Malibu Media Dropping One Of Its 1000s of Copyright Cases

LOS ANGELES—It's been a while since AVN covered Malibu Media, the owner of adult content producer X-Art, but it appears that things haven't been getting better for the company. For example, almost exactly two years ago, U.S. District Judge William Alsup threw out Malibu Media's attempt to discover an alleged illegal content downloader's physical address by using Maxmind geolocation software on the person's IP address—except that Judge Alsup found that in one case, Maxmind had mapped "more than six hundred million IP addresses to a single farm in Kansas"—and that was hardly the only time Maxmind screwed up. But more fundamentally, several courts have labeled Malibu Media a "copyright troll," in large part because the company has filed thousands of lawsuits over roughly the past 10 years against various individuals who allegedly downloaded the company's copyrighted content through websites like BitTorrent—and the company wanted to get paid for it, and wasn't afraid to use all means at its disposal to identify the anonymous pirates. But in an interesting change of direction, TorrentFreak.com has reported that Malibu Media is attempting to dismiss its case against user Tim McManus and his company Greenwood Digital. Why? Well, Malibu Media claims that because McManus and Greenwood are "IT professionals" who are savvy enough to hide their "infringing activity," the company has decided to drop the lawsuit because it would cost too much money in legal and investigative fees to make pursuing the case financially worthwhile. "McManus and his IT company deny these accusations and believe that the rightsholder didn’t have any proper evidence to begin with," wrote TorrentFreak's "Ernesto." "They are not happy with this request for a dismissal, as it will make it harder for them to clear their name and get compensated for the costs they have incurred thus far in their defense." And so, in what may be a unique move in the field of copyright litigation, McManus/Greenwood are asking the District Court of New Jersey, where suit was originally filed, to deny Malibu Media's Motion to Dismiss and allow those defendants to "have their day in court." "Defendants have been severely prejudiced by being forced to expend substantial sums of money and time to defend against plaintiff’s claims and pursue their Counterclaims," McManus, a professor at New York's Fordham University, argued. "In addition, by the mere existence of plaintiff’s lawsuit against defendant Tim McManus, Mr. McManus’s reputation and ability to secure business have been negatively affected." One of those negative effects: One of McManus' students at Fordham confronted him about the alleged piracy. "It is a challenge explaining to the students that I did not download the titles outlined in the plaintiff’s Complaint," McManus argued in court papers. "These accusations have harmed my reputation since I cannot say (yet) that I won a favorable judgment in the case." The New Jersey court has yet to make its decision on either party's claim. In other Malibu Media news, U.S. District Judge James S. Moody Jr. has chopped in half one Florida defendant's claim for legal fees because his attorneys unduly delayed filing the papers to end Malibu Media's lawsuit, which was begun in November 2013, after the company admitted that it had wrongly sued the client for infringement. "Judge Moody determined that [defendant Roberto] Roldan’s counsel collected information from their client and his friends, including affidavits making clear that he wasn’t a proper defendant in the case, but continued to litigate the lawsuit instead of revealing the information and ending the litigation against their client," reported Carolina Bolado for Law360.com. "And when Malibu Media expressed concern to Roldan’s attorneys that he may not be a proper defendant in the lawsuit and asked to depose him, they objected and instead filed a motion for summary judgment a few days later, according to the order." One of Roldan's attorneys' blunders? They "withheld key information, namely that Roldan, the person suspected of infringement, wasn’t home when it happened and that his father was. The porn producer said the attorneys did it to drive up the company’s litigation costs in chasing the wrong target and said they filed a frivolous 281-page motion to dismiss." Naughty, naughty! But on the plus side for the attorneys, Judge Moody decided not to officially sanction them for misconduct, noting that he had already cut their fees in half—from $130,651 to $69,084, which he deemed was punishment enough.