NEW YORK — A New York court granted a default judgment for over $108,000 in favor of Strike 3 Media against a local man accused of illegally downloading videos from their Vixen Media Group studios.
The 68-year old Long Island man had been served, but he didn’t answer the complaint and Senior District Judge Denis R. Hurley issued an order for a default judgement of $108,750 in statutory damages (plus $400 in fees and costs) in November 2020, which was confirmed last month and reported this week.
Strike 3 filed the original complaint in September 2018 and was eventually granted their discovery motion to identify the subscriber name behind the IP address unveiled by their research.
“In the U.S. the vast majority of these cases are filed by Strike 3 Holdings,” reported Ernesto van der Sar for the torrent news site Torrentfreak. “The company produces adult entertainment videos that are made available via the Blacked, Tushy and Vixen websites. When these videos leak and are shared on pirate sites, Strike 3 takes action.”
What makes this case significant is that it identifies the defendant by name. As XBIZ has reported, many jurisdictions have been hesitant to grant the Strike 3 legal team the power to subpoena ISPs for subscriber information, or else, when they have granted it, to allow them to publicize the defendants’ names or other identifying details.
Another distinct feature of this case is that Strike 3 “monitored other activity that was linked to ‘interests’ from the defendant’s public social media profile,” explained Torrentfreak, in order to build a stronger case against him.
For example, the complaint mentions that the defendant “works in the engineering industry, has an interest in science, and likes the TV show 'Myth Busters.' This matches with the download history, which includes 'Myth Busters' downloads as well as engineering, astronomy and chemistry e-books.”
The accused man does not appear to have responded to the summons and public information shows him to be very likely judgment-proof, lacking the means to cover the six-figure judgement and resulting in what is informally known in legal parlance as “a dry hole” with little chance for the plaintiffs to collect.