The company has pursued copyright infringers aggressively for years, including a $1.5 million damages award against a defendant who shared its films on BitTorrent and a high-profile clash with an unnamed television executive that was eventually settled.
This week, the company continues its legal pressure with a complaint filed last week at the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Illinois. The lawsuit targets the owner and administrators of private BitTorrent tracker Gay-Torrents.org, the company that allegedly receives the site’s revenue, and 325 individual members identified only by their site usernames.
Site Owner, Admins, and a Bulgarian Company
Gay-Torrents.org is a private, invite-only BitTorrent tracker that has operated since June 2009. According to the complaint, more than 146,000 members registered at the site since its launch, of which 20,671 members are currently active.
The complaint largely targets unnamed defendants, including the site’s alleged operator, who goes by the handle “TheMan”. According to Flava, “TheMan” was one of the first registered members, using the site’s official email address as the main contact.
In addition to the operator, seven administrators are also named as John Doe defendants, identified only by their site usernames: sgmusuk, jasepl, Marius, ams_guy, lucasneo, simlacroix, and matthewmancs. According to the complaint, matthewmancs alone has generated more than 470 terabytes of upload and download traffic, the largest sharing volume of any user.
Flava does not only list unnamed defendants; it also identifies BYZONA LTD, a Bulgarian company, as being involved. This company and its operator are allegedly linked to 247host.eu and cloud2max.club. These are shell entities, which Flava believes are used to route VIP-membership payments through Skrill and PayPal, while concealing the site’s true beneficiaries.
The complaint alleges that the two shells together have generated more than €7 million in revenue since 2009. This is not an exact calculation, but based on Flava’s analysis of the site’s VIP pricing, donation records, and the registered member data.
“Straight-Up Extortion”
This is not the first time that Flava has targeted users of the private torrent tracker. In fact, the complaint quotes the site’s owner characterizing FlavaWorks’ enforcement as a scam. Last December, TheMan posted on the Gay-Torrents.org forum in response to a member who had received a cease and desist letter from the studio.
Posting under his “Owner” account, TheMan wrote: “This is straight-up extortion, and people shouldn’t fall for it.”
TheMan also told users the studio had been “uploading their own shitty content themselves just so they can blackmail users afterwards,” and claimed: “We deleted all of their stuff a long time ago.”
Flava’s complaint points out that the private tracker did not remove all contested content, as 47 of the 56 infringing links it reported in February 2024 remained active on the site twenty months later. Some of the infringing content remained accessible when the lawsuit was filed, the company adds.
A French Uploader and 325 Registered Users
The lawsuit doesn’t only focus on the alleged owner and administrators; it also lists a prolific uploader who is identified as the Frenchman Ludovic D. This defendant allegedly purchased two paid subscriptions to FlavaWorks-affiliated sites in 2004 and 2013, which were both traceable to the same email address and other personal details.
Since Flava uses a forensic-watermarking system to link videos to registered users, it could track the man’s account to more than thirty videos that were uploaded to the torrent tracker.
“Defendant [D.] cancelled his subscription approximately thirty days after purchase, on the same day as his final download session—a pattern consistent with bulk acquisition for redistribution rather than ordinary consumption,” the complaint reads.
In addition to the named Frenchman, the complaint also lists 325 “John Doe” defendants who are only known by their usernames. These users all allegedly shared Flava’s copyrighted works, are based in the U.S., were active in the Gay-Torrents forums, and purchased VIP memberships.
Courts have previously been wary of joining this many Doe defendants in a single lawsuit. Flava recognizes this and specifically notes that this isn’t part of a mass settlement scheme, while promising to dismiss all defendants who don’t fall under the court’s jurisdiction.
“This is not a mass-joinder action seeking to extract settlements from non-resident Doe defendants in a distant forum,” the complaint reads.
‘$7 Million’ Asset Freeze and More
Flava also requests an asset freezing order targeting the assets in the Skrill account associated with BYZONA and the PayPal account associated with cloud2max.club. Those can be as high as €7,000,000, the complaint notes. That is an estimation based on Flava’s calculations, assuming that no funds were spent or taken out in 17 years.
In addition, the complaint also asks the court to direct Cloudflare to preserve all records relating to the gay-torrents.org domain, including DNS configuration records and customer communications, without taking the site offline.
In total, the complaint lists seven counts, including copyright claims for direct, contributory, and vicarious infringement, and a separate inducement count against the alleged operator and administrators.
To support these secondary liability claims, Flava cites the Supreme Court’s recent ruling in Cox Communications v. Sony, arguing that the Bulgarian shell entities are “tailored to infringement” and without any “substantial noninfringing use.”
The remaining three are state-law claims for unjust enrichment, civil conspiracy, and fraudulent concealment. The latter is built around the alleged payment-routing scheme through 247host.eu and cloud2max.club.
As compensation, Flava requests statutory damages of up to $150,000 per work for willful infringement. The exact number of works is not listed, but with hundreds of titles in Flava’s catalog, the potential damages run into the many millions of dollars.
Finally, it is worth noting that this is not Flava’s only case against a private torrent tracker. Last March, the adult company filed a copyright lawsuit against an alleged Canadian leaker of its videos, as well as 47 users of the private torrent tracker GayTorrent.ru. This lawsuit remains pending at the Illinois federal court.
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A copy of the complaint, filed this week by FlavaWorks Entertainment, Inc. at the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Illinois, is available here (pdf).
