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Tencent is not the only Chinese platform to try its luck there. Last year, rival streaming service iQIYI used the same court and the same legal team to sue Aiyifan, a pirate streaming service for Chinese speakers outside China.
Aiyifan also operates under the names YFSP and IYF, with domains including aiyifan.tv, yfsp.tv and iyf.tv. According to Similarweb, yfsp.tv alone drew roughly 14 million visits last month.
Unlike Olevod, Aiyifan never appeared in court, and none of its operators were named as defendants. However, the U.S. case isn't the only legal trouble the pirate site is up against. In China, one of the site's operators has been sentenced to prison recently.
Operator Jailed in China
In August, iQIYI informed the Florida court that the Shanghai Third Intermediate People's Court had upheld the criminal conviction of Wang Jianyang, describing him as one of Aiyifan's principals.
According to the ruling, Wang ran a company in Chongqing that provided the technical support for Aiyifan's website and app. He also handled advertising and promotion, working on the pirate platform since 2022.
The Chinese police detained Wang in March 2024, which was more than a year before iQIYI filed its lawsuit in Florida.
Wang had been convicted before. In 2021, a court in Jiangsu gave him a suspended prison sentence of three years and a 6 million yuan fine for setting up another pirate site.
Aiyifan launched while he was still on probation. In March of this year, a Shanghai district court revoked the suspension and added a new sentence of three and a half years, plus a 1 million yuan fine. Combined, Wang faces four and a half years in prison and a 7 million yuan fine.
From the translated Shanghai ruling
Wang appealed the verdict, arguing that the evidence was insufficient and that, at most, he merely provided technical support. The appeals court disagreed, however, concluding that he played a major role in the operation. That ruling is final.
Florida: $1.96 Million Instead of $196 Million
In Florida, iQIYI's civil case was launched in hopes to shut down the site. Aiyifan didn't respond to the complaint in the U.S. federal court, after which a default was entered in July 2025.
iQIYI asked for a massive $196.55 million in damages. Most of that came from applying the $150,000 statutory maximum to 776 registered works, while thousands of unregistered works added another $78.55 million in proposed damages.
In January, Judge Melissa Damian ruled that Aiyifan is indeed liable. However, she rejected the damages award because it lacked support. iQIYI responded with a revised request for $54.4 million, but that was still too much for the court.
In an order issued last week, Judge Damian awarded $1,000 per registered work, doubled for willfulness, for a total of $1.8 million. The award covers a total of 901 works as more copyright registrations had been processed as the case moved on.
The trademark claims added $160,000, but there were no damages awarded for the roughly 5,000 unregistered works. This brings the total to $1.96 million, about 1% of the original request.
From the final default judgment
The reduces damages is not the only setback for the Chinese streaming company either, as its requested injunction is also limited.
Judge Won't Transfer Domains
iQIYI specifically targeted the pirate site's domain names, asking the court to hand them over and redirect them to iQIYI's own site. It also wanted ISPs, hosting companies, CDNs, payment processors and WeChat to stop serving Aiyifan.
The amended motion for a default judgment dropped most of these third parties, but it still requested the domain takeovers, to effectively take these offline.
Judge Damian was not convinced that this would be appropriate. iQIYI admitted that it couldn't say how much of the content on the sites was infringing, or whether any of the other content is licensed.
Aiyifan streams plenty of content that is not owned by iQIYI. Taking over the domains entirely would therefore go too far, the judge concluded.
The order acknowledges that "some other judges in this District have a more liberal approach to the dispensation of injunctive relief." However, Judge Damian sided with the Eleventh Circuit's requirement that injunctions must be narrowly tailored.
yfsp.tv's homepage this week, with Toy Story 5 in the top slot
Partial Domain Registrar Suspensions?
Instead of transferring the domains, the judgment orders domain registrars to cancel the pages and subdomains that feature iQIYI's shows or trademarks, once iQIYI provides a list.
If a registrar fails to comply, the registry must move the domain to a registrar of iQIYI's choosing. That changes the registrar but would not transfer the ownership.
The registrar provisions in the judgment
Whether registrars can comply is questionable. A registrar controls the domain registration, not the pages on a website, so the only tools at its disposal are suspending or redirecting a domain as a whole.
That is exactly the broad outcome the court is trying to avoid.
Even the subdomains are a stretch. Two of the listed sites, m.yfsp.tv and www.yfsp.tv, share a single domain, and a registrar can only switch one of them off if it also runs the domain's DNS.
For now, the Aiyifan sites remain online. Without a response from the operators, it's also unclear whether iQIYI will be able to collect any of the damages.
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A copy of the final default judgment, issued at the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Florida, is available here (pdf). The accompanying order can be found here (pdf), and the translated Shanghai ruling, as filed by iQIYI, here (pdf).
The seven (sub)domains listed in the judgment: m.yfsp.tv, www.yfsp.tv, www.yfsp.lv, www.iyf.tv, www.iyf.lv, www.aiyifan.tv and www.ayysp.com.
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