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SAN FRANCISCO— Last week Kink.com filed a copyright and trademark infringement lawsuit worth in excess of $10 million against DrTuber.com,
Igor Kovalchuk, Extron Worldwide Corporation and Era Technologies Limited.
The lawsuit was filed April 13th in U.S. Federal Court in the Southern District of Florida, claiming that over 70 of Kink.com’s protected works have been infringed by the defendants.
According to the 55-page complaint, "Defendant Igor Kovalchuk owns and operates www.drtuber.com, using a shell corporation called Extron Worldwide Corporation, which is incorporated in Panama."
The complaint goes on to detail instances of direct infringement that is alleged to have occurred in February 2012 alone.
The complaint states that a cursory search revealed 75 instances of copyright infringement of Kink.com's intellectual property that was displayed on DrTuber.com.
As the complaint further states, each of the films were displayed and distributed by Defendants and the Doe Defendants without the consent of, or licensing by, Cybernet, the copyright owner and registrant of the motion picture.
DrTuber.com website, according to the complaint, is visited by over 5 million internet surfers per month, and that Alexa ranks DrTuber.com as the #319 most visited website in the world.
The complaint goes on to say that with the vast amount of traffic at least one of the videos has been viewed 247,000 times. [Tube sites generally keep a running tally of views.]
According to the math, Kink.com's property has been visited over 600,000 times and has been available for months, possibly years on the Dr. Tuber website.
"The number of uncompensated views grows daily thus furthering the number of copyright infringements and contributing to the further dilution of the Plaintiff's trade and service marks."
It's also noted in the complaint that Dr. Tuber pays third parties between $1.25 and $1.75 USD for every one thousand (1,000) unique visitors from the United States that are sent to its website.
Kink.com goes on to say that DrTuber.com allows third parties to display infringed content on third party websites for the purpose of driving traffic back to DrTuber.
"DrTuber has enabled this feature by providing an 'embed code' for every video on its site. An internet user can copy and paste the embed code on another website where the video can then be viewed. The number of views displayed on DrTuber does not reflect the number of views on those sites. This significantly increases the number of views."
Kink.com makes the case that DrTuber is "a subscription membership web site hiding behind the veneer of a simple user-generated content exchange site."
Adding insult to injury DrTuber only allows users access to lower quality streaming versions of the product for a monthly membership cost of $29.95.
It's also noted that DrTuber uses the services of a Florida-based payment processor, SegPay, to collect credit and debit card payments from users who sign up for a premium membership.
Kink.com is seeking $10 million in direct and enhanced penalties, the transfer of DrTuber.com and other domains into its possession, attorney fees and other considerations.
The case is Cybernet Entertainment LLC v. Igor Kovalchuk. Cybernet is the corporate parent for Kink.com.
