LOS ANGELES — Since March 2013 through today, Malibu Media, better known as X-Art.com, has filed about 1,900 lawsuits against individuals and groups of individuals for copyright infringement via peer-to-peer file-sharing sites.
Earlier this month, the adult company caught a large piracy fish, perhaps its biggest fish ever, when it won a default judgment against defendant L. Sagala from Muskegon, Mich.
Sagala, according to a federal court decision, was ordered to pay $40,500 for downloading X-Art films via BitTorrent. The defendant did not defend the suit despite being served.
Malibu Media counsel said that Sagala and others, characterized as working in a swarm, “materially aided each of the other participants in the BitTorrent swarm of infringers.” The defendant was called a “regular and persistent” BitTorrent users in the suit.
“This swarm contained thousands of peers and continues to grow,” counsel said. “Plaintiff’s actual damages are the lost sales of its content to those thousands of infringers. In the aggregate, these lost sales far exceed $40,500.”
U.S. District Court Judge Robert Jonkert granted Malibu Media’s damages request, as well as $1,649 in attorneys fees.