LOS ANGELES—Aylo, the parent company of Pornhub.com, was awarded $4.2 million in a recent court ruling for a case the company brought against a website for content piracy and intellectual property theft.
Attorneys for Aylo sued Pornhits.com last December, alleging copyright violations, Torrent Freak reports. Filed in the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Washington, the ruling is the latest in a series of cases Aylo has brought featuring hefty payment demands.
The porn giant asked, initially, for $84 million in penalties. That sum accounted for a total of 5,635 works registered to Aylo and its properties out of the more than 40,000 it has produced. These works include feature-length releases and individual porn scenes.
According to court filings viewed by AVN, Aylo's attorneys argued that Pornhits misleadingly claimed infinging content was uploaded by third-party users, even though its upload feature is nonfunctional.
Aylo additionally filed 44,934 DMCA takedown notices, which were all ignored by Pornhits' webmasters, the complaint reads.
The total of $84 million derives from the fact that courts previously have awarded $15,000 per violation in similar cases. Unfortunately for Aylo, the judge in this case was not convinced. Citing a potential "windfall," the plaintiffs were instead awarded $4.2 million and control of the Pornhits domain name. Named in the suit as a defendant is Anatoly Chernov, the supposed operator of Pornhits.
"Calculating damages is difficult but the Court requires more than mere guesswork," wrote the judge in this case, U.S. District Court Judge Benjamin Settle of the Western District of Washington. He added, "Aylo fails to offer any concrete evidence of lost profits, relying instead upon conjecture as to the effect of Chernov’s piracy on its bottom line."
Aylo did not reply to AVN's request for comment on the case by post time.
