Chinese streaming giant iQIYI has secured a multimillion-dollar default judgment in a United States federal court against Aiyifan, a prominent pirate streaming network catering to Chinese-speaking audiences residing outside of China. While the legal victory marks a significant milestone in the platform’s international antipiracy efforts, the final monetary award fell dramatically short of the astronomical sum originally requested, and a Florida judge refused to order a complete transfer of the site’s lucrative domain names.
The legal confrontation in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Florida is part of a broader, increasingly aggressive strategy by major Chinese entertainment companies to target overseas copyright infringement through American legal channels. Last month, rival streaming behemoth Tencent won the initial phase of its own separate legal battle against another major pirate platform, Olevod, successfully establishing that its case could move forward in a U.S. forum. In its pursuit of Aiyifan, iQIYI utilized the same judicial district and the same legal counsel, highlighting a coordinated cross-border approach to combating digital piracy.
Aiyifan, which operates under multiple domain names and alternative branding including YFSP and IYF across sites such as aiyifan.tv, yfsp.tv, and iyf.tv, represents a massive distribution channel for unauthorized content. According to web analytics data from Similarweb, the single domain yfsp.tv alone pulled in approximately 14 million visits during the month prior to the court’s latest rulings. Despite the staggering traffic and reach of the platform, the legal proceedings in Florida advanced without active resistance. Aiyifan’s operators chose not to appear in court or formally respond to the copyright infringement complaint, prompting the entry of a default against the defendants in July 2025.
Although the U.S. lawsuit represents a major headache for the site’s administrators, it is far from the only legal battlefield Aiyifan has been forced to navigate. Coordinated enforcement actions have simultaneously targeted the platform on its home turf in China, where criminal authorities have successfully pursued key individuals involved in the technical and administrative operations of the enterprise.
Operator Jailed in China
While civil litigation advanced slowly through the American court system, criminal justice authorities in China delivered a much harsher blow to the individuals behind the network. In August, legal representatives for iQIYI formally notified the Florida court that the Shanghai Third Intermediate People’s Court had upheld a significant criminal conviction against Wang Jianyang, whom prosecutors identified as a principal operator of Aiyifan.
According to official court documents from the Shanghai ruling, Wang managed a commercial entity based in Chongqing that provided essential technical support, software maintenance, and backend infrastructure for Aiyifan’s website and mobile applications. Furthermore, Wang actively directed advertising and promotional strategies for the illicit platform, maintaining his involvement in the operation since 2022.
Chinese law enforcement agencies detained Wang in March 2024, more than a year before iQIYI initiated its civil lawsuit across the Pacific in Florida. The detention caught Wang while he was already entangled with the legal system for previous copyright violations. In 2021, a local court in Jiangsu province had previously convicted him for establishing an entirely separate unauthorized streaming platform, handing down a suspended prison sentence of three years alongside a hefty fine of 6 million yuan.
Aiyifan was launched and expanded while Wang was still serving his probationary period. Consequently, in March of this year, a district court in Shanghai officially revoked the suspension of his earlier sentence and imposed an additional prison term of three and a half years, accompanied by a 1 million yuan fine. When combined with the remainder of his previous penalties, Wang faces a total cumulative prison sentence of four and a half years and financial fines reaching 7 million yuan.
Wang subsequently mounted an appeal against the verdict, arguing before the higher court that the evidence presented by prosecutors was insufficient and that his role should be mitigated as merely providing routine technical support. The appeals court firmly rejected these arguments, concluding that his contributions were fundamental and central to the operation of the illicit streaming network. That appellate ruling is now final and unappealable.
Florida: $1.96 Million Instead of $196 Million
In the civil proceedings unfolding in Florida, iQIYI initially sought to utterly devastate the pirate platform by requesting an unprecedented $196.55 million in statutory damages. The bulk of this eye-watering demand was calculated by applying the maximum statutory penalty of $150,000 per work across 776 registered titles, while thousands of additional unregistered works added another $78.55 million to the proposed payout.
