Legal Extortion in the Porn Industry

The porn company that owns labels such as Vixen, Blacked,

Tushy, and

others, Strike 3 Holdings, is running a wildly

profitable and completely legal extortion campaign on John

Does across the country, and you've probably never heard of it.

That's because this part of the porn company's business model has

pinpointed the nexus of antiquated copyright laws, paralyzing

social stigma, and unaffordable defense costs.

Strike 3 Holdings, founded by French pornographer Greg Lansky

in

2015, started running their legal extortion

scheme in September

2017.

Thank you.

Thank you, thank you.

I'm proud of being part of this industry.

I'm proud of working with you guys every day.

Since then, they have filed more than 20,000

boilerplate copyright lawsuits

in federal court against individual John Does, with estimates of making

$20 million per year this way. The technology that Strike 3 is

using to track consumers on how many of their porn videos they download

are likened to copyright trolls. Strike 3 claims to use a proprietary

software

called Vixen Scan that tracks users' IP addresses,

and though they claim

to only track those who download their videos, it's unknown how the

technology actually works because Strike 3 has never had to disclose their

source code because no John Doe has ever chosen to go to trial.

They always choose to settle. Typically, Strike 3 waits until the user has

downloaded around 23 of their videos, then Strike 3 heading to federal

court and getting a subpoena against the internet service

provider to unmask the user. The internet service provider

then alerts the subscriber that they are being sued.

And rather than having their name go on the record in federal court, the John Does

always choose to settle for about 20 to 30K each.

But now Strike 3 has its sights set on their biggest John Doe ever,

Meta, who Strike 3 accuses of downloading

2,396 of their videos, a total of

6,008 times between 2018 and 2025 to

train their AI models. Meta attempted to get the case thrown out,

blaming the downloads on rogue employees, but the California judge is allowing

the trial to proceed, ruling that the Strike 3 investigation showed

coordination across Meta's 47 IP addresses, coordinated

effort to gather data, not just the actions of rogue employees.

Now with this $350 million copyright lawsuit heading to court,

the public may finally get a look into how Strike 3's tracking technology

actually works, and the porn company, who's used humiliation

litigation as a business model and the federal courthouse as their

ATM, may have to reveal that user downloads aren't the only things

they're tracking.