Adult entertainment company MG Premium has left no stone unturned in its three-year legal standoff with the operator of piracy sites including the hugely popular ‘DaftSex’.
The first public sign of the battle ahead arrived courtesy of a huge MG Premium DMCA takedown campaign that aimed to remove 832,000 DaftSex URLs from Google search.
Mass copyright takedowns like these should a) make sites like DaftSex harder to find and b) trigger Google’s downranking mechanism which reduces search engine placement in response to DMCA notices.
Then came MG Premium’s application for a DMCA subpoena targeting Cloudflare in the summer of 2020, which hoped to obtain the identity of DaftSex’s operator.
At the time DaftSex was pulling in tens of millions of visits per month and MG Premium’s goal was to reduce that to zero, through the courts if necessary.
MG Premium Files Lawsuit Against the Operator of DaftSex
Filed at the federal court in the District of Washington in 2022, MG Premium went after Vasily Kharchenko, the alleged operator of Daftsex.com, Biqle.com, Daxab.com and other affiliated sites. In response, Kharchenko dug in his heels, failed to appear in the lawsuit, then sat back as District Judge Benjamin Settle awarded MG Premium $32,145,000 in damages in November 2022.
The Judge also signed off on an injunction that authorized the transfer of several domains away from Kharchenko and into MG Premium’s possession.
The MindGeek subsidiary took control of some domains very quickly and redirected them to its own platforms including RedTube. DaftSex acted quickly too; it switched to new domains including Daft.sex, Dsex.to, plus biqle.ru and biqle.org.
In December 2022, MG Premium asked the court to hold Kharchenko in contempt for breaching the injunction. The company also requested permission to take control of the new DaftSex domains at Daft.sex, Dsex.to, and Biqle.org. Since Daftsex was using a Twitter account to inform users of new domains, MG Premium asked the court to issue an order compelling Twitter to either shut down the account or transfer it to MG Premium.
Kharchenko Ignores Order to Show Cause, Judge Runs Out Patience
In his March 2023 order, Judge Settle described MG Premium’s evidence showing Kharchenko violating the injunction, as both “clear and convincing.” Nevertheless, Kharchenko was given yet another chance to participate and informed that he had 30 days to show why he should not be “subject to a bench warrant, to an order holding him in contempt, or to monetary sanctions.”
Having boycotted the entire process to date, and despite being served, Kharchenko failed to comply with the March order. In an order handed down last week, Judge Settle considered MG Premium’s evidence and the laid out the consequences.
After finding that MG Premium’s 2,143 copyrighted works were still being displayed on Daft.sex, Dsex.to, and Biqle.org, Judge Settle found Kharchenko in contempt for violating the injunctions. With that alone unlikely to prevent further infringement, the court came up with a solution to help reduce visibility of the infringing sites.
Judge Declares MG Premium the New Owner of ‘Pirate’ Domains
The section of the order dealing with Kharchenko’s domains initially reads like bad news for MG Premium but then suddenly starts to improve.
“MG Premium has not persuaded the Court that it can or should order non-parties to take concrete steps to prevent the infringement, or as a sanction for Karchenko’s wrongful conduct and his contempt of court,” it begins.
“The Court will not, therefore, Order third parties take affirmative steps to transfer domain name registrars to MG Premium. It will ORDER instead that MG Premium is entitled to ownership of the domain names.” With that, Judge Settle issued the instructions below.
(1) MG Premium or its designee is entitled to be the registrar of record for the domain name Daft.sex, and this Order demonstrates that right to the operator of the .SEX registry, ICM Registry and/or Registry Service, LLSC. Any resulting transfer shall be done at MG Premium’s reasonable expense.
(2) MG Premium or its designee is entitled to be the registrar of record for the domain name Dsex.to, and this Order demonstrates that right to the operator of the .TO registry, Tonic Domains Corp. Any resulting transfer shall be done at MG Premium’s reasonable expense.
(3) MG Premium or its designee is entitled to be the registrar of record for the domain name Biqle.org, and this Order demonstrates that right to the operator of the ORG registry, Public Interest Registry. Any resulting transfer shall be done at MG Premium’s reasonable expense.
Twitter and GitHub Ordered to Eject Kharchenko
Further instructions relate to Kharchenko-operated accounts on Twitter/X and GitHub. The order notes that since MG Premium “is entitled to be the owner of record” of the Twitter account used to communicate with DaftSex users, it should be transferred to the company at “reasonable expense.” The same applies to daftsex.github.io and daftpost.github.io which have been used to inform DaftSex users of new domain names for many months.
Whether any of the above will be enough to prevent ongoing violations of MG Premium’s rights and the terms of the permanent injunction, remains to be seen. Events to date indicate there’s a solid chance that Kharchenko will find ways to circumvent the order. He may have been served but we suspect that his geographical location represents a major roadblock that’s unlikely to be removed for the next several years.
The March order and last week’s contempt order can be found here (1,2,pdf)
