A federal judge in Los Angeles issued a $2.7 million judgment against Showstash for the infringement of more than a hundred copyrighted movies and television shows. A federal judge awarded the studios a similar judgment against Cinematube for $1.3 million.

The judgments come on the heels of another settlement in favor of the studios, which recently won a $110 million judgment against TorrentSpy.com.

"Our goal is to stop this kind if blatant and illegal activity. These judgments indicate tht the studios will not hesitate to vigorously pursue litigation against this type of site," said John G. Malcolm, Executive Vice President and Director of Worldwide Anti-Piracy for the Motion Picture Association of America.

ShowStash and Cinematube infringed the studios copyrights by collecting, organizing, indexing, and posting on their Web sites links to pirated copies of movies and television shows, which had been posted on third party sites, allowing users to locate and view the content.

The judgments against both sites prohibit them from engaging in any other activity that would infringe on the studios copyrighted content.

The worldwide motion picture industry loses more than $18 billion a year because of movie theft. More than $7 billion in losses are connected to illegal Internet distribution
 

The sites named in the suit are Cinematube.net and Ssupload.com. Cinematube is located in Malayasia and receives 24,000 unique visitors each day who view 85,000pages of content. Ssupload servers are located in Arizona and attract 55,000 unique daily visitors who view 190,000 pages of content per day.

"No matter how you slice it, the sole purpose of these sites is to disseminate and profit from creative content that has been illegally reproduced and distributed. We will continue to scour the Internet for these illegal sites, and through lawsuits such as these we
are putting illegal Web operators on notice that they are not above the law and will face serious consequences for their activities," said John Malcolm, Executive Vice President and Director of Worldwide Anti-Piracy Operations for the MPAA.

The sites themselves do not host pirated content, they direct users to the infringing content via links. The MPAA says the industry lost $18.2 billion in 2005 because of piracy, $7 billion of which it says was because of Internet piracy.