PornHub is Going After BitTorrent Users Who Share its Videos

• PornHub’s parent company is targeting 16594 BitTorrent users from Sweden, who pirated its videos.
• In total, they are asking for a settlement of approximately twelve million USD, or $722 for each person.
• Adult industry firms aren’t very lenient when it comes to pirating their works, and they have proved it again in the past.

The porn industry is very serious when it comes to protecting its copyrights, and the Luxembourg company named “MindGeek Holding” is the leader in the pirate hunting effort. MindGeek owns and operates PornHub, Brazzers, Reality Kings, RedTube, YouPorn, Xtube.com, Nutaku.net, and many other websites and adult film production companies. Thus, they are a giant in the field, employing 1400 people, and having a very rich portfolio of content. They have registered more than ten thousand works at the US copyright office, and they do everything to protect them from unlawful sharing or reproduction.

As the latest news report, MindGeek is riding the wave of BitTorrent user-targeting in Sweden, with 16594 IP addresses populating its list. As we have seen in recent news, the copyright trolling process involves the sending of a shaming letter which accuses the recipient of "filesharing of an erotic movie", and then asks a settlement of 7000 Swedish Krona (approximately $722). If you do the multiplication, you’ll figure out that Pornhub’s parent company is going for a compensation of $11.98 million, which is a pretty significant figure even for adult entertainment giants like themselves.

MindGeek is playing down the goal of collecting money from the BitTorrent users, and claim that they’re doing it to help curb piracy and reduce the rates of unlawful file-sharing. As Mindgreek’s spokesperson, Michael Willis told the press:

“MindGeek, through its exclusive content subsidiary MG Premium, seeks to protect thousands of its copyrighted audiovisual works from blatant infringement. MG Premium is constantly testing and evaluating methods of reducing the extent to which its works are pirated. At different times, these methods can result in targeting website operators, vendors supporting such operators, and in certain cases, end-users who are taking advantage of, or sharing pirated works.”

Last August, MindGeek tried to uncover the identities of individuals who operated CDN (content distribution networks) that shared works belonging to them. The CDNs were hiding behind Cloudflare, who received numerous DMCA notices but didn’t respond positively. This forced MindGeek to secure subpoenas and take the matter over American courts, including hundreds of pages with copyright-infringing URLs in their case folder.