When an opponent fails to hold their own in an ordinary fight, things tend to end pretty quickly. The same is not true of copyright lawsuits.
In early October 2021, MG Premium, a subsidiary of adult entertainment giant MindGeek, filed a copyright complaint in a district court in Washington. It targeted Daftsex.com, an adult 'tube' site that offers MG-owned videos from the Brazzers series and Digital Playground, among others, to dozens of millions of users every month, for free.
Daftsex had little chance of winning in court and completely ignored the lawsuit. It still took over a year to complete, but with damages of $32 million and a broad injunction which included domain seizures, MG Premium prevailed in the end. In reality, however, very little had changed.
Domain seizures immediately countered
Verisign was ordered to sign several domains with MG Premium, including Daftsex.com, Artsporn.com, Daxab.com, and Biqle.com. Daftsex replied by transposed to new domains โ Daft.sex, Dsex.to, biqle.ru and biqle.org. The site took a hit of traffic, but managed to stay online.
Meanwhile, MG Premium redirected its newly acquired domains (and millions of former Daftsex users) to RedTube, owned by MindGeek. Despite an external move to undermine domain transfersthe opportunity to turn pirates into paying customers would have been helpful.
Unfortunately, other opportunities dried up quickly. The seized domain Daftsex.com received more than 41 million hits in November 2022. A month later, traffic plummeted to 6.5 million. According to data from SimilarWeb, in January 2023, just three months after MindGeek took over, the domain received just two million hits.
In parallel, Daftsex continued to rebuild its traffic on new domains. In January 2023, Daft.sex received 22.7 million views and Dsex.5.7 million. In the background, MG Premium renewed its legal efforts to shut down the site.
Contempt of court
In December 2022, MG Premium filed an application to reopen the case for the alleged owner of Daftsex, Vasily Kharchenko, to be held in contempt of court (1). Jason Tucker, of anti-piracy firm Battleship Stance, and MG Premium's director of anti-piracy strategy, Steven Salway, a former detective in the Police Intellectual Property Crime Unit, provided supporting statements (1,2)
In addition to the court finding Kharchenko in contempt, MG Premium requested permission to take over Daftsex's new domains: Daft.sex, Dsex.to and Biqle.org. Since Daftsex is using a Twitter account to communicate with its user community, MG Premium wants the court to issue an order forcing Twitter to close the account or transfer it to MG Premium.
As it stands today, none of those things have happened and Daftsex continues to grow. However, that doesn't mean MG Premium is just letting it happen.
DMCA takedown campaign begins
Within hours of Daftsex announcing its new domains last November, MG Premium began sending DMCA notices to Google, hoping to make daft.sex, dsex.to and biqle.org less visible in search results. .
That went on to become what is almost certainly the largest and most intense DMCA notice campaign by a copyright holder against a single site since the DMCA was introduced in 1998.
The first DMCA notices targeting daft.sex and dsex.to were sent to Google on November 14 and 21, respectively. In the first week, Google logged takedown requests for 937,952 Daft.sex URLs and 941,424 URLs belonging to Dsex.to, but that was just a taste of things to come.
Largest campaign by copyright holders against a single site
According to Google data, an entry dated January 9, 2023, covering a single week, Google received DMCA notices requesting the removal of 4,686,019 Dsex.to URLs. A post dated January 16, again covering a single week, claims that Google received DMCA notices requesting that 5,025,742 Daft.sex URLs be removed.
The data shown in Google charts lags slightly behind the actual notices received, but between November 14, 2022 and February 20, 2023, Google received approximately 11,000 individual requests for MG Premium directed at daft .sex.
Total daft.sex URLs requested for removal by March 3, 2023: ~45.6 million.
Between Nov 21, 2022 and Feb 20, 2023, Google received around ~11,000 individual requests for MG Premium directed at dsex.to.
Total dsex.to URLs requested for removal by March 3, 2023: ~45.6 million
Requested URLs for removal overall (both domains combined): 91+ million
To put these numbers into perspective, the number of URLs requested for removal on The Pirate Bay's .org domain currently stands at 6,008,980, after being targeted since 2012.
Most advisories did not take immediate effect
Since Google reports what action it takes after receiving a DMCA takedown notice, we can see that the vast majority of these notices had no immediate effect.
When considering all MG Premium ads sent to Google, targeting the URLs daft.sex and dsex.to, Google reported that close to 80% were not in the index, meaning that the reported URLs were not in search for Google, so they could not be removed.
That raises the obvious question of why Google didn't recognize so many URLs reported by MG Premium as infringing.
TorrentFreak requested comment from MG Premium on Saturday night but received no response, most likely due to timing.
We'll post an update if we hear back, but we suspect other factors could be at play that only MG Premium can adequately explain.