In January, U.S. District Judge Melissa Damian ruled that Aiyifan was indeed legally liable for copyright infringement. However, the judge thoroughly rejected the initial damages request, noting that the sweeping calculation lacked adequate evidentiary support. In response to the court’s skepticism, iQIYI submitted a revised demand for $54.4 million, which the court once again deemed excessive given the documentation provided.
In a final default judgment order issued last week, Judge Damian settled on an award of $1,000 per registered work, which was doubled due to the willful nature of the infringement, resulting in a baseline total of $1.8 million. This figure encompassed a total of 901 works, as iQIYI had successfully processed additional copyright registrations as the protracted litigation moved forward.
Additional trademark infringement claims added another $160,000 to the ledger. However, the court declined to award any statutory damages for the approximately 5,000 unregistered works included in the complaint. The resulting final judgment of $1.96 million amounts to roughly one percent of the streaming giant’s original financial demand.
The reduction in monetary damages was not the only limitation placed on iQIYI’s legal victory. The presiding judge similarly reined in the scope of the sweeping injunctive relief requested by the plaintiff, declining to grant a total handover of the network’s web domains.
Judge Won’t Transfer Domains
During the course of the litigation, iQIYI specifically targeted Aiyifan’s web assets, petitioning the court to order the complete transfer of the pirate site’s domain names directly to iQIYI so they could be redirected to the legitimate streaming service. The company additionally asked the court to compel internet service providers, hosting companies, content delivery networks, payment processors, and major digital platforms like WeChat to completely sever all services to Aiyifan.
Although the streaming company streamlined its amended motion for a default judgment by dropping most of the third-party service providers, it continued to press the court for total domain takeovers in order to drive the pirate network entirely offline.
Judge Damian remained unconvinced that such a sweeping remedy was legally sound or appropriate under the circumstances. During the proceedings, iQIYI openly acknowledged that it could not definitively determine what exact proportion of the content hosted on the pirate domains was actively infringing, nor could it guarantee whether any remaining content might be legitimately licensed. Because Aiyifan hosted a substantial volume of material not exclusively owned or licensed by iQIYI, issuing an order to seize the domains in their entirety would extend far beyond permissible legal bounds.
The judicial order explicitly acknowledged that while some judges within the same judicial district have historically favored a more liberal and expansive approach to granting injunctive relief, Judge Damian chose to align her decision with the strict requirements established by the Eleventh Circuit, which mandates that all injunctions must be narrowly tailored to address specific, proven harms.
Partial Domain Registrar Suspensions?
Rather than ordering a full transfer of domain ownership, the final judgment directs domain registrars to cancel specific web pages and subdomains that explicitly feature iQIYI’s copyrighted shows or protected trademarks, provided that iQIYI submits a precise list identifying the offending URLs. The ruling further stipulates that if a designated registrar refuses or fails to comply with this directive, the registry must forcibly transfer the administrative management of the domain to a registrar of iQIYI’s choosing, altering the registrar of record without transferring the underlying ownership of the domain itself.
Whether domain registrars possess the technical capability to comply with such a nuanced order remains highly questionable. Standard domain registrars maintain administrative control over the registration of a domain name rather than the specific files, pages, or content housed on a web server. Consequently, the primary administrative tools available to a registrar generally involve suspending or redirecting an entire domain as a single unit—precisely the broad, indiscriminate outcome the court sought to avoid.
Even targeting specific subdomains presents substantial technical hurdles. For instance, multiple infrastructure endpoints listed in the judgment, such as m.yfsp.tv and www.yfsp.tv, operate under a single shared domain name, and a traditional registrar can typically only disable one if it exercises direct control over the domain’s Domain Name System configurations.
For the time being, the various web portals associated with Aiyifan remain fully operational and accessible online. Given the complete lack of a defense or appearance from the site’s anonymous operators in the U.S. court, it remains uncertain whether iQIYI will ultimately be able to recover any portion of the nearly $2 million in awarded damages.
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