Wow this is such an amazing and unethical scam. What do you do in a situation like this?
Make sure that when you are downloading or uploading anything, and I mean anything from the internet that you do it though VPNs or other services that place some barrier between you and copyright trolls. You don't need NSA-levels of security to avoid the trolls, just enough of a barrier that their automated tools cannot see you so easily.
If you run a website, generate all your own content. Don't use stock photos. FYI, film and TV have been dealing with the same issue for decades. It is normal on a film/TV set for there to be zero tolerance for anything that might be subject to copyright. Any painting on a wall will either be blurred or the film will commission a new painting. That is a healthy policy for any website: if you want a little drawing of a mouse, pay someone to create one for you. Don't pay 5$ for a stock image that may or may not be appropriately licensed.
Troll files bad faith lawsuit on behalf of Falcon Ltd. claiming S. Andworm infringed upon their copyright on multiple gay porn titles uploaded to TorrentSite. This stuff gets picked up by sites scraping dockets and resold as "background check" services.
You are now falsely associated with this content in an authoritative context. The suit will obviously fail but until then people will see a lawsuit was filed against you and by who. The scam works because nobody questions the legitimacy or sees it through to resolution.
"Fake and gay" has never described something so aptly.
There isn't much you can do about bad faith claims. Claimants either face no consequence for false reporting or are able to plausibly deny it.
They didn't just upload gay porn in torrents, they intentionally infected those downloads with ransomware that would hold your whole computer hostage with legal threats demanding that you call the lawfirm and pay anywhere between $150,000 and $400,000. With the threatened alternative of releasing your name in public.
I personally witnessed this about three times. They were absolute bastards.
If you are one of the attorneys in that case, then you are found guilty of fraud and extortion, are sent to jail, are disbarred from the practice of law, and are forced to repay all of your proceeds from your scheme.
That includes PeerTube and other decentralized video platforms, at least not without turning off WebRTC swarming.
The reason why this scam works is:
- The defamatory nature of the content in question (which can't be fixed by law). In other words, a lot of people don't want it people thinking they watch gay porn
- The up-to-$150k-per-infringement statutory damages authorized by the Digital Theft Deterrence and Copyright Damages Improvement Act of 1999, which just barely makes copyright litigation a profitable enterprise
- Inherent privacy vulnerabilities caused by P2P communications in a public swarm - i.e. the ability for anyone to obtain evidentiary proof that you downloaded the copyrighted fake gay porn
All of these factors are integral to the scam and it would fall apart if any one of them were removed. Take away the stigma regarding gay porn and nobody would settle. Take away the statutory damages and downloaders are only liable for the cost of a copy, if that, making copyright litigation against curious individuals completely unprofitable. And if the scammers hosted the content themselves (to get IP addresses), anyone could easily use historical DNS archival records to prove that the scammers hosted the content. If a copyright owner deliberately uploads their own content, the downloaders have an implied license to download it.
Or at least you could argue that as a credible legal defense. Remember that these scammers are only barely profitable because they encourage people to settle quickly. A lot of them would drop the case immediately if you even bothered to file a motion to dismiss. For this reason, the scammers would lie under penalty of perjury about the uploads being unauthorized, and once they got discovered they wound up going to jail for lying their ass off.