MG Premium, the adult entertainment giant behind brands including Reality Kings, Brazzers, MOFOS, Babes.com, and Twistys, appears to be increasing the pressure on sites that allegedly distribute its content without permission.
As previously reported, one of those targets is the massive adult tube site YesPornPlease. This February, MG Premium filed a full-blown lawsuit against the site in a Washington court, potentially worth hundreds of millions of dollars. However, the action began months earlier with a DMCA subpoena directed at Cloudflare.
Through processes like this, MG Premium hopes to obtain crucial identifying information about site operators and/or uploaders. At US courts this week, MG Premium made several similar requests targeting additional adult domains, all of which use the services of Cloudflare.
The first pair of subpoenas, filed at a Washington district court, target YesPornPlease.biz and YesPornPlease.best. Whether these are directly connected to MG’s earlier target isn’t made clear in the applications but the nature of the action is obvious.
“MG is the owner of numerous copyrighted audiovisual works. In the course of protecting its works, MG has determined that infringing copies of these works, posted at the direction of individual users and without authorization from MG, appear on Cloudflare, Inc.’s website ‘yespornplease.biz’,” one of the applications reads.
MG notes that it has been sending DMCA infringement notices to Cloudflare but it is now applying for a DMCA subpoena to obtain the identity of the individuals “who are posting the infringing content.” A closer examination of the wording in the subpoena shows that this can easily extend to the site’s operators too.
“For the period January 1, 2016 through the present, produce all documents and account records that identify the person(s) or entities that caused the infringement of the material described in the attached Exhibit B DMCA notifications to the DMCA Agent for Cloudflare, Inc., and/or who unlawfully uploaded MG Premium Ltd’s copyrighted works at the URLs listed in the notifications, including but not limited to identification by names, email addresses, IP addresses, user history, posting history, physical addresses, telephone numbers, and any other identifying information,” the request reads.
An almost identical application seeks the same information relating to alleged infringers at YesPornPlease.best, a domain that appears to have been put into use around October last year.
A third application, which in most key respects is a copy of the others, targets PornDish.com. At the time of writing and according to SimilarWeb stats, this ‘tube’ site receives just under three million visits per month. Right on its front page it states that visitors can “Watch full premium Sis Loves Me, Brazzers, RealityKings, Teamskeet, Naughty America 2020 HD videos online for free!”, which is probably why MG Premium is interested in the site.
Yet another subpoena application, again filed at a Washington district court, demands the same information relating to watchxxxfree.org. According to traffic statistics, the site didn’t get any significant traction until December 2019 but steep gains since then now mean it’s pulling in around 1.4 million visits per month. This domain triggered malware warnings several times (apparently due to different threats) during our investigation so we backed away carefully.
XTapes.to, another MG Premium target, was also the subject of a cookie-cutter DMCA subpoena this week. With around 3.8 million visits in February, it’s bigger than the also-targeted XMoviesForYou.video but, unlike the latter, didn’t cause MalwareBytes to light up in panic.
Finally, MG Premium also fired off a subpoena application listing a domain called ‘PornForDays.net’ as infringing its rights. Sadly, this had us running round in circles because there is no site of that name and the domain is yet to be registered.
After closely examining additional paperwork, however, it became clear that this was in fact an error by MG Premium’s law firm. The correct domain should have been listed as the 2.9 million visits per month tube site Porn4Days.net, which also triggered malware warnings during our checks.
Where these cases will go from here remains to be seen but if MG Premium’s action against YesPornPlease is any indicator, more lawsuits could appear on the horizon.
The DMCA subpoena applications can be found here (1,2,3,4,5,6,7 (all pdf))
