Marc Juris, the openly gay president of WE TV, was just slapped with a $1.2 million lawsuit from a gay porn company.
Flava Works, which specializes in x-rated videos featuring models of color, claims Juris joined its site as a member, then downloaded a bunch of videos and illegally uploaded them to file sharing sites like Gay-Torrents.org and GayTorrent.ru. Now, the company wants $1.2 million from him for copyright infringement.
“Marc Juris was issued a cease-and-desist over alleged sharing and was urged to settle out of court [but he] refused,” Phil Bleicher, CEO of Flava Works, says. “We have ample evidence to prove that its him—from matching emails, IP, logs and usernames—and he continued to share our copyrighted works.”
Bleicher also says Juris has filed a countersuit under a John Doe pseudonym, claiming Flava Works blackmails its subscribers with frivolous lawsuits and threatening to out them as customers.
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The countersuit, filed Tuesday, reads:
Capitalizing on the social stigma of its own product, Flava Works has apparently discovered a lucrative side business: extorting money from former subscribers by threatening to expose them as consumers of gay porn.Even if the accusation is false, most users reluctantly pay rather than be outed in court documents as a gay porn user—especially if the victim has chosen to keep his sexual orientation private.
Bleicher says the countersuit it total B.S. He’s also hellbent on making Juris (and others) pay for his alleged offenses.
“Flava Works models and staff spend countless hours producing our high quality videos and images only to have a few people steal them and distribute to these illegal file sharing websites,” he says. “This will stop, one lawsuit at a time.”
Related: Creator of Presumably Accurate Nude Trump Painting Threatened With Lawsuit
Creamsicle
So are they only suing him for this amount because he’s wealthy, or is this only getting attention because he’s wealthy enough to fight back? I guess the real test would be to see if Juris is right and other people have been targeted for suit.
Kangol
Someone should have told him, stay away from the direct torrents sites. They’re easily trackable. There are other options, I’ve heard.
iamstefanodee
Why would one upload to those sites?