Strike 3 Holdings and Malibu Media continue to inundate Federal courts around the country with file-sharing lawsuits against individual, anonymous internet subscribers. In the past few days, Strike 3 Holdings has filed 62 copyright infringement lawsuits in California (29 cases), Colorado (9 cases), Illinois (6 cases), New York (6 cases), Pennsylvania (1 case), and Virginia (11 cases). Malibu Media has also filed 23 additional cases in Michigan (1 case), New Jersey (12 cases), and Texas (8 cases). This has been a record breaking year. So far, Strike 3 Holdings has filed more than 1700 lawsuits this year. Malibu Media is not far behind with more than 1000 cases.
Although different companies, both Strike 3 Holdings and Malibu Media have similar tactics in aggressively pursuing alleged downloaders of their adult films. Strike 3 Holdings owns the Blacked, Tushy, and Vixen brands. Malibu Media owns the X-Art brand. Both Plaintiffs begin by identifying an IP address they claim participated in downloading and sharing their films through Bittorrent networks and then sue the unnamed account holder as a John Doe. As they only have an IP address, they ask the courts to subpoena the defendant’s identity from the Internet Service Provider (ISP) so the defendant can be formally served.