Adult entertainment company MG Premium has left no stone unturned in its three-year legal standoff with the operator of piracy sites including the hugely popular ‘DaftSex’.

The first public sign of the battle ahead arrived courtesy of a huge MG Premium DMCA takedown campaign that aimed to remove 832,000 DaftSex URLs from Google search.

Mass copyright takedowns like these should a) make sites like DaftSex harder to find and b) trigger Google’s downranking mechanism which reduces search engine placement in response to DMCA notices.

Then came MG Premium’s application for a DMCA subpoena targeting Cloudflare in the summer of 2020, which hoped to obtain the identity of DaftSex’s operator.

At the time DaftSex was pulling in tens of millions of visits per month and MG Premium’s goal was to reduce that to zero, through the courts if necessary.

MG Premium Files Lawsuit Against the Operator of DaftSex

Filed at the federal court in the District of Washington in 2022, MG Premium went after Vasily Kharchenko, the alleged operator of Daftsex.com, Biqle.com, Daxab.com and other affiliated sites. In response, Kharchenko dug in his heels, failed to appear in the lawsuit, then sat back as District Judge Benjamin Settle awarded MG Premium $32,145,000 in damages in November 2022.

The Judge also signed off on an injunction that authorized the transfer of several domains away from Kharchenko and into MG Premium’s possession.

The MindGeek subsidiary took control of some domains very quickly and redirected them to its own platforms including RedTube. DaftSex acted quickly too; it switched to new domains including Daft.sex, Dsex.to, plus biqle.ru and biqle.org.

In December 2022, MG Premium asked the court to hold Kharchenko in contempt for breaching the injunction. The company also requested permission to take control of the new DaftSex domains at Daft.sex, Dsex.to, and Biqle.org. Since Daftsex was using a Twitter account to inform users of new domains, MG Premium asked the court to issue an order compelling Twitter to either shut down the account or transfer it to MG Premium.

Kharchenko Ignores Order to Show Cause, Judge Runs Out Patience

In his March 2023 order, Judge Settle described MG Premium’s evidence showing Kharchenko violating the injunction, as both “clear and convincing.” Nevertheless, Kharchenko was given yet another chance to participate and informed that he had 30 days to show why he should not be “subject to a bench warrant, to an order holding him in contempt, or to monetary sanctions.”

Having boycotted the entire process to date, and despite being served, Kharchenko failed to comply with the March order. In an order handed down last week, Judge Settle considered MG Premium’s evidence and the laid out the consequences.

After finding that MG Premium’s 2,143 copyrighted works were still being displayed on Daft.sex, Dsex.to, and Biqle.org, Judge Settle found Kharchenko in contempt for violating the injunctions. With that alone unlikely to prevent further infringement, the court came up with a solution to help reduce visibility of the infringing sites.

Judge Declares MG Premium the New Owner of ‘Pirate’ Domains

The section of the order dealing with Kharchenko’s domains initially reads like bad news for MG Premium but then suddenly starts to improve.

“MG Premium has not persuaded the Court that it can or should order non-parties to take concrete steps to prevent the infringement, or as a sanction for Karchenko’s wrongful conduct and his contempt of court,” it begins.

“The Court will not, therefore, Order third parties take affirmative steps to transfer domain name registrars to MG Premium. It will ORDER instead that MG Premium is entitled to ownership of the domain names.” With that, Judge Settle issued the instructions below.

(1) MG Premium or its designee is entitled to be the registrar of record for the domain name Daft.sex, and this Order demonstrates that right to the operator of the .SEX registry, ICM Registry and/or Registry Service, LLSC. Any resulting transfer shall be done at MG Premium’s reasonable expense.

(2) MG Premium or its designee is entitled to be the registrar of record for the domain name Dsex.to, and this Order demonstrates that right to the operator of the .TO registry, Tonic Domains Corp. Any resulting transfer shall be done at MG Premium’s reasonable expense.

(3) MG Premium or its designee is entitled to be the registrar of record for the domain name Biqle.org, and this Order demonstrates that right to the operator of the ORG registry, Public Interest Registry. Any resulting transfer shall be done at MG Premium’s reasonable expense.

Twitter and GitHub Ordered to Eject Kharchenko

Further instructions relate to Kharchenko-operated accounts on Twitter/X and GitHub. The order notes that since MG Premium “is entitled to be the owner of record” of the Twitter account used to communicate with DaftSex users, it should be transferred to the company at “reasonable expense.” The same applies to daftsex.github.io and daftpost.github.io which have been used to inform DaftSex users of new domain names for many months.

