GoFuckYourself.com - Adult Webmaster Forum - News Does US Legal Ruling Spell the End for Online Porn?

It begins with a letter informing the recipient that pornography from erotica website X-art.com has been illegally distributed by their IP address, in breach of copyright laws.

The recipient is then faced with a choice: either spend thousands on a lawyer and risk having to pay out tens of thousands of dollars in damages if they lose, or settle out of court.

Thousands have chosen the latter option, eager not just to avoid financial damage, but the damage to their reputation caused by being publicly accused of stealing pornography.

X-art's parent company, Malibu Media LLC, is now the largest litigator in the United States. In the past year alone, it filed more than 1,300 copyright-infringement lawsuits, accounting for a third of all US copyright litigation and averaging three lawsuits a day, according to federal litigation database Pacer.

Colette Pelissier, who co-founded the site with her boyfriend, said that they were forced to act to save their business after a company they hired to estimate the damage caused by pirates told them that 300,000 people were watching pirated versions of their films every month.

"We felt like we had to do something," she said. "I don't want to wake up in five years and have everything be free," she told the New Yorker.

Copyright backlash
Critics, however, accuse companies like Malibu Media of extortion, targeting people without the financial means to defend cases in court on the basis of inaccurate data.

They argue that IP addresses can be shared by computers belonging to different people on the same network, or can even be hijacked by hackers.

"If you're filing three lawsuits per day, that very much looks like an abusive model," Ben Depoorter, a professor at the University of California, Hastings College of Law, told the magazine.

Recently, anti-"lawsuit trolling" activists hailed an important victory when a US High Court judge ruled that internet service providers do not have to provide the personal details of users accused of piracy.

Read more:

http://www.ibtimes.co.uk/does-us-leg...e-porn-1450788