The porn giant Mindgeek has yet again taken aim at another porn site and a hosting site, suing both websites for hundreds of million dollars in damages.
“The YesPornPlease Web Site is a pirate website, displaying copyrighted adult entertainment content without authorization or license,” read MG Premium’s complaint.
YesPornPlease, a porn website averaging at least 100 million users per month, has disappeared after a complaint posted by MG Premium, one of Mindgeek’s subsidiaries.
A DMCA subpoena filed by MG Premium back in September 2019 was filed against the porn site and a hosting site, VShare.io.
The subpoena demanded the security and DDoS platform Cloudflare handover key information of the two sites, including the site operators’ names, IP addresses, physical addresses, phone numbers, user histories, posting histories and so on.
MG Premium has now filed a full-blown lawsuit in a Washington court, stating:
“The conduct that gives rise to this lawsuit is egregious and willful. Defendants own and operate websites engaged in the business of copying and distributing infringing audiovisual works. Under the guise of acting as a distributor of “user-generated content,” Defendants in fact are directly and knowingly involved in the trafficking of tens of thousands of pirated works – including thousands of works owned by MG Premium. Moreover, though Defendants are not “service providers,” not engaged in the storage of content at the direction of users, and thus are not entitled to any of the safe-harbors afforded under Section 512 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act”
The porn giant claims that YesPornPlease, between July 2017 and January 2020, has infringed over 3000 works it owned, while producing all the details in an exhaustive 233-page complaint.
It is worth noting that MG Premium doesn’t refer to the DMCA subpoena it filed earlier, meaning that it could not extract any details of the site runners so far.
As of now, MG Premium is only aware of the fact that YesPornPlease is hosted by a Russian company, with no further information on the identities and location.
Generally speaking, third-parties uploading infringing content in sites such as YouTube are immune under safe harbor provisions of the DMCA. MG Premium, however, argues that YesPornPlease cannot qualify for such provisions.
“The YesPornPlease Web Site fails to fulfill the requisite conditions precedent to qualify for the safe harbor provisions of the DMCA. Specifically, the YesPornPlease Web Site does not have an appointed registered DMCA Agent,” said MG Premium.
