Chinese streaming giant iQIYI has scored a significant, albeit partial, victory in a U.S. federal court against Aiyifan, a prominent pirate streaming network catering to Chinese-speaking audiences residing outside of China. While a Florida judge ruled in favor of the streaming platform and issued a multi-million-dollar default judgment, the outcome fell drastically short of the staggering financial and structural remedies the company originally demanded.
The legal battle in the United States mirrors a broader, increasingly aggressive international enforcement strategy being deployed by major Chinese media corporations. Just last month, rival streaming titan Tencent won the opening round of its own U.S. legal battle against another pirate platform, Olevod, proving that domestic entertainment giants are increasingly willing to cross international borders to combat digital copyright infringement. iQIYI utilized the same Florida court and legal representation for its action against Aiyifan, targeting a network that operates under a variety of domain names and alternative titles, including YFSP and IYF.
Operating across domains such as aiyifan.tv, yfsp.tv, and iyf.tv, the pirate platform has historically drawn substantial web traffic from global users seeking access to Chinese-language television shows, movies, and entertainment content. According to analytics data from Similarweb, the yfsp.tv domain alone pulled in roughly 14 million visits during the month prior to the court proceedings. Despite the massive scale of the operation, Aiyifan chose not to mount a defense in the U.S. federal proceedings. None of the platform’s primary operators were formally named as individual defendants in the American lawsuit, leaving the judicial process to focus squarely on the infrastructure and liability of the network itself.
However, the civil lawsuit in Florida represents only one front in a much wider legal war against the individuals behind the platform. While the civil case proceeded through the U.S. judicial system, criminal authorities in China were simultaneously dismantling the network’s operational backbone.
Operator Jailed in China
In August, legal representatives for iQIYI updated the Florida court regarding parallel criminal proceedings taking place overseas. Documentation submitted to the U.S. federal judge confirmed that the Shanghai Third Intermediate People’s Court had formally upheld the criminal conviction of Wang Jianyang, whom court filings identified as a core principal and operator behind the Aiyifan network.
According to the translated rulings submitted to the U.S. court, Wang managed a commercial enterprise based in Chongqing that was specifically established to provide the technical infrastructure, website architecture, and mobile application support necessary to keep Aiyifan online. In addition to his technical duties, Wang actively coordinated advertising and promotional campaigns for the pirate service, maintaining his involvement with the illicit platform since 2022.
Chinese law enforcement authorities detained Wang in March 2024, a full year before iQIYI ultimately filed its civil copyright infringement lawsuit across the Pacific in Florida. Wang was not a first-time offender in the eyes of Chinese intellectual property enforcers. In 2021, a judicial body in Jiangsu province convicted him of orchestrating a separate, unauthorized streaming platform, handing down a suspended prison sentence of three years alongside a heavy financial penalty of 6 million yuan.
Aiyifan was launched and expanded while Wang was still serving his probationary period from the earlier conviction. Consequently, in March of this year, a district court in Shanghai revoked the probation suspension, adding a new prison term of three and a half years and imposing an additional 1 million yuan fine. Combined with the consequences of his prior conviction, Wang faces a total of four and a half years behind bars and a cumulative financial penalty of 7 million yuan.
Wang attempted to challenge the verdict on appeal, arguing before the higher court that the evidence presented against him was insufficient to justify the severity of the sentence and claiming that his contributions were limited strictly to technical support. The appellate court firmly rejected these arguments, concluding that his role was central and indispensable to the pirate network’s commercial viability. That judicial decision is final, closing off further domestic avenues of appeal.
Florida: $1.96 Million Instead of $196 Million
In the United States, iQIYI’s civil litigation was designed to secure a permanent shutdown of the platform and substantial financial restitution. Because Aiyifan’s operators completely ignored the U.S. complaint, the court entered a default judgment in July 2025, establishing liability without a contested trial.
Seeking to maximize the financial penalty against the elusive operators, iQIYI initially petitioned the court for a staggering $196.55 million in damages. The bulk of this eye-watering figure was calculated by applying the statutory maximum of $150,000 per violation across 776 formally registered copyrighted works, supplemented by an additional $78.55 million tied to thousands of unregistered works found on the platform.
