ON VALENTINE’S DAY last year, Strike 3 Holdings LLC — the holder of copyrights to a number of adult film titles — filed 15 lawsuits in federal court in San Francisco.
Each suit was brought against a “John Doe” who was unknown to Strike 3 and identified only by a long string of numbers that described his internet address. Each suit alleged that the Doe had illegally downloaded a raft of the adult films from one of Strike 3’s adult websites: Blacked, Tushy, Vixen, and Blacked Raw.
Strike 3 demanded $150,000 in each of the cases.
The 15 lawsuits were just the then-latest manifestation of the lucrative litigation operation run by Strike 3 and the lawyers who represent the company in its ongoing efforts to identify infringers and make them pay.
An analysis by Bay City News in February 2023 discovered that that since 2017, Strike 3 had filed 9,508 copyright infringement lawsuits in federal courts throughout the United States, including 1,046 in U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, the federal court that hears litigation from the Bay Area.
The BCN analysis reported that more than 200 suits were filed in the district in 2022, making the Bay Area the national leader in such suits since 2017, beating the District of New Jersey by 166 cases.
BCN reported that the cases did not linger in court for long — the average time from filing to resolution was 122 days over that period — because most cases settled and settled quickly.
Defense attorneys reported to BCN that most cases settled in the range of $10,000 to $15,000.
Settlements were driven by several factors, but one important factor was that the John Doe who was sued in each case had to face the prospect that Strike 3 would be able to use the court process to connect the long string of numbers to the actual person who had that internet address.
And once Strike 3 found out who owned that IP address, it would demand a cash payment to make the case go away or force the defendant to face potentially large damages if the alleged infringement were proven and shown to be willful.
Another factor contributed to the quick resolutions.
Attorney Steve Vondran of San Francisco has defended a number of the cases. He said, “we have people that have really good jobs in really prominent companies. So, you know, it’s kind of shameful and they don’t want to be associated. So they’ll pony up a settlement to avoid that, even sometimes when they think they haven’t done anything.”
Courting behavior
As Valentine’s Day 2024 approaches, it is worthwhile looking back at how Strike 3’s litigation industry has developed over the last year.
BCN’s updated analysis found that that 2023 was a good year for new lawsuits; Strike 3’s filings increased by 26 percent nationwide.
That represented an additional 3,478 lawsuits — nearly 10 a day — in federal courts around the country.
In the Bay Area, Strike 3’s 2023 filings were the second-highest of any district in the country, only losing out to the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of New York (the counties of Kings, Nassau, Queens, Richmond, and Suffolk) by a dozen cases.
The Bay Area retained its overall leadership for Strike 3 cases since 2017, decisively beating the Eastern District by more than 200 cases.
Of last year’s Valentine’s Day crop of Strike 3 filings in San Francisco, all 15 cases have been resolved. The average time of resolution was just 88 days.
Of last year’s Valentine’s Day crop of Strike 3 filings in San Francisco, all 15 cases have been resolved. The average time of resolution was just 88 days, less than three months.
In only one of the 15 cases did a lawyer enter an official appearance in the case on behalf of the defendant.
While the outcome of the cases is not disclosed by the court records, roughly half of the cases were noted as either “settled” or “dismissed with prejudice,” likely meaning that Strike 3 received payments that made it worth dropping any further claims against the John Doe defendants.
While 2023 was a good year for new cases, there is no reason to think that Strike 3’s litigation business has run its course.
Strike 3 dropped a new set of 25 Bay Area cases in January of 2024.
Moreover, records from the U.S. Copyright Office show that Strike 3 registered copyrights to 299 new adult titles in 2023, more than any year since it began in 2017.
Thoma v. VXN Group
While Strike 3 and its affiliates are private companies, some light about the size of their adult film operations has emerged from a lawsuit brought by one of the adult performers.
In 2023 Mackenzie Anne Thoma, stage name “Kenzie Anne,” brought suit against Strike 3, VXN Group LLC, General Media, LLC and an individual adult film producer, in state court in Los Angeles. General Media is Strike 3’s parent company. VXN produces the films that Strike 3 copyrights.
Thoma sought to bring the case as a class action, claiming that in paying their performers, the defendants violated California wage and labor laws in nearly a dozen ways, including by forcing them to work overtime without compensation and not giving them required meal breaks.
The defendants denied the allegations and have sought to dismiss the case.
To advance their arguments, the defendants filed various sworn declarations. The declarations give an idea of the scope of their adult film operations.
One declaration stated that between Jan. 7, 2020 and May 8, 2023, VXN entered 1,120 separate actor engagements.
Another stated that VXN engaged 384 individual actors (including the plaintiff), of which 116 were California residents. The declaration reported that the average per-film-rate paid to actors in “Type 1” films was $1,579.65. (Type 1 films are described as having a more complex filming style and more complex plots that results in more time on the set than Type 2 films.)
While the information from the declarations is far from a complete picture of the defendants’ operations, it suggests that litigation over illegal downloads will continue many Valentine’s Days into the future.
