CHICAGO — Flava Works today filed a $1.2 million lawsuit against well-known mainstream TV exec Marc Juris for allegedly distributing its gay black and Latino online content on file-sharing sites.
Juris is the network president and general manager of WE tv, the AMC Network-owned digital cable and satellite TV channel.
Flava Works, in a suit filed at Chicago federal court, said that Juris joined its membership site, copied content and later posted it on sites with peer-to-peer file-sharing technology.
Phil Bleicher, Flava Works founder and CEO, told XBIZ today that Juris was issued a cease-and-desist over alleged sharing and urged to settle out of court. But Juris refused, he said.
“We have ample evidence to prove that its him — from matching emails, IP, logs and usernames — and he continued to share our copyrighted works,” Bleicher said. “Now we are suing him for $1.2 million.”
Bleicher said that Juris recently sought out a judicial declaration from a federal judge that he didn’t infringe on the website network. That court action, however, did not include Juris’ name; the plaintiff is identified only as a John Doe.
In that legal matter, Doe argued that Flava Works extorts subscribers by filing boilerplate lawsuits without identifying users by name.
“Defendant Flava Works operates pornographic websites for gay men. Capitalizing on the social stigma of its own product, Flava Works has apparently discovered a lucrative side business: extorting money from former subscribers by threatening to expose them as consumers of gay porn,” Doe said in the separate complaint.
“Even if the accusation is false, most users reluctantly pay rather than be outed in court documents as a gay porn user — especially if the victim has chosen to keep his sexual orientation private,” Doe said.
Armed with evidence, however, Bleicher said that he’s fingered the right individual and added that Flava Works is planning to file a series of lawsuits against “other alleged copyright infringers who are members of Gay-Torrents.org, GayTorrent.ru and several other illegal file-sharing websites soon to put an end to the rampant stealing of intellectual property.”
Flava Works operates FlavaMen.com, MixItUpBoy.com, ThugBoy.com, RawRods.com, PapiCock. com and CocoDorm.com, among other gay ethnic porn sites.
“Flava Works models and staff spend countless hours producing our high-quality videos and images only to have a few people steal them and distribute to these illegal file-sharing websites,” Bleicher told XBIZ. "This will stop, one lawsuit at a time."
Doe's attorney, Ben Meiselas of Geragos & Geragos, did not immediately respond for comment by XBIZ post time.