About a couple of weeks ago, The Expendables 3 was leaked onto the internet where it quickly became available to download via torrents. Given that the movie’s official release date is set for the 15th of August, naturally and unsurprisingly Lionsgate isn’t too thrilled about the leak. After all, why bother paying for a ticket when you’ve already seen it, right?

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Well perhaps to cover potential losses and to send a message, Lionsgate has since filed a lawsuit against the individuals that they have identified as the ones who have been sharing the torrent. They are targeting people behind torrent websites like limetorrents.com, billionuploads, and so on.

According to the lawsuit, “By downloading one of these ‘torrent’ files associated with the Stolen Film from [limetorrents (dot) com], users join a ‘swarm’ where they download parts of the Stolen Film from many different users and also upload to other users parts of the Stolen Film they have already received, until eventually they have reproduced the entire Stolen Film on their own hard drives and in most cases have also uploaded all or a substantial part of the Stolen Film to others.”

The movie studio is also seeking an injunction and presumably damages as well from the alleged millions of downloads that took place across several weeks and multiple websites. In fact, Lionsgate seems to be on a mission here and are even thinking about going after ISPs who provide cloud storage and hosting services for the torrent websites, and even banks who might be servicing said websites.

Yikes! Now we’re not sure how successful Lionsgate will be in their lawsuit, but safe to say that if they are, the next time a movie is leaked, chances are pirates could think twice about sharing it with others.

Filed in . Read more about Legal, Movies and Piracy.