MindGeek is one of the leading players in the adult entertainment industry.
MindGeek is one of the leading players in the adult entertainment industry. Formerly known as Manwin, MindGeek conquered the online adult market over the past decade by offering free porn to the masses.
The Copyright Switch
With help from user-uploaded videos, the company created massive databases of adult entertainment, much to the frustration of incumbent adult industry companies that often found pirated copies of their content on the site.
This bold business model paid off with billions of visits that provided a sizable revenue stream through sites such as Pornhub, YouPorn, Redtube, Tube8, Xtube, and dozens of others. And as MindGeek’s stature rose, it also transformed into a major rightsholder itself.
This imperium also includes a lot of copyrighted content. MindGeek subsidiary MG Premium, for example, owns brands including Brazzers and has more than 10,000 works registered at the US copyright office which it actively protects.
MindGeek’s subsidiary regularly files lawsuits against ‘pirate’ tube sites and users of peer-to-peer networks. The most impressive numbers come from its DMCA takedown campaign, which has been ramping up for over a decade.
121 Million URLs Since January
At the time of writing, MG Premium is the most prolific sender of DMCA notices to Google, according to the search giant’s transparency report. Since January this year, the adult company asked the search engine to remove more than 121 million allegedly infringing URLs.
MindGeek’s subsidiary officially began sending takedown notices in 2014 and since then has submitted well over half a billion links; 561,222,215 to be precise.
These numbers make MG Premium the copyright holder behind most DMCA notices to Google overall. The company reported nearly twice as many notices as the runner-up, anime publisher Viz Media. Music Group BPI reported slightly more URLs but it represents multiple rightsholders.
~60% Removal Rate
Not all reported URLs were removed from Google’s search results. The totals also include duplicates and URLs that were not indexed. For 1.6% of the links, Google decided not to take action, which suggests that no infringing content was found. This remaining 60.% was indeed removed, which translates to 327 million URLs
MindGeek also received DMCA notices for its own platforms. However, on PornHub, this number went down dramatically after the site started to verify uploaders.
All in all, it’s intriguing to see how MindGeek managed to transform itself from a company that was scolded for copyright infringement to one that protects (its own) copyrights at all costs.