Whether any of the above will be enough to prevent ongoing violations of MG Premium’s rights and the terms of the permanent injunction, remains to be seen. Events to date indicate there’s a solid chance that Kharchenko will find ways to circumvent the order. He may have been served but we suspect that his geographical location represents a major roadblock that’s unlikely to be removed for the next several years.

The March order and last week’s contempt order can be found here ( 1 , 2 ,pdf)

From: TF , for the latest news on copyright battles, piracy and more.

When an opponent fails to defend themselves in an ordinary fight, things tend to be over pretty quickly. The same isn’t true for copyright lawsuits.

In early October 2021, MG Premium – a subsidiary of adult entertainment giant MindGeek – filed a copyright complaint at a district court in Washington. It targeted Daftsex.com, an adult ‘tube’ site offering MG-owned videos from the Brazzers and Digital Playground series, among others, to dozens of millions of users every month – for free.

Daftsex had little chance of winning in court and completely ignored the lawsuit. It still took more than a year to conclude but with a damages award of $32 million and a broad injunction that included domain seizures, MG Premium prevailed in the end. In reality, however, very little had changed.

Domain Seizures Immediately Countered

Verisign was ordered to sign several domains over to MG Premium, including Daftsex.com, Artsporn.com, Daxab.com, and Biqle.com. Daftsex responded by switching to new domains – Daft.sex, Dsex.to, biqle.ru and biqle.org. The site took a traffic hit but managed to stay online.

Meanwhile, MG Premium redirected its newly acquired domains (and millions of former Daftsex users) to MindGeek-owned RedTube. Despite an external move to undermine domain transfers , the opportunity to convert pirates into paying customers would’ve been useful.

Unfortunately, further opportunities quickly dried up. Seized domain Daftsex.com received more than 41 million visits in November 2022. A month later, traffic plummeted to 6.5 million. According to SimilarWeb data, in January 2023, just three months after MindGeek took control, the domain received just two million visits.

In parallel, Daftsex continued to rebuild its traffic on new domains. In January 2023, Daft.sex received 22.7m visits and Dsex.to 5.7 million. In the background, MG Premium renewed its legal efforts to take the site down.

Contempt of Court

In December 2022, MG Premium filed a request to reopen the case so that alleged Daftsex owner Vasily Kharchenko held in contempt of court ( 1 ). Declarations in support were filed by Jason Tucker of anti-piracy company Battleship Stance, and MG Premium’s Anti-Piracy Strategy Manager, Steven Salway, a former Police Intellectual Property Crime Unit detective ( 1 , 2 )

In addition to the court holding Kharchenko in contempt, MG Premium requested permission to take over the new Daftsex domains – Daft.sex, Dsex.to, and Biqle.org. Since Daftsex is using a Twitter account to communicate with its user community, MG Premium wants the court to issue an order compelling Twitter to shut down the account or transfer it to MG Premium.

As things stand today, none of those things have happened and Daftsex just keeps on growing. That doesn’t mean that MG Premium is simply letting it happen though.

DMCA Takedown Campaign Begins

Within hours of Daftsex announcing its new domains last November, MG Premium began sending DMCA notices to Google, hoping to make daft.sex, dsex.to, and biqle.org less visible in search results.

That went on to become what is almost certainly the largest and most intense DMCA notice-sending campaign by a copyright holder against a single site since the DMCA was introduced in 1998.

The first DMCA notices targeting daft.sex and dsex.to were sent to Google on November 14 and 21, respectively. In the first week, Google recorded takedown requests for 937,952 Daft.sex URLs and 941,424 URLs belonging to Dsex.to, but that was just a taster of things to come.

Largest Ever Copyright Holder Campaign Against Single Site

According to Google data – an entry dated January 9, 2023, covering a single week – Google received DMCA notices requesting the removal of 4,686,019 Dsex.to URLs. An entry dated January 16, again covering a single week, states that Google received DMCA notices requesting 5,025,742 Daft.sex URLs to be taken down.

Data shown in Google’s charts lag a little behind actual notices received but between November 14, 2022 and February 20, 2023, Google received ~11,000 individual requests from MG Premium targeting daft.sex.

Total daft.sex URLs requested for removal until March 3, 2023: ~45.6 million .

Between November 21, 2022 and February 20, 2023, Google received around ~11,000 individual requests from MG Premium targeting dsex.to.

Total dsex.to URLs requested for removal until March 3, 2023: ~45.6 million

URLs requested for removal overall (both domains combined): 91+ million

To put these figures into perspective, the number of URLs requested for deletion against The Pirate Bay’s .org domain currently sits at 6,008,980 – after being targeted since 2012.

