Court Grants Subpoenas to Unmask ‘TVAddons’ and ‘ZemTV’ Operators

A District Court in Texas has granted a series of subpoenas to Dish Network, aimed at identifying the people behind the TVAddons website and the ZemTV Kodi addon. This allows Dish to request detailed information on associated accounts of the alleged copyright infringers at services including Amazon, Github, Google, Twitter, Facebook and PayPal.

Earlier this month Torrentfreak broke the news that third-party Kodi add-on ZemTV and the TVAddons library were being sued in a federal court in Texas.

In a complaint filed by American satellite and broadcast provider Dish Network, both stand accused of copyright infringement, facing up to $150,000 for each offense.

While the allegations are serious, Dish doesn’t know the full identities of the defendants.

To find out more, the company requested a broad range of subpoenas from the court, targeting Amazon, Github, Google, Twitter, Facebook, PayPal, and several hosting providers.

From Dish’s requestThis week the court granted the subpoenas, which means that they can be forwarded to the companies in question. Whether that will be enough to identify the people behind ‘TVAddons’ and ‘ZemTV’ remains to be seen, but Dish has cast its net wide.

For example, the subpoena directed at Google covers any type of information that can be used to identify the account holder of taacc14@gmail.com, which is believed to be tied to ZemTV.

The information requested from Google includes IP address logs with session date and timestamps, but also covers “all communications,” including GChat messages from 2014 onwards.

Similarly, Twitter is required to hand over information tied to the accounts of the users “TV Addons” and “shani_08_kodi” as well as other accounts linked to tvaddons.ag and streamingboxes.com. This also applies the various tweets that were sent through the account.

The subpoena specifically mentions “all communications, including ‘tweets’, Twitter sent to or received from each Twitter Account during the time period of February 1, 2014 to present.”

From the Twitter subpoenaSimilar subpoenas were granted for the other services, tailored towards the information Dish hopes to find there. For example, the broadcast provider also requests details of each transaction from PayPal, as well as all debits and credits to the accounts.

In some parts, the subpoenas appear to be quite broad. PayPal is asked to reveal information on any account with the credit card statement “Shani,” for example. Similarly, Github is required to hand over information on accounts that are ‘associated’ with the tvaddons.ag domain, which is referenced by many people who are not directly connected to the site.

The service providers in question still have the option to challenge the subpoenas or ask the court for further clarification. A full overview of all the subpoena requests is available here (Exhibit 2 and onwards), including all the relevant details. This also includes several letters to foreign hosting providers.

While Dish still appears to be keen to find out who is behind ‘TVAddons’ and ‘ZemTV,’ not much has been heard from the defendants in question.

ZemTV developer “Shani” shut down his addon soon after the lawsuit was announced, without mentioning it specifically. TVAddons, meanwhile, has been offline for well over a week, without any notice in public about the reason for the prolonged downtime.

The court’s order granting the subpoenas and letters of request is available here (pdf).

Source:   TorrentFreak.com