Don't Download X-Art Porn Torrents: Copyright Owner Malibu Media Is Most Litigious Plaintiff In The US

You don’t want to come home after a long day at work to open up your mailbox and find a letter from Malibu Media. The obscure porn production company, which has been accused of bullying customers into unfair settlements, has filed more copyright infringement lawsuits than any other plaintiff in the U.S. since 2009. And it usually gets it way.

Malibu Media LLC has filed 4,332 of the 6,058 copyright infringement suits launched in the United States since 2009, according to a new report from the legal analytics firm Lex Machina and obtained by TorrentFreak. The second-most active plaintiff is Dallas Buyers Club LLC, a company launched to pursue illegal downloads of the 2013 Matthew McConaughey film, with 274 cases.

Malibu Media started shooting adult films in 2009 and released them via X-Art.com, a popular erotica website. It identifies alleged downloaders by their computer IP addresses, which are exposed when downloaders save files with the BitTorrent protocol. In downloading a torrent, users are required to upload part of the file, revealing their online fingerprint.

The problem is that parties ranging from federal judges to the Electronic Frontier Foundation have portrayed Malibu Media as the personification of the shadowy legal practice known as porn trolling. Porn trolling occurs when porn production companies formally accuse defendants of illegally downloading videos and include a list of the salacious, often gross, movie titles in the court complaint. Included in many of the lists are a number of films where Malibu Media doesn’t even own the copyright.

The logic is simple: Either settle out of court or forever have your name publicly associated with stealing pornography.

“One needn’t be a cynic to suppose that an intended purpose -- perhaps the primary purpose of [including the film titles in] the complaint in each of these lawsuits is to increase the pressure on a subsequently identified John Doe defendant to settle before s/he is publicly linked to hardcore/deviant titles that are completely irrelevant to a plaintiff’s actual claims in the lawsuit,” Magistrate Judge Stephen L. Crocker wrote in one of the many rulings admonishing Malibu Media.

Just 137 of the 6,058 cases went to court since 2009, where 126 ended in default judgment (settlement benefitting the plaintiff), 10 consent judgments and only one case resulting in a full trial, according to TorrentFreak.

Malibu Media was awarded $3,048,450 in damages during the period in question. The vast majority of those dollars came in the form of default judgments. The next largest amount was the $330,750 awarded to the parties representing the animated movie “Zambezia.”

“If you’re filing three lawsuits per day, that very much looks like an abusive model,” Ben Depoorter, professor at the University of California, Hastings College of Law, told the New Yorker. “Some judges may say this looks like a business model. On the other hand, infringement is infringement.”