Majority of Notices Had No Immediate Effect

Since Google reports what action it takes after receiving a DMCA takedown notice, we can see that the vast majority of these notices failed to have any immediate effect.

When considering all MG Premium notices sent to Google, targeting both daft.sex and dsex.to URLs, close to 80% were reported by Google as ‘not in index’, meaning that the reported URLs were absent from Google’s search so couldn’t be removed.

That raises the obvious question of why so many URLs reported by MG Premium as infringing were unrecognized by Google.

TorrentFreak requested comment from MG Premium on Saturday evening but received no response, most likely due to the timing.

We’ll publish an update if we receive a response, but we suspect that other factors could be at play here that only MG Premium will be able to properly explain.

From: TF , for the latest news on copyright battles, piracy and more.

Adult entertainment conglomerate MindGeek owns several of the largest ‘free’ tube sites including Pornhub.

In the early days, these sites thrived on pirated content but over time, that changed . Today, MindGeek itself is one of the most protective copyright holders in the industry.

MindGeek subsidiary MG Premium, for example, has many thousands of works registered at the US Copyright Office. To prevent these videos from being shared online without permission, the company regularly takes legal action.

Victory Against DaftSex

In a recent case heard at a federal court in the Western District of Washington, MindGeek won a default judgment against Vasily Kharchenko, the suspected operator of Daftsex.com, Artporn.com, Biqle.com and Daxab.com.

These sites have been a thorn in MindGeek’s side for years and MG Premium accused their operator of mass copyright infringement. DaftSex alone was good for dozens of millions of monthly visits.

The adult media company won by default after the defense failed to appear. Kharchenko was ordered to pay more than $32 million in damages and an injunction required domain name registry Verisign to sign over the valuable domain names to MG Premium.

Court Order Hijack Attempt

Apparently, someone had been keeping a close eye on the case. Shortly after the court issued its order, Verisign received an email from an MG Premium imposter trying to seize ownership of the contested domain names.

The identity of the imposter is unknown, but a new court filing MG Premium suggests that it could be Kharchenko’s attempt to retain control over the domain names. For as long as it lasts.

“On November 10, 2022, just days after this Court entered the Order of Final Judgment and Permanent Injunction, a fraudulent letter was sent to Verisign, Inc. purportedly from MG Premium requesting Verisign, Inc. to unlock the domains and send authorization codes to mgpremiumltd@gmail.com.”

“This is a fake letter, not sent by MG Premium. It is suspected Defendant Kharchenko may have sent this fake letter in an attempt to thwart the Court’s Order and the loss of the domains,” MG Premium writes.

The bold move ultimately failed, as the real MG Premium was already in touch with Verisign at that point. However, it was clear that someone had tried to hijack the court’s order.

Motion for Contempt and Sanctions

MG Premium suspects that DaftSex’s operator sent the email. Despite the court order and injunction, the pirate site is not giving up. After the domains were eventually signed over to MG Premium, the sites switched to new domains including Daft.sex, Dsex.to, and Biqle.org.

These new domains were made public through DaftSex’s Twitter account and remain in operation today.

To address this problem, MG Premium submitted a motion for contempt and sanctions against the site operator. And since more monetary damages aren’t going to help, the sanctions should be focused on taking all replacement sites offline. MG Premium also wants the Twitter account suspended.

“The Court must unfortunately look at Defendant Kharchekno as an irresponsible teenager who simply cannot follow simple rules nor show any respect to others, including the rule of law,” MG Premium writes.

“To force obedience with the Court’s Order, the Court should take away the utilized domains and the Twitter account promoting those domains. There is simply no other way to get this behavior to cease.”

The court has yet to rule on this motion but if MG Premium successfully takes over the new domain names, any new hijacking attempts will lack the element of surprise. Even then, MG Premium may have to return to court if DaftSex switches domains again.

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A copy of MG Premium’s request for a finding of contempt and associated sanctions against Daftsex and its operator Vasily Kharchekno is available here (pdf)

From: TF , for the latest news on copyright battles, piracy and more.

Legal action filed last week by two Arizona-based companies aims to prevent pirate sites distributing their content. That’s not unusual in itself but the case is far from ordinary.

Founded in 2005, CP Productions, Inc. produces adult entertainment media and uses its own website for distribution. Fornix Holdings, Inc. handles intellectual property matters for CP Productions and to date has registered 157 videos at the U.S. Copyright Office.

Both companies are owned by Arizona resident David Graves who appears to manage everything from production to his companies’ anti-piracy efforts.

