Adult Film Company Files Nearly 100 Copyright Suits Over 2-Day Span

Adult film producer Strike 3 Holdings filed 98 copyright infringement lawsuits, including over a dozen in U.S. District Court for Southern New York, from Friday to Monday, suing defendants identified only by the name John Doe and their IP addresses. Strike 3 says its paid subscriber base is one of highest of adult content sites globally, and its motion pictures are “among the most pirated content in the world.” A Friday complaint in U.S. District Court for the District of Minnesota alleges John Doe, with IP address 24.118.118.215, is stealing its works “on a grand scale.” Doe uses the BitTorrent peer-to-peer file-sharing protocol to commit “rampant and wholesale copyright infringement” by downloading the company’s movies and distributing them to others, the complaint (docket 0:23-cv-01014) said. Doe has recorded 29 infringing movies “over an extended period of time.” A John Doe at IP 74.72.25.42 was sued in New York Monday for allegedly pirating 92 titles, said a complaint (docket 1:23-cv-03189). Though the defendant Does “attempted to hide" their theft by downloading content anonymously, their ISPs, Comcast and Spectrum, “can identify Defendant through his or her IP address," said the complaints. Strike 3 “intentionally omitted the title of the work from this public filing due to the adult nature of its content,” but it can provide the works’ titles “to the Court or any party upon request,” it said in the complaints. Strike 3 used IP address online geolocation fraud detection tools Maxmind GeoIP, used by federal and state law enforcement, to determine that John Does' IP addresses traced to a physical address in a particular district, it said. Maxmind’s accuracy is 99.8% accurate on a country level, 90% accurate on a state level in the U.S. and 86% accurate to cities within the United States, the complaint said. BitTorrent enables users to interact directly with each other to distribute a large file without taxing any individual source computer or network, said the complaint. That enables Strike 3’s motion pictures, many filmed in high resolution, to be transferred quickly and efficiently, the complaint said. Strike 3 created an infringement detection system, VXN Scan, that establishes direct TCP/IP connections with defendants’ IP addresses and can identify portions of pirated videos, the complaint said. The system doesn’t upload content to a BitTorrent user but captures transactions from infringers sharing specific pieces of digital media files that have been determined to be at least “substantially similar” to a Strike 3 copyrighted work, it said.