US Porn Producer Makes Profit from German P2P Lawsuits

John Stagliano Inc (aka Evil Angel), a Southern California-based adult film company, has reportedly hired a German anti-piracy firm to hunt down and take file sharers to court. Due to a recent leak involving a contract between the two, we learn that Evil Angel had Germany's Digiprotect track over 800 individual film titles, among which "Euro Hardball 15" or "She-male Domination Nation". The contract’s provisions has Evil Angel allocating exclusive P2P distribution rights of these movie titles to Digiprotect, which consecutively will take legal action against individual file sharers using these exact rights.

Lately, Germany has turned into a sort of battlefield for P2P enforcement, due to companies such as Digiprotect and associated lawyers initiating over 100,000 cases against alleged illegal downloaders. Although the majority of cases are later abandoned, the rights owners cunningly use them to facilitate civil enforcement, having file sharers fined with sums ranging from a few hundred to thousands of Euros.

As many critics, righteously we’d say, argue these lawsuits are not at all ways towards cracking infringement, but shortcuts to gaining easy money. Digiprotect's own slogan serves as example: "Turn piracy into profit". As we reported on August 18, German prosecutors saw themselves forced to stop this lawsuits flood by only considering cases which involved at least 200 movies shared since the whole thing is getting way too costly.

There might be some irony at play here because John Stagliano is the central figure in another, different kind of lawsuit in the US. He has been accused of distributing obscene content through mail and online. According to adult industry magazine XBiz , in April, Stagliano's lawyer when commenting about the lawsuit, called it just "a waste of the government’s resources."