PornHub owner Aylo has secured a wide-ranging injunction from the US courts in a copyright legal battle with a company called Goodporn which includes a web-blocking order targeting internet service providers. Which is significant, because web-blocking orders against ISPs, an anti-piracy tactic favored by the music industry, are not generally available in the US.
The ruling from the district court in California states that, “internet search engines, web hosting and internet service providers, domain name registrars, domain name registries and other service or software providers are ordered to block, or use reasonable efforts to attempt to block, access by US users of the Goodporn websites”.
Aylo also owns a number of studios that produce pornographic content and it accused Goodporn of copyright infringement for allowing that material to be hosted and streamed on its website. The Californian court found in Aylo’s favour in February and ordered Goodporn to pay $2.1 million in damages.
Aylo then returned to court seeking the injunction, arguing that Goodporn probably wouldn't pay the damages and therefore additional sanctions were required to stop its copyrights from being infringed.
Given the wide-ranging nature of the injunction, Aylo can now put pressure on those various different groups of internet companies to act, including demanding that ISPs block access to the Goodporn website.
Welcoming the injunction, a spokesperson for Aylo told Torrentfreak, “We take any infringement of our content and brands seriously and remain committed to protecting our intellectual property rights. We believe this amended judgment will contribute to deterring piracy and will help ensure consumers find our content through legitimate channels”.
In many countries, web-blocking has become a common anti-piracy tactic employed by the music, movie and wider content industries. Copyright owners go to court to secure an injunction that orders ISPs to block their customers from accessing specific websites that primarily exist to facilitate copyright infringement.
However, under US law, standalone web-blocking injunctions are not currently available. There were proposals in Congress back in 2011 and 2012 to amend American copyright law to allow web-blocking to take place. However, that resulted in a major backlash from the tech sector and all the proposals were abandoned, never to be revisited.
Although, earlier this year the CEO of the Motion Picture Association, Charles Rivkin, announced a plan to start lobbying lawmakers again with the aim of getting web-blocking properly going as an anti-piracy tactic in the US.
The order secured by Aylo against Goodporn shows that web-blocking is, technically, already possible in the US, although in a different way.
In this case, Aylo successfully sued Goodporn for copyright infringement and then pushed for a wide-ranging injunction, including web-blocking, as a remedy. Whereas with a specific web-blocking system, like that available in the UK, the copyright owners can skip that stage and begin by requesting a web-blocking order which names the ISPs as defendants.
This more complicated form of web-blocking has come up in other US cases similar to Aylo v Goodporn, for example when a group of Israeli movie and media companies successfully sued piracy sites Israel-tv.com, Israel.tv and Sdarot.tv in 2022.
However, as with Aylo v Goodporn, the injunction in that case was wide-ranging and did more than order the ISPs to instigate web-blocks. Where that is the case, the copyright owners will usually prioritise one or two of the sanctions outlined in the injunction and then pretty much ignore the others, meaning they don’t actually get implemented.
So, for example, if a copyright owner can get the piracy site’s domain names deactivated by the relevant domain registries and registrars, they may decide that is all that needs to happen and therefore never seek to enforce the rest of the injunction. It seems likely Aylo will prioritise domain name deactivation in this case.