IOWA CITY (AP) — A judge ordered the operators of a pornographic website to pay $4 million for copyright infringement to an Iowa-based adult film company — a ruling that should serve as a deterrent to others who pirate content online, a lawyer said Monday.
U.S. District Judge Mark Bennett in Cedar Rapids entered the judgment last week against Mark and Mina Faragalla of Beaumont, Calif. He ordered them to pay the maximum damages of $150,000 per infringement to Norwood, Iowa-based FraserSide IP LLC, a subsidiary of Nevada-based adult entertainment company Private Media Group Inc., and to stop stealing its copyrighted work.
"Simply having the word 'million' in a judgment sends a message. It is going to be better to comply with copyright laws than to make money from the work of others," said Phoenix attorney Chad Belville, who represents FraserSide. "The only way online piracy will truly be slowed or stopped is to take the financial incentive away."
Belville has filed numerous lawsuits on behalf of FraserSide in recent months as part of a campaign against websites that illegally profit from its intellectual property. FraserSide owns the copyrights to 75 adult films in the United States and other content that is distributed through Internet, television and DVD sales in 45 countries. Belville said the ruling against the Faragallas was one of the largest recent awards for piracy that he was aware of.
Bennett called his ruling "a shot across the bow" against online piracy. He said the website the Faragallas operated was visited by more than 500,000 Internet users daily, making it one of the 2,900 most popular sites in the world. Belville said the Faragallas' site recently stopped operating, but a sister site remains in business.
"The modern-day pirates at issue in this litigation do not wear tricorns and exact their ill-gotten booty at cutlass point, but with a mouse and the Internet. Nonetheless, their theft of property is every bit as lucrative as their brethren in the golden age of piracy," Bennett wrote.
Two percent to 3 percent of the visitors to the Faragallas' site bought memberships that ranged from $3.95 for two days to $100 for six months, and the site made $720,000 per year in advertising revenue, Bennett said.
The site was "a cash cow, made all the more profitable by the fact that its product is the result of pirating copies of others' adult films," he said.
Bennett entered a default judgment against the Faragallas after they did not contest the lawsuit, but he still had to calculate the amount of damages. He said 19 FraserSide films were being unlawfully used by the Faragallas' site as of August, and he awarded the maximum damages of $150,000 for each by finding the Faragallas' actions were willful, for a total of $2.85 million. Bennett could have awarded as little as $750 for each infringement.
He awarded FraserSide an additional $1.14 million in damages for trademark claims based on what he called a conservative estimate of lost sales and the 1,500 members the site received from FraserSide films.
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