Adult Movie Firm Subpoenas Verizon for IP Address ID in Copyright Case

U.S. Magistrate Judge Taryn Merkl granted plaintiff Strike 3 Holdings’ motion for discovery, permitting it to serve a subpoena on Verizon Fios for the limited purpose of obtaining the name and address of defendant “John Doe” in a copyright infringement lawsuit, said a Thursday order (docket 1:23-cv-01997) in U.S. District Court for Eastern New York in Brooklyn.

Strike 3, owner of adult motion pictures distributed through adult websites, alleges John Doe, an internet subscriber with IP address 108.41.174.198 from Oct. 27 to Feb. 25, stole its works “on a grand scale.” The defendant used BitTorrent to commit “rampant and wholesale copyright infringement” by downloading 50 movies and distributing them to others over the extended time period, Strike 3 alleged in a March 15 complaint.

John Doe tried to hide the “theft” by “infringing” the content anonymously, said Strike 3, but his ISP, Verizon Fios, can identify the defendant through his or her IP address, said the plaintiff. The company used MaxMind geolocation technology to trace John Doe’s IP address to a physical address within the court’s jurisdiction, said the complaint.

Strike 3 has a “major problem” with internet piracy, said the complaint, saying its videos are among “the most pirated content in the world.” The company developed and owns an infringement detection system, VXN Scan, that it used to discover John Doe used the BitTorrent file network to illegally download and distribute its copyrighted movies, it said.

VXN Scan established direct TCP/IP connections with the defendant’s IP address while he or she was using BitTorrent and then downloaded from the defendant one or more pieces of digital media files, which Strike 3 identified as portions of infringing copies of its movies, it said.

For each copyrighted work at issue, Strike 3 noted the publication date, date of registration and the work’s copyright registration number. It omitted the title of the works from the public filing “due to the adult nature of its content,” but it can provide a version with the videos’ titles upon request, it said.

Strike 3 seeks a permanent injunction, an order that the defendant delete and permanently remove the digital media files related to its works from all computers he or she controls, statutory damages and attorneys’ fees and costs.