CYBERSPACE—Corbin Fisher parent Liberty Media Holdings filed a copyright infringement lawsuit yesterday in federal court in Nevada against FF Magnat Limited, which does business as Oron.com, a massive cloud storage service that is being accused of the "infringement of Plaintiff’s copyrights in its creative works by the Defendants, either directly or indirectly, through the use of the Oron.com website."
The complaint was filed yesterday by Corbin Fisher's in-house counsel, Marc Randazza. who alleges in the 17-page complaint, "Defendant FF Magnat Limited d/b/a Oron.com and its owners and/or operators (collectively, 'Oron') collectively own, operate, and/or control the Internet website www.Oron.com. Oron.com’s business model fosters and promotes the infringing of Plaintiff’s exclusive rights through copying, storing, distributing, displaying, and profiting from the unauthorized use of Plaintiff’s copyright protected works. Oron also fosters and induces others to act in concert in order to infringe upon Plaintiff’s copyrighted works."
The suit also names as a defendant Maxim Bochenko, a/k/a Roman Romanov, which it claims "is the owner, operator, and guiding force behind Oron.com and is accused of being equally responsible for any and all offenses by Oron.com and/or FF Magnat Ltd. herein."
In claiming proper jurisdiction over Oron, which claims offices in Edinburgh, Hong Kong and London, the complaint argues, "Oron utilizes a Virginia-based domain name registrar and U.S. based companies to receive payment from members and to provide payment to members for services. Further, Oron lists a Pennsylvania address on its domain name registration. Therefore, Oron has availed itself of the privilege of doing business in the United States, and it is properly subject to jurisdiction in any federal court."
The suit also labels Oron.com a "pirate website that allow users to purchase access to infringing works. Oron and the users acting in concert with it upload infringing copyrighted works to its servers. When a user uploads a file to Oron.com, that user is provided with a Uniform Resource Locator ('URL') which allows the user to distribute the link to other individuals, allowing any recipients of the link to access, copy, and download the infringing material from Orons servers. Oron provides this service to members for as little as €9.95 per month or up to as much as €74.95 per year."
The suit claims "at least 232 infringements of Liberty’s works" by oron.com, and seeks maximum statutory damages of $150,000 per infringement, plus attorneys' fees and costs.
The complaint may be accessed here.
