TACOMA, Wash. — A Washington District Court has ruled that MindGeek subsidiary MG Premium is entitled to ownership of the mirrored sites, and some social media accounts, established by the former owner and operator of DaftSex.com to sidestep the court’s piracy ruling against him.
As XBIZ reported, in November 2022 Vasily Kharchenko was ordered by the same court to surrender his domains and pay $32 million in damages to MG Premium over copyright violations related to content owned by the Montreal-headquartered adult conglomerate.
MG Premium sued Kharchenko — owner and operator of DaftSex.com, ArtsPorn.com, Daxab.com and Biqle.com — alleging that those sites had “displayed adult oriented videos and content to millions of viewers in the United States” and had offered 2,143 instances of MindGeek’s copyrighted works.
According to the order issued Thursday, Kharchenko is aware of the decision and has been served, but failed to appear or defend his position.
Kharchenko, the order asserts, “has since taken steps to avoid the Court’s Order.”
MG Premium demonstrated to the judge’s satisfaction that, following the transfer of his original domains — Daftsex.com, Artsporn.com, and Biqle.com — to the plaintiff, Kharchenko relocated them to mirrored sites Daft.sex, Dsex.to, and Biqle.org.
The judge ruled that MG Premium or its designee is entitled to be the registrar of record for those mirrored sites, and confirmed that right to the operators of the .sex, .to and .org registries.
The court also established that MG Premium is entitled to be the owner of record of the @Daftpost account on X — formerly Twitter — and of the daftsex.github.io and daftpost.github.io Github accounts.
According to the plaintiff, Kharchenko used those social media accounts to inform viewers about the new mirrored sites that he had set up to continue sharing the copyrighted content once hosted through Daftsex.com and his other two sites.
MG Premium may now present the order to any domain name registrar, and any resulting transfer shall be done at MG Premium’s reasonable expense.
Last year, when U.S. District Judge Benjamin H. Settle ruled in favor of MindGeek, he also ordered Kharchenko to pay the company’s legal fees in the amount of $27,297.50.
At the time, a MindGeek rep told XBIZ, “We are extremely pleased with the court’s decision, which is crucial to MindGeek’s fight to eliminate piracy of its content. Decisions such as this help contribute to restoring the rights of thousands of content owners who suffer because of illegal pirate sites such as DaftSex.”