A Texas district court has granted several summons to Dish Network to identify the operators behind the Kodi add-on ZemTV and TVAddons website.
Dish Network does not know the full identities of the defendants and have thus requested the court to issue subpoenas to request information on associated accounts of the alleged copyright infringer at different services including Amazon, Facebook, Github, Google, Twitter, and Paypal.
For instance, the subpoena forwarded to Google required the search engine giant to give out any type of information including IP address logs with session date and timestamps as well as "all communications" like GChat messages starting from the year 2014.
Twitter, on the other hand, has also been asked to supply information related to the email address taacc14@gmail.com; usernames @TV ADDONS and @shani_08_kodi; and other accounts tied to the domains tvaddons.ag, tvaddons.org, and streamingboxes.com. The summon also covers "all communications" such as tweets or direct messages received from each Twitter account since Feb. 1, 2014 up to the present.
Paypal has also been summoned to submit details of the transactions including debits and credits to the accounts. It is asked to provide information on any account with the credit card statement "Shani" or "Shani_08." Github has also been asked to hand over information on accounts linked to the tvaddons.ag domain. Amazon was also asked to submit payment records and documents used to make or make changes to the accounts.
However, the service providers in question could still challenge the subpoenas and ask the court for further clarification.
The series of subpoenas came after Dish Network filed a lawsuit against ZemTV for directly infringing several of its TV channels and TVAddons for distributing the questioned add-on. Also known as "Shani" and "Shani_08," the ZemTV operator is using the platform TVAddons to spread and share its service and seek donations at the same time.
Following the case filed, ZemTV developer "Shani" has closed his add-on. And TVAddons has also mysteriously disappeared last week, leaving its domain names unresponsive after the DNS entries were removed. Users trying to enter the site get a browser error message or are redirected to a page of TVAddon's domain name registrar Uniregistry.com.