about their VPN services."

In court documents, the VPN firms countered that the plaintiffs' "inflammatory issues" are unrelated to copyright infringement. The VPNs' legal teams argue that allegations such as "hacking, stalking, bomb threats, political assassinations, child pornography, and anonymous online message board posts full of hate speech and appearing to encourage violence and murder" are a ruse to paint the VPNs in "a cruelly derogatory light."

A court complaint reveals an Express VPN customer confessing to obtaining child sexual assault material, among other terrible acts (CSAM). Personal political beliefs or actions of persons employed by VPN businesses are also criticised by the film companies. They specifically target Rick Falkvinge, who is well-known for his political beliefs and arguments in favour of making CSAM legal. Falkvinge is the PIA's Head of Privacy and the founder of the Pirate Party, a political party. He has called for copyright reform on several occasions, describing "copying and distributing" as a "natural right."

These allegations must be struck from the case, according to PIA's attorney, because they are completely irrelevant and "serve only to inflame emotions in a misguided attempt to prejudice the Court and the public against the defendants by false association with the non-parties whose conduct is described in these paragraphs."

In replies to WIRED, ExpressVPN and PIA both refuted the accusations. "The functioning of ExpressVPN's service has not been modified or otherwise affected in any manner relevant to the parties' dispute," an ExpressVPN spokesman said.

PIA said that this lawsuit jeopardises user privacy and that it will continue to defend in court. "We believe that using VPNs is a legal means to preserve one's online privacy—a basic human right that is increasingly being violated," the business said.

The movie studios' legal counsel did not reply to WIRED's request for comment.

While Hollywood has been fighting legal challenges throughout the world for years, its legal conflicts with the VPN sector in the United States intensified last year. TorGuard, for example, has been sued by the same group of plaintiffs who were successful in getting the VPN service to ban BitTorrent traffic for its US consumers. VPN.ht likewise "settled" with these filmmakers in October 2021, agreeing to ban BitTorrent as well as track traffic on its US infrastructure. Providers such as Surfshark, VPN Unlimited, and Zenmate have also been sued by Hollywood studios.

Voltage, a film studio that often sues VPN providers, takes it a step further by sending letters to internet users demanding payments for suspected infringement and threatening them with legal action.