

The Motion Picture Association of America is suing two websites accused of acting as a for-profit, "one-stop shop" for allegedly infringing copies of Hollywood's copyrighted works.

The sites, fomd.com, known as "Free Online Movie DataBase," and movierumor.com, post, organize, search for, identify, collect and index links to infringing material that is available on third-party websites.

According to the suits filed Monday in U.S. District Court in Los Angeles, the sites profit via advertising. The language in the two lawsuits were nearly identical.

The so-called search engines go a step further than Google, for example. To watch a flick on fomdb, "the user clicks on the title of a particular infringing work … from fomdb's index. A page then appears on the fomdb site in which the work is performed and displayed on an embedded video player."

Similar allegations are made against Movierumor. The suits, which seek unspecified damages and the removal of the sites from the internet, were filed in U.S. District Court in Los Angeles. They claim the "fundamental purpose" of the two sites "is to further the illegal dissemination of infringing works" and to profit from those works.

The lawsuits claim fomdb's (.pdf) servers are located in Charlotte, North Carolina and movierumor's (.pdf) are in Chicago.

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