A federal judge in Orange County this month finalized a $20.4 million judgment against an x-rated website that sold 272 Japanese pornography films on the Internet without authorization, according to court records inside the Ronald Reagan Federal Courthouse in Santa Ana.
The action by U.S. District Court Judge Cormac J. Carney backs a trial-eve, April mediation settlement between plaintiff Dreamroom Productions, Inc. and HHSI, Inc. and its owner, Koji Ban.
Dreamroom Productions, which owns copyrights on the movies it created, filed its lawsuit in 2008 and won a 2011 permanent injunction against HHSI from selling its porn without authorization.
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For years prior to the settlement, HHSI claimed it hadn't stolen any XXX movies because its site merely served as storage for the actual villains, a defense Dreamroom lawyers rejected after investigations.
“Dreamroom will present evidence at trial proving that HHSI, while trying to hide behind numerous aliases (including a labyrinth of interlocking websites, offshore entities, alter-ego businesses and sham corporations), copied plaintiff's movies onto its computers, and illegally sold thousands of copies to users who paid a 'membership fee' to a website called www.movie-revolution.com,” the company's Marina del Rey-based lawyer, Paul T. Martin, wrote in a March court filing.
The $20.4 million judgment was calculated based on a fee of $75,000 for each of the 272 misappropriated films that are, according to court records, especially popular and profitable in Japan.
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CNN-featured investigative reporter R. Scott Moxley has won Journalist of the Year honors at the Los Angeles Press Club; been named Distinguished Journalist of the Year by the LA Society of Professional Journalists; obtained one of the last exclusive prison interviews with Charles Manson disciple Susan Atkins; won inclusion in Jeffrey Toobin’s The Best American Crime Reporting for his coverage of a white supremacist’s senseless murder of a beloved Vietnamese refugee; launched multi-year probes that resulted in the FBI arrests and convictions of the top three ranking members of the Orange County Sheriff’s Department; and gained praise from New York Times Magazine writers for his “herculean job” exposing entrenched Southern California law enforcement corruption.
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