Porn Studios Play Dirty: (S)Extortion Techniques Revealed

July 12, 2012 by
Filed under: Announcements & Events, Entertainment Industry, Legal P2P News & Issues 

Various porn producers have been accused of fraud, defamation and racketeering (among other charges) in their copyright lawsuits against BitTorrent users.

Their strategy is simple and effective. As soon as they get their hands on IP addresses related to the unlawful download of copyrighted materials, they sue hoping that the judge will force the ISP to give a name and address of the IP(s) – in some cases it works.

Then the shakedown begins. However, the actual problem is that the companies are not seeking litigation, but rather aim for settlements of $1.000 to $5.000. In many cases people prefer to pay that amount to avoid the embarrassment of being accused of downloading pornographic material. Not to mention that according to the U.S. Copyright Act defendants are eligible to pay up to $150.000 in damages for a single copyright violation.

A week ago a federal judge ruled that a BitTorrent lawsuit filed by Malibu Media is “an extortion scheme”. Eventually the wheel turned and now there’s another lawsuit, this time against the adult movies producers.

“The pornography purveyors know that this amount of money is less than the cost of defense would be if suit were filed. They also know that individuals such as the plaintiff in this matter are embarrassed to have their names associated with pornography, and therefore, are susceptible to being shaken down,” says the suit, claiming it could represent 200,000 people.

“In fact, if the individuals could be proven to have downloaded the pornography unlawfully from the internet, the pornography purveyors could collect civil statutory damages of $150,000 for a willful infringement such as they allege, yet they settle for $1,000-$5,000.”

“There’s a slime element associated with the porn cases, which makes it much more apparent than the music cases that there is an extortionist element to this,” said Lory Lybeck, a Washington state attorney who’s defending hundreds of clients accused of downloading mature oriented movies.

The case against porn studios was filed on behalf of a Kentucky woman named Jennifer Barker. She was allegedly contacted by a representative of Intellectual Property Protection, which works for the porn companies involved in the suit, and asked to settle for supposedly downloading X-Art videos produced by Malibu Media. According to her claims, she’s innocent.

The company “demanded that Ms. Barker pay money to settle the lawsuit or she would be identified publicly as having downloaded pornography and would be subject to hundreds of thousands of dollars as a judgement if the suit went forward because there were multiple downloads,” said the suit.

Malibu Media, Third Degree Films and Patrick Collins Inc. did not comment.

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