SAN FRANCISCO — The Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals on Tuesday reversed a lower court decision and allowed a proposed class action lawsuit over user-uploaded content to move forward against WebGroup Czech Republic (WGCZ), the parent company of tube sites XVideos and XNXX as well as other adult brands.
The lawsuit is sponsored by religiously inspired anti-porn lobby NCOSE, formerly known as Morality in Media. NCOSE has been conducting a high-profile legal campaign to shut down major adult websites over third-party content, including suits filed against Aylo’s Pornhub. All these cases involve attempts to circumvent Section 230 protections, often by appealing to the controversial FOSTA-SESTA carve-out.
NCOSE’s Dani Pinter is one of the Jane Doe plaintiff’s attorneys.
In a published decision, the three-judge panel held that, although WGCZ and related entity NKL Associates are based in the Czech Republic, have servers in the Netherlands and do not have offices or conduct business in the United States, they can be sued by Doe in California.
The court established jurisdiction in the U.S. because of WGCZ’s contracts “with various U.S.-based content delivery networks that temporarily copy content from the Netherlands-based servers to additional servers, including some in the United States,” as well as because of the company’s “work with Google and Twilio to manage emails and PayPal and EPOCH to manage payments” and due to data establishing that the U.S. “is the largest market for both XVideos.com and Xnxx.com,” legal news site Law360 reported.
The lawsuit alleges that videos of Doe when she was a minor were uploaded onto WGCZ’s platforms and then “viewed thousands of times on XVideos and Xnxx.”
Jason Tucker, president of copyright enforcement company Battleship Stance, told XBIZ that the WGCZ ruling is very fact-specific, because it involves both questions of personal jurisdiction and more a specific crime against a minor.
“I believe that if this case didn’t involve this sort of content, the court may have been more open to agreeing that there was an alternative forum to resolve this matter,” Tucker explained. “This case has a long way to go. For example, there may be jurisdictional discovery on all of the other defendants.”
Tucker, who has been working on a noted precedent-setting case concerning U.S. jurisdiction over international websites, on behalf of Japan-based adult entertainment company Will Co., noted that the WGCZ case “is sponsored by an organization that has historically been dead set on dismantling the legal adult industry. That shouldn’t be ignored.”
