Contending that MonsterCockTube.com and its two operators Thorsten Palicki and Maik Herrmann pirated nine gay adult films for that site, adult studio Titan Media asked a federal judge to award it a default judgment of $1.35M.

And so San Francisco-based gay porn studio Titan Media and TitanMen.com won the judgment in U.S. District Court this week in an intellectual property rights case against Antelope Media LLC, Palicki and Herrmann, proprietors of an adult “tube” site.

U.S. District Court judge Maxine M. Chesney never got to meet Palicki and Herrmann, the defendants behind the name and the gay adult video sharing site: Her judgment was rendered after the defendants failed to respond to the suit, according a report at AVN Business.

from www.examiner.com – Titan Media and its parent company Io Group have rigorously defended its copyrighted materials against the proliferation of tube sites (think YouTube, but with a lot of porn), where clips and in some cases entire bodies of work are uploaded by users for free sharing, thus cutting into the studios’ profits and violating provisions outlined in the U.S. Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), including willful infringement and failure to respond to takedown notices over the content in question.

Via Business.AVN.com:

In her ruling, the judge called Antelope’s infringement “particularly egregious.”

“First, defendants gained commercial advantage by using plaintiff’s copyrighted works, specifically, by displaying plaintiff’s works on defendants’ websites, for which they charge their customers, including California residents, a monthly access fee, and on which they earn revenue by selling advertising space, and by enrolling in ‘affiliate programs through which [d]efendants receive payments for directing individuals to other websites,” Chesney wrote.

“Second, defendants, within a week of learning of the instant lawsuit, transferred ownership of their websites to fictitious names, in an apparent attempt to evade service and hinder plaintiff’s ability to locate and identify the infringing parties,” she continued. “Third, defendants have continued their infringing activities after being notified of the instant action. Fourth, defendants engaged in various technological steps to block plaintiff from gaining access to defendants’ websites, in an apparent attempt to prohibit plaintiff from learning the full extent of the infringing conduct…. [G]iven that defendants fraudulently transferred ownership of the domain names from a domestic company, which could have been readily located, to companies and individuals residing outside the United States, it is readily apparent defendants were attempting to preclude or at least make it considerably more difficult for plaintiff to locate any party against whom a judgment could be executed,” Chesney wrote.

“Under such circumstances, and given that plaintiff apparently is aware of the current location of the entities who presently own the domain names, the Court finds it appropriate to prohibit defendants from further transferring ownership of the domain names, or the proceeds thereof, and the record discloses no equitable reason why plaintiff should not be granted [injunctive] relief.”