At a district court in Arizona on November 15, Fornix Holdings and CP Productions filed an ex parte application for a temporary restraining order (tro) and preliminary injunction. The goal was to quickly end infringement on several pirate websites where CP Productions’ videos were offered illegally for free.

Piracy is a common issue in the U.S. affecting thousands of content-producing companies. What stands out in this case are the far-reaching demands on extremely short notice. That the court authorized strict anti-piracy measures in a matter of days is noteworthy too, especially given some of the unusual features of the case.

Declaration in Support of TRO

The core of the TRO application is straightforward. As laid out in David Graves’ declaration, the website DaftSex.com links to 1,734 pirated copies of CP Productions videos. Two other domains, daftsex.tv and daftsex.porn, redirect to DaftSex.com.

A second website, Pornwild.com, began offering CP Productions’ videos around May 2022, again without permission. Graves says the site links to 1,339 infringing videos while two other websites, Pornwild.to and Pornwild-to.nicepornproxy.com, redirect to Pornwild.com.

Through content-monitoring companies, Graves sent over 1,700 takedown notices to DaftSex.com, to an email address that used to appear on the site but no longer does. The 1,600 takedowns sent to Pornwild.com were sent to a withheldforprivacy.com address listed in the domain’s WHOIS records. Graves says no responses from the sites were ever received.

Application for TRO/Preliminary Injunction

In their preliminary statement, Fornix and CP note that since the operators of DaftSex.com and Pornwild.com concealed their identities, they are listed as Doe #1 and Doe #2 in their application. There’s no reference in the application but PornHub owner MindGeek actually made Doe #1’s identity public in September.

To overcome their identification problems, the applicants named EasyDNS, Namecheap and Cloudflare as defendants in the case. And since it “provides a search service that returns Defendant John Does’ sites” in response to certain searches, Google was also named as a defendant.

At this point readers will recall that MG Premium, a subsidiary of Pornhub-owner MindGeek, won a $32 million judgment against the operator of Daftsex.com on November 7, 2022.

Fornix and CP’s application for a temporary restraining order against DaftSex and Pornwild was filed on November 15. That’s more than a week after MG Premium won its own case against DaftSex and an injunction requiring Verisign to hand over the DaftSex.com domain to MG Premium.

Already under new ownership, DaftSex.com now redirects to RedTube, another platform owned by MindGeek.

Applicants Demand Everything – and More

To prevent the operators of DaftSex and PornWild from knowing about the case, Fornix and CP requested an ex parte restraining order in the face of “willful and ongoing infringing conduct.” Their demands included the following:

• Deactivate and cancel the DaftSex and Pornwild domains and prevent re-registration
• Deactivate the websites at daftsex.com, daftsex.tv, daftsex.porn, pornwild.com, pornwild.to, pornwild-to.nicepornproxy.com and delete all copies of infringing works
• Delete all copies of plaintiffs’ works uploaded by DaftSex and Pornwild to third-party sites
• Cease provision of all internet services to DaftSex and PornWild including domain name registration, hosting, security, content delivery, and reverse proxy services
• Compel Google to remove all DaftSex and Pornwild websites from search results

After the application was filed on November 15, Judge Diane J Humetewa responded by ordering a telephone hearing on November 17. In the meantime, summons were reportedly issued to Cloudflare EasyDNS, Google, and NameCheap. What happened during the telephone hearing isn’t revealed in the docket but it was subsequently reset for November 21.

Google Appears, Dismissals Begin

An entry dated November 18 shows that Fornix and CP Productions voluntarily dismissed their case against EasyDNS. Hoping to learn more about this fast moving case, TorrentFreak contacted EasyDNS with some questions. CEO Mark Jeftovic told us that he knew nothing about it.

“We have never been served any papers regarding this case. Your email was the first I’ve ever heard about any of this,” Jeftovic informed TF.

After consulting their systems, EasyDNS did manage to find some related information. One ticket related to a copyright removal request forwarded to a customer and later confirmed as complete by the complainant. Another contained a notice from Verisign advising that a domain was being moved onto the EuroDNS registrar tag to comply with the MG/DaftSex injunction. That left one more.

“[The third ticket] was an email thread amongst several lawyers asking if we will participate in some hearing five days ago, received the day of the hearing. Our agent responded ‘What is our involvement with this case?’ and we never heard back,” Jeftovic explained.

Jeftovic then offered a theory on EasyDNS’ dismissal from the case. “My guess is one of Google, Namecheap or Cloudflare did attend the hearing, pointed to Section 230 or other safe harbour provisions, and got all of the ISPs dropped from the defendants,” he said.

