MIAMI – A lawsuit filed last week in federal district court accuses MindGeek USA of willfully violating copyright and trademark laws as a routine part of operating the adult tube sites Pornhub.com and PornhubPremium.com. Plaintiffs MetArt and SexArt seek not only damages, attorney fees, injunctions and the usual other penalties, but also the transfer of “Pornhubpremium.com and all similar domains held by Defendants … such as misspellings of the enumerated domains, domains held by Defendants linked to www.Pornhubpremium.com, and the content therein.”
The lawsuit lists eight counts under which Hydentra L.P. — corporate parent of MetArt and SexArt — alleges Pornhub and PornhubPremium “display[ed] copyrighted adult entertainment content and utilize[ed] trademarks without authorization in order to attract users, and distract them from the trademark owners’ services for financial gain.”
According to court documents, Pornhub allowed users to upload 100 unauthorized videos belonging to Hydentra and failed to remove the materials in a timely matter once notified about the illegal uploads. Furthermore, Hydentra claims PornhubPremium, a website that charges users a monthly fee to view videos in high-definition, incorporated the same Hydentra videos into its library.
Defendants stocked PornhubPremium with Hydentra content evidently copied from Pornhub even though Hydentra expressly rejected a partnership proposal, the lawsuit alleges.
“Defendants approached Plaintiffs in the spring of 2015 seeking permission to display Plaintiffs’ works on Pornhubpremium.com [sic],” court documents note. “Plaintiffs refused to grant such permission.” Nevertheless, “Defendants displayed Plaintiffs’ copyrighted works in the Pornhubpremium [sic] library, the same videos Plaintiffs demanded to be removed from Pornhub.com and the same videos that Defendants confirmed would be removed from Pornhub.com.”
In the lawsuit, Hydentra opines that even though PornhubPremium allows user-uploads, MindGeed cannot claim the site is covered by safe harbor provisions in the Digital Millennium Copyright Act because the content at issue was uploaded before PornhubPremium launched but after operators became aware the material had been uploaded without permission.
“Plaintiffs’ copyrighted videos on Pornhubpremium.com [sic] were not uploaded by members of Pornhubpremium.com [sic],” the suit states. “The posting dates of the videos predate the inception of Pornhubpremium [sic]. The videos mirror Plaintiffs’ copyrighted works displayed without authorization on Pornhub.com, the same works that Plaintiffs demanded to be removed from Pornhub.com and which Defendants promised to have removed.
“Defendants posted Plaintiffs’ videos on Pornhubpremium.com [sic], charging a fee for users to view and download the videos, with full knowledge that no license or authority existed to display and/or distribute the videos,” the court documents note. “Defendants engaged in such conduct with full knowledge that Plaintiffs forbade such use, display, and distribution.”
The lawsuit also seeks redress for damages incurred by the unauthorized display of models’ images in the subject videos.
