Wednesday, Apr 21, 2010    Text size: 

Titan claims MonsterCockTube’s Thorsten Palicki and Maik Herrmann pirated nine gay adult films for its membership site.

Further, the gay adult studio says the German pair have attempted to avoid the suit by changing ownership into a bogus offshore company, concealing online assets and "engaging in a game of cat and mouse rather than appear before the court and engage in discovery."

General Counsel Gill Sperlein plans to ask a judge in early June to award Titan a default judgment against the pair after Titan movies found their way to MonsterCockTube.com.

Titan says MonsterCockTube tracked each time someone viewed one of the infringing video files and published the number of views on the website next to the display.

The Titan movies allegedly posted on MonsterCockTube include "110 in Tucson," "Boner," "Cirque Noir," "Crossing the Line," "Gale Force: MR2," "Hell Room," "SeaMen: FA IV," "Telescope" and "White Trash."

One of the videos — "Telescope" — was viewed more than 20,000 times, Titan says.

Palicki and Herrmann, both German citizens, haven't responded to the court relative to the Titan suit for months. The last piece of correspondence sent from U.S. District Court in San Francisco earlier this month was stamped "return to sender."

Since serving the pair at a Florida adult trade show in August, Herrmann and Palicki have communicated from Germany to Chesney that they can’t be tried for civil liability in the U.S.

As German citizens and business owners, the pair said, “only the constitutional principles of the Federal Republic of Germany for us as non-Americans are valid.”

“I would ask you to instruct [Titan] to send us the complaint with the constitutional principles of [Germany],” Palicki and Herrmann at the time wrote.

With the upcoming hearing, Titan plans to show that the pair all along have been stringing the studio and the courts along.

"The facts here clearly portray defendants sneering in the face of copyright owners and copyright laws," Titan said in a brief to the court. "Defendants knew their actions violated the law. Their strategy was simply to avoiding identification and to evade the jurisdiction of U.S. courts.

"They formed and dissolved business entities, transferred assets, and blocked plaintiff’s IP address so employees could no longer view their websites."

Titan Media's Keith Webb told XBIZ that operators of MonsterCockTube now face a "textbook example of what not to do when you get caught stealing Titan content."

"Instead of acting like responsible members of the adult industry, these two chose to show the sleazy side of the adult industry," he said.

"Instead of handling this like responsible business owners, they instead chose to play a shell game of avoidance and lies. Instead of owning up to their mistakes and trying to make good, they chose to further complicate their legal troubles and dig themselves an even deeper hole."