Coincidence or probably not, an appearance was made on behalf of Google on November 18. The very next day, Namecheap, Cloudflare, and Google were voluntarily dismissed too.

Temporary Restraining Order Granted

Following a telephone hearing this Monday, Judge Humetewa granted the plaintiffs’ request for a temporary restraining order, minimal details as follows:

“Plaintiffs are not required to post a bond. Defendants are to disable infringing domain names, suspend service to those infringing domain names, and prevent transfer,” the entry reads, adding:

“Google shall, to the extent necessary, remove the infringing domain names from search results.”

The preliminary injunction will be handled separately.

Related documents can be found here ( 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5 , pdf)

From: TF , for the latest news on copyright battles, piracy and more.

Adult entertainment conglomerate MindGeek owns several of the largest ‘free’ tube sites including Pornhub.

In the early days, these sites thrived on pirated content but over time, that changed . Today, MindGeek itself is of the most protective copyright holders in the industry.

MindGeek subsidiary MG Premium, for example, has many thousands of works registered at the US Copyright Office. To prevent these videos from being shared online without permission, the company regularly takes legal action.

Daftsex Lawsuit

In a recent case, filed at the federal court in the District of Washington, MindGeek went after Vasily Kharchenko, the alleged operator of Daftsex.com, Artporn.com, Biqle.com and Daxab.com.

These sites have been a thorn in MindGeek’s side for years and sending hundreds of thousands of DMCA takedown notices made little difference. So, in 2020, MindGeek obtained a DMCA subpoena against Cloudflare to unmask their operator , which eventually led to Kharchenko.

MG Premium accused the operator of mass copyright infringement and argued that he personally uploaded 2,143 of its copyrighted works to the sites. Through the court, the company hoped to stop these infringements and receive compensation for the damages suffered.

Default Judgment

Kharchenko remained silent and didn’t show up in court to defend himself. This left MG Premium with no other option than to request a default judgment seeking millions of dollars in damages and a broad injunction.

In the first instance, United States District Judge Benjamin Settle denied the injunction . The massive damages request wasn’t a problem but since third parties such as Cloudflare and FDC Servers were also targeted by the injunction, further evidence was required.

To justify such a “sweeping” order, the Judge asked MG Premium to provide more details about the contacts between the defendant and the third-party services.

MindGeek responded to this order with an updated request, leaving out most of the third-party services. The only one that remains is Verisign , the registry responsible for .com, .net, .cc, and .tv domain names.

Specifically, MindGeek wants Verisign to disable the Daftsex.com, Artsporn.com, Daxab.com, and Biqle.com domains and transfer them to the porn conglomerate.

$32m Damages + Domain Seizures

MindGeek argued before the court that DaftSex alone had 125 million visits in June 2021. If these people all signed up for a Brazzers subscription at $9.99 per month, that would have resulted in over a billion dollars in revenue.

The adult entertainment company didn’t ask for a billion dollars in damages though. It requested $15,000 for each of the 2,143 copyright-infringing works that were at stake in the lawsuit. Judge Settle views this as an appropriate amount.

“[A]ctual damages could be calculated at over $1,248,750,000, thus statutory damages of $32,145,000 are appropriate for Defendants’ willful infringement. Only a large award will serve to deter these arrogant Defendants from future illegal action,” Judge Settle writes.

The Judge also agreed to an injunction that requires Verisign to sign over Daftsex.com, Artsporn.com, Daxab.com, and Biqle.com, to MG Premium’s registrar EuroDNS. This means that MindGeek will effectively seize control of the domains, which have millions of daily visitors.

At the time of writing the domains have yet to be signed over. MindGeek expects this to happen fairly soon and is content with the outcome of the case.

“We are extremely pleased with the court’s decision, which is crucial to MindGeek’s fight to eliminate piracy of its content. Decisions such as this help contribute to restoring the rights of thousands of content owners who suffer because of illegal pirate sites such as Daftsex,” MindGeek informs TorrentFreak.

Jason Tucker of anti-piracy company Battleship Stance , who helps MindGeek to enforce its rights, notes that the domain seizures will be particularly useful to point adult entertainment fans to legitimate sources.

“The websites in this case have been causing financial harm to rights holders including MindGeek for a considerable amount of time. Daftsex.com, in particular, has built its own branding and recognition online. The seizure of the domain names in this case will direct consumers back toward legitimate content sources,” Tucker said.

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A copy of the default judgment and the permanent injunction, issued by United States District Judge Benjamin Settle, is available here (pdf)

From: TF , for the latest news on copyright battles, piracy and more.