In January, U.S. District Judge Melissa Damian ruled that Aiyifan was indeed legally liable for copyright infringement. However, she rejected the initial damages request outright, pointing out that the astronomical figures lacked proper evidentiary support. In response, iQIYI submitted a revised calculation lowering its demand to $54.4 million, but the court determined that this adjusted figure remained excessive and inadequately justified under the circumstances.
In a final default judgment order, Judge Damian awarded $1,000 for each registered work, which was subsequently doubled due to the willful nature of the infringement, culminating in a base total of $1.8 million. Because additional copyright registrations were successfully processed while the litigation was underway, the final calculation covered a total of 901 registered works.
Supplemental trademark claims added another $160,000 to the total tally, while the court declined to award any statutory damages for the roughly 5,000 unregistered works flagged by the streaming platform. The final monetary judgment stands at $1.96 million, representing approximately one percent of iQIYI’s original, highly ambitious demand.
The reduction in financial damages was not the only procedural hurdle faced by the Chinese streaming service. The court also reined in the scope of the sweeping operational injunctions requested by the legal team.
Judge Won’t Transfer Domains
Beyond financial compensation, iQIYI aggressively pursued structural remedies aimed at neutralizing the pirate network’s web presence. The company asked the federal court to order the complete transfer of Aiyifan’s domain names directly to iQIYI, allowing the platform to redirect domestic and international traffic to its own official servers. Furthermore, the streaming company sought broad injunctions compelling internet service providers, web hosting companies, content delivery networks, payment processors, and messaging giants like WeChat to completely sever their business relationships with the platform.
Although iQIYI eventually dropped most of the third-party service providers from its amended motion for a default judgment, it continued to press the court for total domain name takeovers to effectively force the sites offline permanently.
Judge Damian remained unconvinced that such a sweeping remedy was legally sound or appropriate. During the proceedings, iQIYI conceded that it could not definitively prove what precise percentage of the massive content library hosted across the pirate domains was actively infringing, nor could it rule out the possibility that some materials on the sites might be legitimately licensed.
Because Aiyifan streams a diverse array of video content that extends far beyond the intellectual property directly owned or controlled by iQIYI, seizing the domains entirely would sweep up lawful or unproven materials, a result the court deemed excessive.
The judicial order explicitly acknowledged that while some judges within the same judicial district have historically adopted a more permissive approach toward the issuance of broad injunctive relief, Judge Damian felt bound by the strict legal standards of the Eleventh Circuit, which mandates that injunctions must be precisely tailored to the specific harms proven in the case.
Partial Domain Registrar Suspensions?
Refusing to authorize a full ownership transfer of the domains, the final judgment instead directs domain registrars to cancel specific web pages and subdomains that directly feature iQIYI’s copyrighted shows or protected trademarks, provided that the streaming company supplies a precise, itemized list. The order further stipulates that if a designated registrar refuses or fails to comply with this directive, the overarching domain registry must forcibly transfer the domain management to a registrar selected by iQIYI, changing the administrative intermediary without actually transferring the underlying ownership of the property.
Whether domain registrars possess the technical capability to comply with such a nuanced order remains a significant point of operational question. Standard domain registrars maintain administrative control over the registration and DNS settings of a domain name rather than managing the individual files, pages, or content residing on the hosting server. Consequently, the primary operational tools available to a registrar generally involve suspending or redirecting an entire domain as a single entity.
Such a blunt instrument would achieve the broad, wholesale disruption that the court expressly sought to avoid through its preference for narrowly tailored relief. Even targeting specific subdomains presents substantial technical hurdles; platforms such as m.yfsp.tv and www.yfsp.tv operate under a shared primary domain name, and a registrar can typically only disable individual subdomains if it exercises direct control over the domain’s authoritative DNS routing.
As the legal fallout from the twin actions in Florida and Shanghai continues to settle, the various domains associated with Aiyifan remain operational online. Given that the platform’s operators have continually refused to appear or respond in the U.S. federal court, it remains entirely uncertain whether iQIYI will ultimately be able to successfully collect any portion of the nearly $2 million awarded in damages.
Leave a Reply