A company called Strike 3, owner of Vixen and Tushy, has clogged US courts with lawsuits, mostly against porn watchers who feel shamed into settling privately

When 73-year-old Tom Brown*, a retired police officer from Seattle, received a letter from Comcast, he might have mistaken it for a broadband bill. Instead, it was a subpoena. He had been sued in federal court for illegally downloading 80 movies. Some of the titles sounded cryptic – Do Not Worry, We Are Only Friends – or banal, like International Relations Part 2. Others were less subtle: He Loved My Big Ass, He Loved My Big Butt, and My Big Booty Loves Anal.

Brown, who had spent decades investigating sex crimes, claimed he had never watched any of them. His years “dealing with pimping”, he wrote in a court filing, left him “with no interest in pornography”. He had been married for 40 years, he did not need to download Hot Wife, another title in the list. But the subpoena did not seem like something he could laugh off. It said he could face damages of up to $150,000 per movie – as much as $12m for all 80 films. If he did not respond promptly, the letter said, Comcast would identify him to the plaintiff in the case: a company called Strike 3 Holdings.

Strike 3 is not a name that Brown, or most people outside the world of copyright law, would recognize. The Delaware-based corporation, formed in 2015, owns the intellectual property rights to a catalog of about 2,000 adult films, mostly made by Vixen Media Group, its porn production subsidiary. It had very little online footprint; no social presence to speak of. But its associates were better known. The company was co-founded by Greg Lansky, the French porn director whose recent pivot to the art world has yielded works such as Algorithmic Beauty, a marble reproduction of the Venus de Milo with breast implants taking a selfie.

  • pageflight@lemmy.worldEnglish
    10·
    15 hours ago

    Thousands of lawsuits follow a similar formula: Strike 3 claims to use a proprietary software called VXN Scan to track IP addresses that have downloaded porn they own. The software cannot identify the user beyond a rough geographic location, so Strike 3 files suit against an anonymous John Doe, and subpoenas their internet service provider (ISP) to unmask the user. The ISP in turn alerts the subscriber – which is when most people find out they have been sued.

    there remain several open questions about its methods. For one, IP addresses are notoriously fickle; it is easy to spoof an IP address through a virtual private network (VPN) or to use someone else’s address via malware that bypasses passwords. More to the point, as Mitch Stoltz, IP litigation director at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, puts it: “In a lot of cases, many, many people are using the same IP address.”

    In order to state a claim, the justices wrote, the plaintiff had to allege “something more” – some additional evidence to establish “a reasonable inference that a subscriber is also an infringer”.

    Strike 3 found their “something more” – namely, the son’s profile on a uTorrent forum, where he wrote things such as “utorrent is a keeper.” But in this case, that was neither here nor there; they had sued Brown, not his son. Strike 3 quickly dropped the claims, and in 2020, a judge sided with Brown on his countersuit, affirming that he had not infringed any copyright and awarding him $47,777.26 in attorney’s fees. It remains the biggest victory any John Doe has notched against Strike 3, and yet for many critics, somewhat bittersweet.

    Sounds like they make a plausible sounding guess, BS that they have evidence, and then with the US legal system being what it is people get scared and pay up.

    For Strike 3 defense lawyers, the larger case presents a new opportunity to scrutinize the porn firm’s piracy detection practices because, according to the complaint, the company tracked Meta’s downloads the same way they had the Does’: VXN Scan. If the case proceeds to trial, it may finally let the public look inside Strike 3’s black box.

    Sounds like a win win for the public: either Strike 3 is shown up as fabricating evidence, or Meta takes a hit for AI training on others’ work.