Adult entertainment is big business on the internet and several of the largest brands in this niche are owned by the Aylo conglomerate.
Formerly known as Mindgeek, Aylo is the driving force behind free ‘tube’ sites such as Pornhub, YouPorn, and RedTube. It also owns many adult brands, including Brazzers and Reality Kings, that charge for subscriptions.
Over the years, the company has built an impressive library of more than 40,000 registered copyright works. The company’s enforcement arm Aylo Premium protects this content by various means. It has sent many millions of takedown requests and also targets pirate sites in court, hoping to shut these down.
Aylo previously went after Goodporn and Daftsex in U.S. courts, which largely ruled in favor of the adult entertainment company. However, permanently taking these sites offline has proven to be quite a challenge, at a time when additional problematic sites continue to appear on the company’s radar.
Aylo Sues PornXP
The latest legal battle pits Aylo against PornXP, an adult website offering access to adult videos while operating from over a dozen domain names. These videos allegedly include content owned by Aylo and posted without permission.
In a complaint filed at a federal court in Washington, Aylo writes that 2,040 of its works are shared across 71,400 individual web pages. Since PornXP doesn’t have a visible upload functionality, the site’s ‘anonymous’ operators stand accused of uploading them.
With its most popular domain receiving over 7 million monthly visitors, PornXP poses a significant threat. Aylo notes that roughly 18% of the site’s visitors come from the U.S. while the site uses itselff U.S.-based advertisers and other services.
To an effort to end the alleged infringement, Aylo sent more than 680,000 DMCA-compliant takedown notices to the website’s email address. Aylo says that none of these takedown requests were honored, and the copyright infringing content remained online.
“Defendants did not remove any content identified in the takedown notices or respond to any of Plaintiff’s DMCA takedown notices,” the complaint reads.
In addition to contacting the site directly, Aylo also sent over 2.1 million DMCA notices to Google, asking the company to remove these URLs from its search results. While Google responded, PornXP claims that the company took no notable action.
Unmasking the Operators
Despite the detailed description of the site and its alleged wrongdoings, Aylo knows little about the people who operate the domains. The defendants are listed as “John Does” instead, with the site’s domain names the only clear identifiers.
To unmask the operators, Aylo requested an ex parte motion for early discovery, targeted at domain registrars and several associated privacy services. These third-party services include Porkbun, NameSilo, Spaceship, GoDaddy, the Public Interest Registry, Privacy Protect, PrivacyGuardian.org, and Private by Design.
Last week, District Court Judge Benjamin H. Settle granted this discovery request, allowing Aylo to subpoena these services asking for the personal details of the domain registrants, including names, emails, and IP-addresses.
“This includes but is not limited to names, addresses, login information, billing and transaction records, account information, server logs and IP addresses, email exchanges, and IP login information related to the accounts for the PornXP domain names,” Judge Settle ruled last week.
Damages, Domain Transfers and Site blocking
Whether the subpoenas will return any usable information has yet to be seen. Ultimately, however, Aylo hopes to win a judgment in its favor, including a substantial damages award compensating it for the alleged copyright infringement.
Enforcing a potentially favorable order is not always straightforward, especially against operators who might be outside U.S. jurisdiction. Therefore, the complaint includes a request for a broad injunction that requests registrars to transfer the PornXP domain names over to Aylo’s possession.
In an attempt to cover all bases, the injunction request also includes a broad blocking request that orders ISPs, hosting companies, search engines and other intermediaries to block the PornXP domains and IP-addresses in the United States.
Specifically, it wants these third-party intermediaries to:
“Block or attempt to block access by United States users of PornXP websites by blocking or attempting to block access to all domains, subdomains, URLs, and/or IP Addresses that has as its sole or predominant purpose to enable to facilitate access to PornXP domains”
At the time of writing, the PornXP defendants have not yet been served and Aylo has until October to do so. For now, all PornXP domains remain operational. However, given the substantial effort that has already been expended on the case, Aylo is determined to do all it can to change the status quo.
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A copy of the complaint filed by Aylo at the United States District Court for the Western District of Washington at Tacoma is available here (pdf). A copy of District Court Judge Benjamin H. Settle’s order on the discovery request is available here (pdf)
From: TF, for the latest news on copyright battles, piracy and more.
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