TACOMA, Wash.—Attorneys representing Pornhub's parent company, the Canadian-based porn conglomerate Aylo, sued adult tube site PornXP for content piracy at the end of May. A federal district judge issued an order on June 30 permitting Aylo's attorneys to subpoena several stakeholders to identify the owners of PornXP.
As Torrent Freak reports, a central complaint from Aylo is that the website's operators have committed content piracy and copyright infringement. Such violations include the posting of full-length scenes produced by Aylo's network of premium studios and pay sites, including Brazzers, Digital Playground, Twistys and others.
AVN confirmed this assertion in the initial legal complaint. One such example includes a Mofos.com full scene starring Kimberly Kendall that was uploaded in 2023.
The initial legal complaint was filed in the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Washington, noting that PornXP.com owns well over 30 domain names. To quash this piracy, Aylo's attorneys asked the federal court to mandate the transfer of these domains and ownership of the website's assets to the ownership of Aylo's digital divisions.
This request only comes after Aylo's legal department reportedly made around 680,000 DMCA takedown demands targeting PornXP for copyright infringement. They also filed 2.1 million DMCA notices to Google and other search engines requesting the removal of the offending webpages from search results.
Aylo participated in these DMCA enforcement efforts targeted at 2,040 of its copyrighted works that are shared across 71,400 webpages owned by PornXP. One of the most popular domain names for PornXP brings in 7 million monthly visitors. The complaint also notes that roughly 18 percent of the PornXP visitors come from the United States digital space.
“Defendants did not remove any content identified in the takedown notices or respond to any of plaintiff’s DMCA takedown notices,” the initial complaint reads.
To eventually identify the "John Does" in the lawsuit, the federal judge on the case, U.S. District Judge Benjamin H. Settle, granted a discovery request for Aylo's attorneys to identify the owners of the various PornXP domain names.
Settle ruled in federal court on June 30, "This includes but is not limited to names, addresses, login information, billing and transaction records, account information, server logs and IP addresses, email exchanges, and IP login information related to the accounts for the PornXP domain names."
This entails subpoenaing domain companies like Porkbun, NameSilo, Spaceship, GoDaddy, the Public Interest Registry, Privacy Protect, and Private by Design.
