Specializing in adult content, the sites will be familiar to many readers since they were heavily promoted by the now-defunct Empornium and PureTNA BitTorrent trackers several years ago.

Fraserside alleged that both EmpFlix and TNAflix were guilty of contributory, vicarious and the inducing of copyright infringement along with various other trademark and other infringements.

The adult company served a copy of a summons and complaint on Youngtek agent in Cyprus during April 2011 (but not in Greek, the local language), and followed this by initiating the process for default judgment in the United States. Along with argument that Youngtek had not been properly served, the company filed a motion to set aside any default. During July 2011, U.S. District Court Judge Mark W. Bennett sided with Youngtek and denied Fraserside’s motion.

By April 2012 things had switched around somewhat, with Youngtek filing a motion for summary judgment on the basis that it is a not a United States-based company nor does it have connections to Iowa where it was being sued.

In December 2012 Fraserside objected, claiming that Youngtek’s online activities were enough to establish a sufficient basis for specific personal jurisdiction under Iowa’s long-arm statute.

The adult company said it could show that one person with an Iowa IP address had purchased a three-day premium membership for one of Youngtek’s websites for one dollar. The company also said that during a period of two years EmpFlix had 1.248 million visits from Iowa users (0.17% of its total traffic) and TNAflix had 2.197 million (0.14%). Both sites, Fraserside said, also used US-registered .com domains.

But would this be enough to hold a foreign company liable for alleged infringements carried out in the United States? According to the Judge, absolutely not.

Despite accepting that TNAflix, Empflix and Youngtek had “intentionally infringed Fraserside’s registered copyrights and trademarks”, in a ruling handed down yesterday District Court Judge Mark W. Bennett decided in favor of Youngtek and granted the company’s motion to dismiss.

“Youngtek is a Cyprus based company. Youngtek has no offices in Iowa, no employees in Iowa, no telephone number in Iowa, and no agent for service of process in Iowa. No Youngtek officer or director has ever visited Iowa,” the Judge began.

“Youngtek does not maintain any of its servers in Iowa. Youngtek’s complete absence of contacts with the State of Iowa is the antithesis of the type of continuous and systematic contacts necessary for exercising general personal jurisdiction over it,” he added.

Judge Bennett said that the sale of a single three-day pass to one user did not demonstrate “intentional, continuous, and substantial contacts with Iowa”, adding that Fraserside had failed to show that Iowa courts have general jurisdiction over Youngtek.

So what about the millions of visits to the sites from Iowa users? Still no good according to the Court.

“Fraserside has offered no materials whatsoever to support its assertion that visitors to Youngtek’s websites from the United States have uploaded, downloaded, or viewed Fraserside’s films,” Judge Bennett wrote, adding that no evidence had been presented to show that Youngtek bought its domains through a US company either.

“Fraserside’s utter lack of any evidentiary materials to support its assertions is particularly surprising since Fraserside’s submission comes after over six months of jurisdictional discovery,” he added.

Judge Bennett concluded by stating that the maintenance of the lawsuit would “offend traditional notions of fair play and substantial justice” and dismissed the case.

Evan Fray-Witzer of Ciampa Fray-Witzer and co-counsel Val Gurvits of the Boston Law Group, the lawfirms that defended Youngtek, say this kind of case has parallels with many of the copyright-troll style lawsuits the U.S. is witnessing at the moment. Fray-Witzer says there are a dozen more similar cases against other sites currently underway.

“We think that these kinds of lawsuits are simply higher-end versions of the BitTorrent suits – an attempt to shake down foreign cloud storage companies by suing them in far flung jurisdictions under the threat of having their businesses shut down through pre-trial asset and domain name seizures,” Fray-Witzer told TorrentFreak.

“The decision [in the Youngtek case] is an important one because the Court took a real hard look at some cutting edge jurisdictional questions and said that it’s not enough simply to show that there were a lot of visitors to a site from the United States.”

Fray-Witzer adds that the decision by Judge Bennett was the right one.

“If our courts start dragging foreign companies and individuals into the U.S. simply because they run a site where infringing materials may have been posted, then there’s no good argument that U.S. citizens and companies can’t get dragged into Court in China (or wherever) because they host a site that speaks favorably of Falun Gong or the Dalai
Lama,” he concludes.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

Rumors continued to persist in connection with their sudden vows of chastity, with the AVN porn industry website reporting that the owners of both Empornium and PureTNA had been seen the week before at one of their trade shows in Las Vegas.

Regardless of the specific ins-and-outs, the effect of site refugees fleeing to other trackers was immediate. The pressure was perhaps felt most deeply at rival porn tracker Cheggit.

“After this latest fiasco, any stat you can think of (web, torrent or tracker) at least doubled over the span of about 4 days,” Cheggit admin Chip told TorrentFreak.

“After some help from our host and some reconfiguring, we’ve got things in order with our servers running the site pretty smoothly. There is still the odd error that will cause a slow down, but that’s to be expected considering the unplanned and hurried fashion in which the server reconfig came about.”

As Cheggit’s ranks become increasingly swollen with new and eager members, the mass debate now centers on where else porn aficionados can spend some me-time.

With the help of ex-PureTNA and Empornium users we’ve compiled a list of alternatives / replacements which can be found below. Both public and private sites are included, but only those that are currently accepting new sign ups. Those that aren’t immediately welcoming to complete strangers are excluded.

