HONOLULU — Strike 3 Holdings, the copyright holder for the Vixen Media Group brands, has partnered with a Hawaiian law firm to expand its persistent strategy of filing multiple infringement lawsuits in federal court against unidentified downloaders.
The Los Angeles-based production studio partnered with Honolulu attorney Christian Kamau and his firm Virtuesq in 2022, local outlet Civil Beat reported, noting that the company has filed 132 lawsuits in the Hawaiian capital’s U.S. district court since then.
Virtuesq describes its practice as combining “modern legal expertise with the spirit of Hawaii.”
The Civil Beat report cited a still-open case before U.S. Magistrate Judge Wes Reber Porter, who cautiously allowed for it to move forward without naming the defendants, citing precedent that “an allegation that an individual illegally downloaded adult entertainment may relate to matters of a sensitive and highly personal nature, including one’s sexuality.”
As XBIZ reported, Strike 3 has for years been the subject of much fascination in the legal world for not backing down from its lawsuit-heavy approach, even after judges rebuked other practitioners of the same strategy. In 2022, legal analysis news site Law360 noted that the company’s legal gambit had proven profitable even though “several adverse court rulings have dismantled controversial business models that center on filing a high volume of infringement suits accusing internet users of downloading copyright-protected pornographic movies.”
The Law360 article describes Strike 3's strategy this way: “After targeting anonymous Internet Protocol addresses, the plaintiffs use the suits to file ex parte subpoenas to demand internet service providers turn over information to identify the subscribers attached to the addresses. Armed with that information, the plaintiffs then pursue the defendants, who often pay small amounts to settle because they are too embarrassed to fight the allegations or don't want the expense of hiring an attorney.”
