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Abandonment Defense Stays in Copyright Suit on Filesharing
Malibu Media LLC is by now well-known as a frequent filer of copyright infringement lawsuits nationwide against Web users alleged to have illegally downloaded and shared the company's adult films. But a federal judge in Pennsylvania recently said it should be up to a jury to decide whether the company is entitled to stake a claim to those copyrights in the first place.
In a ruling on the parties' cross-motions for summary judgment, U.S. District Chief Judge Christopher Conner of the Middle District of Pennsylvania ruled that a John Doe defendant should have an opportunity to argue before a jury that Malibu abandon ned its copyrights when it made the decision to upload its content to several YouTube-esque porn streaming websites that it knew would make that content available for download. Malibu Media LLC v. Doe, 4:15-CV-2281.
Doe was accused of illegally downloading 20 copyrighted porn movies and distributing them via the peer-to-peer file-sharing platform BitTorrent. He admitted to downloading all except one of them, but responded with several affirmative defenses arguing that he was entitled to do so. Among those defenses was Doe's assertion that Malibu may have uploaded all 20 videos itself to streaming sites as part of a promotional strategy and therefore would have been aware of the potential for the videos to be downloaded and disseminated by users of those sites, thus abandoning the copyrights to those works.
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