Link to movie downloads? Be prepared to pay millions

Now-defunct movie sharing sites Cinematube.net and Showstash.com were ordered by Los Angeles judges to pay $1.375 million and $2.7 million, respectively, to the MPAA for linking to movie downloads.

Like the $110 million case against TorrentSpy.com, Showstash and Cinematube were cited for "actively searching for, identifying, collecting, organizing, indexing, and posting on their websites" links to pirated copies of Hollywood films and TV shows.

Following a new trend in legal action by the MPAA, the two sites were not charged with hosting the copyrighted content. Even unlike BitTorrent sites that facilitate downloads by hosting torrent files, Cinematube and Showstash simply pointed to movie downloads on other servers.

Nonetheless, as a result of the lawsuit, both sites are offline, with Showstash simply returning unreachable, and Cinematube displaying a message with a short explanation of the May 7 judgement against it and a link to the MPAA's list of sites with legal content.

The suits were filed in July and September of 2007, before the MPAA admitted its evaluation of losses due to piracy were greatly overestimated.