* If you’re looking to download torrents anonymously and avoid the prying eyes of third parties we strongly recommend BTGuard.

Then the rest of our stimulus package, in no particular order….

Links removed upon Google’s request.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

For the last few days the huge BitTorrent porn trackers Empornium and PureTNA have been dark, with both sites routing to 127.0.0.1. Understandably, users of the sites have been pretty concerned since these pair of giants, which are connected by the same management, have massive memberships and are long-standing mainstays of the community.

To give an idea of size, PureTNA had in excess of 1,329,500 members, Empornium a similar number. At last count PureTNA’s database sat at nearly 67,000 torrents servicing around 630,000 peers. Empornium listed more than 82,000 torrents and 660,000 peers. That’s a hell of a lot of filth and depravity, just how their members liked it.

But for their users, speaking of the sites in the permanent past tense is the sad reality today. The management of both Empornium and PureTNA have confirmed to TorrentFreak that they are “offline permanently”. Requests for elaboration were declined, but a comment obtained from Breeze, the manager of both sites, said simply: “Such is bittorrent life.”

So considering that both sites had continued to grow, both in terms of torrents and membership, why suddenly close down?

The main unconfirmed rumor to have gained traction is that due to a lack of investment in code development, both sites have been vulnerable to malicious attacks. This resulted in one or both of the sites being hacked in recent days. Rather than pump money into the sites to prevent this happening again, their hard drives were wiped by the sites’ owners to protect user privacy, or so the story goes.

The other rumor, which is circulating on the fringes of the adult entertainment industry, is that the sites buckled under legal pressure, or at least the threat of it. As can be seen from a list retrievable via Google cache which was updated only last week, dozens of porn sites and studios have issued some kind of legal “do not upload” orders to the sites.

While there may be some triumphant gloating from elements of the porn industry, these lists could merely be an indication that both sites were trying to stay within the law by abiding by the desires of copyright holders who preferred for their material not to be shared on the sites. In any event, with the demise of both sites, that point is moot.

Interestingly, although PureTNA is still listed by Google, a similar search for Empornium draws a a complete blank. As far as the world’s leading search engine is concerned, Empornium doesn’t exist. In the future, those looking for nostalgia will have to settle for the Empornium song from Futuristic Sex Robotz which lives on with YouTube.

Whatever the reason – hackings, legal pressure, a combination of the two or just plain old lack of interest in continuing – the sites are not coming back so for BitTorrent porn consumers this certainly marks the end of an era.

Whether Cheggit can cope with the Empornium/PureTNA refugees will remain to be seen. Their servers, in common with the actors in the videos they index, are likely to be puffing and panting for some time.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

Two of the largest adult BitTorrent communities are Empornium and PureTNA. Both sites have well over half a million members, and these giants are a thorn in the side of the adult entertainment industry. Copyright issues don’t seem to be the largest threat for these sites though – adult YouTube-type spinoffs are – and they are taking over quickly.

Streaming adult content appears to be much more appealing to the Internet user out for a quick fix. They are easily accessible and offer instant gratification, with many not even requiring the user to sign up. While some would argue that the wait for a complete download is half the fun, the majority of the porn surfers are not interested in such foreplay.

The popularity of these streaming sites didn’t go unnoticed at the adult BitTorrent communities either. Both Empornium and PureTNA have launched their very own ‘tube’ alternatives, realizing that’s what the public seems to want nowadays. Not without success too, as the streaming sites they launched are outgrowing the BitTorrent sites in number of visitors.

PureTNA is currently hiring for their streaming site, and they have some interesting job offers. They are looking for a part-time porn expert with “encyclopedic knowledge of Porn Stars, Labels, Studios and the Adult Industry”, among other things, hoping to expand the site even further.

It is interesting to see how quickly these torrent sites have adapted to the demands of the market. Hollywood could learn a thing or two from them, as instead of aggressively promoting their old technology, they simply acted in response to the public’s demands.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

Today, users searching Google for Empornium.us are met with a warning under the URL: “This site may harm your computer”. After ignoring the warning and clicking the link using Internet Explorer, the Empornium main page starts loading, but is then punctuated with virus/malware/exploit warnings from an up-to-date anti-virus scanner. Google reports “Malicious software includes 4 trojans, 3 exploits. Successful infection resulted in an average of 11 new processes on the target machine.”

During our tests we caught malware or exploits which seemed to originate from:

hxxp://hardmoviesporno.com/test/exp/update1.pdf
hxxp://ffseik.com/25/2/getfile.php?f=vispdf

At this point we deemed the Google Safe Browsing report to be correct and abandoned our own tests. Accessing the Empornium homepage using Firefox3 caused an immediate halt:

Google notes that the ‘malicious software’ is actually hosted on 4 domains, including gianttopnano.cn, mmcounter.com, filmmultimediaonline.cn. Furthermore it states that two domains appear to be “functioning as intermediaries for distributing malware to visitors of this site” including vxhost.cn, and filmmultimediaonline.cn.

TorrentFreak has contacted Empornium management for a comment, but so far there has been no response.

Update: Empornium Team contacted us, confirming that the malicious code has nothing to do with them and they are “taking action to shut down the infiltration & remove the code asap”. Their own tests so far show it is “exploiting a known & patched security hole in Acrobat”.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

Cheggit went public nearly a day ago but the torrent site already has 20806 registered users, a great success for a site that’s just starting.

Cheggit implements some neat features like a wiki and a tag based search engine.

Cheggit out

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.