LONDON — Sky UK Ltd. has sent out letters to thousands of its broadband customers warning them that they could receive demand letters from Golden Eye International for porn downloaded through torrent sites.
Golden Eye, the company that owns copyrights for Ben Dover Productions content, earlier this year won a court order that forced Sky to hand over customer data corresponding to IP addresses infringing on its poached content.
In the letters to customers, Sky wrote: “We need to let you know about a court order made against Sky earlier this year that requires us to provide your name and address to another company.
“A company called Golden Eye International, which owns rights to several copyrighted films, has claimed that a number of Sky Broadband customers engaged in unlawful file sharing of some of its films.
“In support of this claims Golden Eye International says it has gathered evidence of individual broadband accounts (identified online by unique numbers called IP addresses) from which it claims the file sharing took place.”
It’s not the first time Golden Eye has targeted a mass amount of infringers of it porn content.
Two years ago more than 6,000 O2 network customers received letters alleging they downloaded Ben Dover content without permission after winning permission from the court. Golden Eye was seeking £700 per film for copyright infringement.
Julian Becker, Golden Eye spokesman and Ben Dover producer, told XBIZ that the studio and others it represents have every right to go after porn pirates with demand letters threatening legal action.
“As a well-known U.K. producer and distributor of adult content the levels of piracy that we are experiencing are astronomical and show no signs of dissipating,” Becker said. “Producers that we distribute for from the U.S are also experiencing similar crippling levels of infringement of their content.
“Therefore we felt it necessary to once again apply for a disclosure order to the courts against SKY UK Ltd. for them to release the personal details of their customers who we have evidence have infringed both ours and our client’s copyrighted content.
“The court once again agreed that there was a prima facie breach of copyright of both ours and our clients content and therefore granted the order in our favor.”
