PHOENIX — An Arizona district court yesterday denied a motion by Sagan Limited and other defendants connected to Porn.com, allowing a lawsuit brought against them by Hydentra HLP Int. Limited, the parent company of MetArt and SexArt, to move forward later this month.
Senior U.S. District Judge David G. Campbell ruled yesterday in favor of Hydentra, which argued that "the remaining jurisdictional facts are intertwined with the merits of their claims."
Sagan had argued that more evidentiary hearings concerning jurisdiction were necessary.
Judge Campbell ordered the parties to "file a joint memorandum setting forth a proposed discovery and motion schedule for completing this case" on, or before, February 28.
The case dates back to May 2016, when MetArt filed a copyright infringement suit in Phoenix, alleging that Porn.com and its defendants "engaged in a practice called 'scraping,' by which entities aggregate, on their own, user information and videos from other websites, then create a facade that those users exist on their own website and upload the videos to their websites directly," XBIZ reported in 2017.
"Porn.com was alleged to have displayed four of MetArt’s movies over four separate Porn.com URLs," the report continued. "Porn.com claimed that the poached videos were uploaded by third-party users."
In July 2017, Judge Campbell dismissed the lawsuit, granting Porn.com's owners, Sagan Ltd., their motion to dismiss and terminate the case on the issue of personal jurisdiction.
"Plaintiffs have failed to show that foreseeable harm occurred in the forum as a result of defendants’ conduct giving rise to this suit, and therefore have failed to satisfy the purposeful direction element of personal jurisdiction analysis," Campbell wrote at the time. "Plaintiffs have provided no more than bare bones assertions to support of the claim that they have operations in the U.S. or that the foreseeable harm to them in the U.S. was jurisdictionally significant."
Hydentra filed an appeal with the Ninth Circuit which ruled in their favor in August 2019. The Ninth circuit determined that Judge Campbell's district court does have personal jurisdiction over Sagan, and that this also applies to all owners or operators of Porn.com.