One Single Porn Copyright Troll, Malibu Media, Accounted For Nearly 40% Of All Copyright Lawsuits This Year

from the shakedown dept

We've written about porn copyright troll Malibu Media a bunch of times in the past, including noting late last year that it had filed over 1,100 copyright lawsuits in 2013 alone. Many who follow copyright trolling have noted that Malibu Media's practices (and those of the lawyers who represent it) may be much worse than even Prenda, who has become synonymous with questionable copyright trolling practices. The New Yorker has written up a profile of Malibu Media and its copyright trolling, generously referring to the company as an "erotica" website.

Matthew Sag, who has written up an empirical study on copyright trolling, with lots of data, notes that Malibu Media alone is swamping the court system with lawsuits. Of 872 copyright claims filed in the first quarter of 2014, 343 of them were from Malibu Media. Sag also recently updated his chart showing different types of copyright lawsuits, from "regular" copyright lawsuits, those against "porn John Does" and "other John Does." The "red" sections for "porn John Does" is basically almost entirely Malibu Media at this point (back in 2011 and 2012, many were Prenda).
Oh, and if you're wondering about the bump from 2004 to 2007, much of that was back when the RIAA decided to sue thousands of music fans for file sharing music. That strategy turned out to be a disaster, but the RIAA, in many ways, wasn't quite as bad as the trolls. The RIAA was on a moral mission -- it never cared about squeezing money out of people. Malibu Media, on the other hand, is all about the trolling: using the court system as part of a shakedown system to scare people into settling. The New Yorker article only hints at how this is not a legal strategy, but rather a business model, to use the fear of the judicial system to get tons of people to just pay up.