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Adult entertainment conglomerate Aylo has won a $90 million default judgment against a large piracy ring in a Washington federal court. Recouping these damages will be a challenge because the owner of the sites was not located. For Aylo, however, the main priority is to use the court’s judgment to seize control of the associated domain names of ‘Freshporno,’ ‘Kojka’, ‘PornHeal’, and others.
In recent years, Aylo has taken an aggressive stance against pirate sites, doing everything possible to shut these down.
The parent company of Pornhub, which owns popular brands such as “Reality Kings”, “Brazzers”, “MOFOS”, has already won several lawsuits against high profile targets such as Daftsex and Goodporn.
Early last year, Aylo filed a lawsuit in the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Washington against a collection of pirate adult websites, including ‘Freshporno,’ ‘Kojka’, ‘PornHeal’. These eight sites were allegedly operated by someone named Anton Popravkin.
To stop the infringing activity, Aylo’s copyright enforcement arm sent more than 10,000 DMCA takedown notices to the piracy ring. However. These notices failed to get the infringing videos removed, so Aylo decided to take the matter to court.
Aylo Requests Multi-Million Dollar Default
Aylo accused the piracy network, which reportedly received more than three million monthly visits, of publicly displaying many thousands of works without permission. This was done with a profit motive, making the operator liable for willful copyright infringement.
“Popravkin Anton willfully infringed Plaintiff’s Works at least 9,006 times: Plaintiff identified 9,006 of its copyrighted registered works being displayed across 27,105 infringing URLs on the Websites,” the complaint read.
“The sheer volume of infringements demonstrates Popravkin Anton’s deliberate and willful disregard for copyright law, as well as his ongoing operation of a business that operates by monetizing copyright infringement.”
The operator of the site never responded to the lawsuit, which left Aylo no other option than to request a default judgment. While Aylo could theoretically request $150,000 per work, for a total of more than a billion dollars in damages, it settled for a tenth of that.
In its motion for a default judgment, Aylo requested $15,000 in statutory damages per work infringed. With 9,006 works, this brings the total to $135,090,000 in statutory damages.
Court Awards $90,060,000 in Damages
Last Friday, U.S. District Judge Kymberly K. Evanson granted Aylo’s motion for default judgment. However, instead of awarding $15,000 per work, she reduced it to $10,000 per infringed work. In addition, Aylo was granted attorney’s fees and costs of $20,350.
In the order, Judge Evanson notes that Aylo hasn’t shared any persuasive evidence to justify its $15,000 claim. In addition, the court deems $10,000 per work sufficient to send a deterrent message to other prospective pirates.
“Because Plaintiff has not presented persuasive evidence to support its $15,000 valuation of each infringed work, the Court declines to assume that the full amount requested is appropriate,” the order reads.
“The amount awarded will nonetheless discourage wrongful conduct and uphold the integrity of copyright laws,” Judge Evanson adds.
Domain Name Seizures
While a $90 million damages award sounds good, it is unlikely that Aylo will recoup this, as the main defendant was not located. And since Anton Popravkin likely doesn’t reside in the United States, they will likely ignore the court order.
Therefore, the real value of the default judgment lies in the domain name transfers that were granted in response to the “willful” and “malicious” copyright ingringement.
The court issued a broad permanent injunction ordering the U.S.-based domain name registry Verisign to change the registrar for the eight targeted domains to EuroDNS. EuroDNS is subsequently instructed to change the registrant for those domain names directly to Aylo Premium Ltd.
“Verisign, Inc. shall change the registrar for the domain names 3prn.com, freshporno.net, frprn.com, homexvideo.com, kojka.com,mojva.com, onlineporno.cc, and pornheal.com to EuroDNS, and instruct EuroDNS to change the registrant for those domain names to Aylo Premium Ltd,” the order reads.
At the time of writing, all domains remain linked to the piracy ring, but it is expected that these will become unavailable later this week, when Aylo takes them over. Whether that will permanently keep the pirate sites offline remains to be seen.
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A copy of the order granting the default judgment, issued by U.S. District Judge Kymberly K. Evanson, is available here (pdf). The order signed by the court clerk can be found here (pdf).
