Movie studios are extending their efforts to take down sites that offer pirated material, with a new lawsuit targeting an advertising company that provides services to such sites. As first reported by The Hollywood Reporter, Warner Bros. and Disney have teamed up to sue Triton Media, accusing the company of both contributory and induced copyright infringement because Triton helps to keep the sites alive by providing them with advertising and referral income.

Warner and Disney say that Triton has relationships with at least nine sites that they consider to be "one-stop-shops" for illegal copies of the studios' work. The list is made up of mostly no-name sites, such as free-tv-video-online.info, watch-movies-links.net, and thepiratecity.org. According to the complaint, Triton and the nine sites basically had a symbiotic relationship—both sides allegedly profited from the distribution of pirated works, and Triton made it possible by offering "material assistance" to the websites.

Much of the complaint focuses on the actions of the websites themselves, but the connection is obvious. The movie studios say that Triton should be held liable for copyright infringement because of its involvement with the sites—doubly so because Triton supposedly knew the alleged illegal activity thanks to notices sent by Warner and Disney.

The two movie studios have clearly decided that it's not enough to go after pirate sites for making a buck off of copyrighted works thanks to advertising. Now, they think the ad companies should be responsible, too, for not being careful about whom they do business with. Whether the studios will succeed in court, however, is another matter.

Sue-happy Perfect 10 attempted a similar strategy by suing numerous credit card processors in 2004 and again in 2007 for offering payment processing services to companies that ripped off Perfect 10's images. The 2004 case against Visa and MasterCard was thrown out by a federal judge, and Perfect 10 lost the 2007 case against CCBill and CWIE.

Warner and Disney hope that their case will go differently than Perfect 10's. Still, if the DMCA protected the credit card processors from being held liable because they're just service providers, then it seems the same would likely apply here for Triton.