MindGeek Awarded Domains After Pirate Ignores Injunction

TACOMA—A subsidiary of Canadian company MindGeek was awarded the domains once owned by a porn pirate after the offender ignored a federal district court injunction. MG Premium and its counsel sued a class of defendants affiliated with a popular network of known piracy sites, including the adult tube site DaftSex. A recent filing issued by the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Washington in Tacoma held defendant Vasily Kharchenko in contempt for knowingly violating a previous order after MG Premium was awarded the domains in question. DaftSex is a massive DMCA violator, according to initial filings submitted to a federal court in Washington by MG Premium. In those filings, MG Premium asserted that its DMCA takedown efforts targeted at least 832,000 DaftSex URLs indexed throughout Google search engine results. U.S. District Judge Benjamin Settle awarded MG Premium over $32 million in damages in a ruling in November 2022 after Kharchenko, the operator of DaftSex and its network of sites, failed to appear before the court and answer the claims against him outlined by the lawsuit.  Judge Settle also authorized the transfer of several domains from the possession of Kharchenko’s operation to MG Premium. While compliance was clear at the beginning, the network of sites that Kharchenko owns eventually shifted to similar-sounding domains in defiance of the federal court’s order, and they openly advertised the moves over social media. Counsel representing MG Premium pointed this out and requested Judge Settle to sanction Kharchenko for violating court orders. While the court sought to grant Kharchenko the ability to plead his case before the court, he was again absent from any of the proceedings, resulting in the court decision last week that granted MG Premium ownership of the new domains and the social media accounts for DaftSex. “Kharchenko relocated the at-issue websites to new domains immediately upon the transfer of original domains to plaintiff MG Premium,” writes Settle in his order issued on August 3, 2023.  He “re-located the websites previously located at Daftsex.com, Artsporn.com, and Biqle.com to new domains located at Daft.sex, Dsex.to, and Biqle.org. MG Premium has demonstrated that the websites at their current domains are 'mirrored' sites to the original websites,” Settle says. The court also compelled Twitter (now X.com) and GitHub to eject Kharchenko and any other accounts he and his team may own and transfer the ownership of those accounts to MG Premium. Torrent Freak reporter Andy Maxwell observed that Judge Settle classified DaftSex as a property wholly owned by MindGeek, and the ownership of that account should be transferred to the awarded party at “reasonable expense.” Maxwell reports that this applies to the GitHub domains daftsex.github.io and daftpost.github.io. These accounts were also used to promote the news surrounding the transfer of the sites from the old domains to the new domains after the first order from Settle’s court was granted. Settle outlines no other sanctions in the new order. At present, DaftSex—at the domain daft.sex—is still live on the internet and operating.