TACOMA, Wash. — A federal court awarded on Tuesday over $36 million in copyright damages to MG Premium, a subsidiary of MindGeek, in its two-year legal battle against the owners and operators of the site YesPornPlease.com, and ordered the infringing domain to be transferred to the plaintiff.
As XBIZ reported, MG Premium, a MindGeek company described by its lawyers as "among the world's leading providers of adult entertainment content," filed a complaint for damages and injunctive relief against the operators of YesPornPlease.com and VShare.io in March 2020.
MG Premium alleged that defendants Thomas Zang, Howard Stroble, Mathew Bradley, Michael Goal and Mateusz Czajka owned and operated "websites engaged in the business of copying and distributing infringing audiovisual works" under the guise of "acting as a distributor of user-generated content."
The original complaint included over 60 pages in spreadsheet format listing 3,078 videos that MG Premium alleges YesPornPlease pirated.
In his default judgment — originally reported by the TorrentFreak news site — Judge Benjamin H. Settle awarded statutory damages in favor of MG Premium of $15,000 for each of 2,433 offending videos, totaling $36,495,000.
MG Premium had originally requested maximum statutory damages for losses it assessed at $727 million.
The judge noted that MG Premium is unlikely to collect the awarded damages from the defendants.
Battleship Stance’s Jason Tucker consulted on the case on behalf of MG Premium.
“What’s important is that the judge ordered the domain transfer,” Tucker told XBIZ. “Our team worked hard on this case. We are pleased with the outcome and believe this case sets a precedent. Pirate operators should take notice.”