Mindgeek has made its fortune operating some of the world’s most popular brands including Brazzers and Digital Playground.
The company has also generated substantial revenues from its ‘tube’ site operations including the instantly recognizable Pornhub, RedTube, and YouPorn. In common with vanilla counterparts such as YouTube, these platforms have been heavily criticized for carrying large volumes of copyrighted content but Mindgeek also has a ‘tube’ site problem of its own.
When content belonging to Mindgeek companies appears on third-party upload platforms, the company takes action to stop this infringing behavior, filing huge volumes of takedown notices and sometimes taking matters even further.
MG Premium Targets Daftsex
The latest action from subsidiary MG Premium targets a tube site called Daftsex. While fans will be only too aware of what it offers, others might be surprised at the platform’s scale.
According to SimilarWeb stats, Daftsex.com receives an impressive 66 million visits every month, making it the 347th most popular site on the entire Internet. MG Premium believes that at least some of that traffic is due to people viewing illegal copies of its copyrighted content.
In a request for a DMCA subpoena filed this month, MG asked a Washington court to compel Cloudflare to hand over the details of the people behind Daftsex and two less well-known platforms, Crazycloud.ru and Daxab.com. The company explained that it had served DMCA notices on Cloudflare previously, in compliance with the DMCA subpoena process.
Indeed, according to the proposed subpoena, MG served a copyright infringement notice on Cloudflare’s DMCA agent on June 22, listing 60 URLs containing MG content. A cursory examination of the content in question reveals that many if not all URLs link to content distributed under the Reality Kings brand. The vast majority of that content is still live but at least one URL now displays the message below.
“The purpose of the DMCA Subpoena is to obtain information sufficient to identify alleged infringers who, without authorization from MG, posted material to the webpages daftsex.com, crazycloud.ru, and daxab.com, all three of which infringed copyrights held by MG,” the proposed text reads.
Subpoena Requires Cloudflare to Hand Over Identifying Information
The information being demanded dates from January 2016 to the present, with MG requesting access to “all documents and account records” that identify the person or entities that “caused the infringement” of the listed content, including but not limited to names, email addresses, IP addresses, user history, posting history, physical addresses, telephone numbers, and more.
Whether this exercise will deliver the required information is unclear but MG appears keen to prevent Daftsex from continuing its upwards traffic trend. At the start of the year, the tube site was receiving around 44 million visits per month but has since enjoyed a 50% boost in traffic.
This increase has been achieved despite a notable increase in anti-piracy activity carried out against the platform by MG Premium. According to Google’s transparency report, the Mindgeek-owned company has sent takedown notices to Google targeting more than 823,000 Daftsex URLs, with a notable spike in sending during the early months of this year.
The DMCA subpoena documents can be found here (pdf)
