Jan 29, 2026 13:10:00

Pornhub's parent company wins $140 million in piracy lawsuit

Aylo (formerly MindGeek), a major Canadian adult entertainment conglomerate sometimes referred to as the 'Amazon of porn,' filed a lawsuit against a major piracy site and won a $90 million (approximately 14 billion yen) damages judgment. However, recovering the damages is expected to be extremely difficult, highlighting the difficulty of recovering the damages caused by piracy.

Aylo Wins $90 Million Default Judgment Against Porn Piracy Network * TorrentFreak
https://torrentfreak.com/aylo-wins-90-million-default-judgment-against-porn-piracy-network/

Aylo's copyright enforcement department had sent over 10,000 DMCA takedown notices to pirate sites after identifying multiple instances of copyright infringement for adult content. However, these notices were unsuccessful in removing the infringing videos, so in early 2025, Aylo filed suit in the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Washington targeting eight adult pirate sites. All eight sites were believed to be operated by the same person, Anton Popravkin.

According to Aylo, Anton Popravkin's pirate network received over 3 million hits per month and published Aylo's copyrighted content at least 9,006 times without authorization. All of the pirate sites were also found to be operated for commercial purposes, and the operators are being held liable for willful copyright infringement.

The site operator did not respond to the lawsuit, so the trial was held in default. Under U.S. copyright law, Aylo could have sought damages of $150,000 per work, or more than $1 billion for the 9,006 confirmed infringements. However, Aylo sought damages of $15,000 per work, one-tenth of the amount.

As a result of the trial, U.S. District Judge Kimberly K. Evenson of the Western District of Washington granted Aylo's motion, finding that Aylo had not presented persuasive evidence to justify its $15,000 claim, and awarded a reduced statutory damages award of $10,000 per infringing work. The order stated, 'Because Plaintiff has not presented persuasive evidence to support a $15,000 valuation for each infringed work, the Court declines to presume the full amount claimed is appropriate. Nevertheless, any damages awarded will deter fraud and preserve the integrity of copyright law.'

The court also ordered Verisign , a US-based domain name registry, to transfer the registrar of the eight affected domains to Luxembourg-based EuroDNS, which then changed the domain registrar to Aylo, which will then gain control of the domains of the pirate sites and be able to take action to shut down those sites in the future.

However, the damages, totaling approximately $90 million, are the result of a default judgment and are unlikely to be recovered by Aylo because the main defendants are likely not resident in the United States and are likely to ignore court orders.