If you’re in the business of stealing porn movies and clips, odds are you don’t have copies of 2257 paperwork.
And that’s the new legal front in the war against porn piracy. This week www.xbiz.com reported two stories where an obvious solution may become the most practical one in combating cyber thievery and unfair business practices.
This week Pink Visual filed a copyright infringement suit against Motherless.com its operator Joshua Lange and 20 John Does in a unique “secondary producers” offense involving 2257s or the lack thereof.
In filing the suit, counsel for Pink Visual said that porn distributors spend enormous sums to comply with the 2257 law and the defendants instead are showing disregard to federal rules that apply to the legal porn business, as well as disregard to ownership of intellectual property.
Not complying with the regulations of 2257 gives them an unfair business advantage over rule-abiding companies.
Nineteen copyrighted scenes of adult content owned by Pink Visual's parent company, Ventura Content, were found on the motherless.com site, according to the suit which was filed at U.S. District Court at Los Angeles.
The other porn suit to use the 2257 angle involved the San Francisco-based- XPays which filed a complaint against Bit Torrent users who shared the Paris Hilton sex tape.
Borrowing a strategy which was first employed when Vivid filed a lawsuit against PornoTube in 2008 [later settled] using the 2257 angle in a copyright infringement case, XPays named 995 John Does as defendants acting as "secondary producers" as it relates to 18 U.S.C. § 2257.
“...And they are subject to all of the requirements imposed on 'secondary producers' by the 2257 regulations," the suit said. XPays is seeking injunctive relief, prohibiting each defendant from further infringing on its copyright, and damages from the Does.
XPays in January filed a similar suit against 843 Does, but did not include language in its original complaint relative to possible 2257 violations among the Does.
XPays obtained the rights in 2004 to sell, market and otherwise exploit the Hilton video, also known as "1 Night in Paris," on the Internet. Red Light District has the exclusive rights for DVD distribution.
