Pornhub may be fighting an online petition to shut the site down, but that has not stopped the company—or more specifically, its parent company—from carrying out a massive campaign against alleged copyright violators.
According to a report by the technology news site TechNadu, MindGeek Holding—the Canadian company that owns Pornhub, as well as Brazzers, Reality Kings, RedTube, YouPorn, Xtube.com and others—has identified 16,594 IP addresses in Sweden that were responsible for downloading torrents of adult videos ... videos whose copyrights are held by MindGeek.
The online porn giant currently owns more than 10,000 works registered with the United States copyright office, according to the report.
The Swedish internet provider Banhof, which closely monitors “copyright trolling” on its services, found that MindGeek had filed eight applications to uncover the identities of users behind the 16,954 IP addresses, according to a report by Torrent Freak.
As often happens with copyright “trolls,” MindGeek once it has identified a user sends out a letter informing that person that he or she has illegally shared “an erotic movie.” The letter to the Swedish users offers to make the case go away for a preemptive settlement of 7,000 krona per violation—about $722 in U.S. currency.
Adding up all of the potential settlements, MindGeek could haul in almost $12 million from the campaign. But the company says it isn’t in it for the money. Instead, the company said in a statement that it seeks only “to protect thousands of its copyrighted audiovisual works from blatant infringement.”
Hitting up individual users for cash is only one method that the company employs in its quest to curtail piracy, the statement said. Other methods include, “targeting website operators, vendors supporting such operators, and in certain cases, end users who are taking advantage of, or sharing pirated works.”
How much money, if any, MindGeek has collected from the alleged illegal porn torrenters remains unclear.
MindGeek has also issued 250 million takedown request to Google, seeking to remove what the company says is copyrighted material linked from the industry-dominating search engine.
Photo by Pornhub / Wikimedia Commons Public Domain
