A federal judge ruled FlavaWorks can subpoena email providers to identify users accused of copyright infringement related to Gay-Torrents.org. The lawsuit targets 39 anonymous users.
A federal district judge in Illinois has ruled that FlavaWorks, an adult entertainment company, can subpoena email service providers to identify users accused of copyright infringement related to the now-defunct BitTorrent site Gay-Torrents.org. This decision allows FlavaWorks to seek subscriber information for individuals previously identified only by IP addresses.
FlavaWorks Entertainment, Inc., a Chicago-based adult-film company, initiated a copyright infringement lawsuit on April 28, 2026, in the United States District Court for the Northern District of Illinois. The lawsuit targets the operators, administrators, and members of Gay-Torrents.org, a private BitTorrent site. The case is captioned FlavaWorks Entertainment, Inc. v. Deniau et al., Case No. 1:26-cv-04857.
The complaint alleges that Gay-Torrents.org has been used since 2009 to distribute copyrighted adult entertainment content without authorization. Initially, the lawsuit named 325 "John Doe" defendants, described as U.S.-resident members of the site. These individuals are accused of infringing FlavaWorks’s copyrights by uploading, downloading, or seeding content through the site, paying for VIP memberships that funded the site’s operations, or participating in forum discussions about the enforcement campaign. The lawsuit also named a shell company, Byzona Ltd., reportedly based in Kazanluk, Bulgaria, and a class of users believed to be administrators of the torrenting website and its forums.
The legal theories asserted in the complaint include direct and contributory copyright infringement, civil conspiracy, and fraudulent concealment. FlavaWorks seeks statutory damages of up to $150,000 per infringed work, disgorgement of profits, injunctive relief, and attorneys’ fees. Following the lawsuit, Gay-Torrents.org went offline. FlavaWorks later narrowed its list of targeted users from 325 to 39 in an amended complaint, with several site administrators and most targeted members still listed as anonymous John Does.
On October 14, U.S. District Judge John Robert Blakey granted in part FlavaWorks's request to subpoena email providers to identify the anonymous defendants. The judge ruled that IP addresses alone do not constitute a personal identity, stating that an IP address identifies an Internet subscription, not a person, and can be masked by a VPN. This ruling allows FlavaWorks to subpoena email service providers including Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, AT&T, Cloudflare, and web-hosting provider Newfold Digital.
The subpoenas are limited to the email addresses or domains of defendants linked to a particular service provider. The targeted services are required to provide the subscriber’s name, mailing address, telephone number, and any secondary, recovery, or two-factor authentication email addresses on file. FlavaWorks can also request the most recent IP address used to access each account, covering the period from January 2025 onward, along with its date and time. The judge did not grant FlavaWorks permission to request billing names and addresses from email providers, nor did he allow a subpoena to payment processor Stripe to identify individuals behind the Bulgarian company linked to the site.
In a minutes order published to the docket on October 14, Judge Blakey dismissed the case for some of the John Doe defendants, citing cooperation and transparency associated with those defendants. For the remaining defendants, the judge agreed to grant a "Plaintiff's motion for leave to serve third party subpoenas … each limited to the email address associated with each defendant listed … seeking the following subscriber identification information […]: (a) the subscriber's name, mailing address, telephone number, and any secondary, recovery, or two−factor−authentication email addresses on file; and (b) the most recent IP address used to access the account, with its date and time."
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Fuente: adultfyi.com
