PHOENIX — A U.S. district court has ruled that it has jurisdiction to hear a copyright infringement lawsuit brought by adult website operators against tube site Eporner, even though Eporner is based outside the United States.
Fornix Holdings and CP Productions, which operate Gloryholeswallow.com, filed the lawsuit last year against MW Media, which operates Eporner. MW, headquartered in Poland, asked the court to dismiss the suit based on a lack of jurisdiction.
Judge Susan Brnovich of the U.S. District Court for the District of Arizona denied the motion, ruling that the Fornix/CPP complaint fulfills the requirements for establishing specific personal jurisdiction — the legal framework determining whether a court may hear lawsuits involving a defendant’s activities in a particular forum — and that the lawsuit may therefore move forward.
The ruling contrasts notably with the outcome of a nearly identical lawsuit filed against Eporner in 2015 by AMA Multimedia. The same Arizona district court dismissed that suit in 2017 over lack of personal jurisdiction. In 2020, that ruling was affirmed on appeal in a split decision by a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit, and in 2021 the U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear a further appeal, ending the case.
In her ruling, Brnovich acknowledges the AMA case but writes that MW’s motion to dismiss the current case relies on it “erroneously,” since a 2025 decision by the full 9th Circuit in the case Briskin v. Shopify loosened the analytical framework for establishing personal jurisdiction. Under that ruling, an interactive online business may be subject to jurisdiction where it knows that it has a customer or user base in a forum and deliberately exploits that base for commercial gain.
Brnovich’s ruling states that Eporner “uses American services to host American content viewed by American viewers … MW knew of its United States user base and generated revenue from that audience through advertising revenue. At bottom, the ongoing availability and sustained profitability of the website depends on American companies and citizens.”
Industry attorney Corey Silverstein called Brnovich’s ruling “an important and potentially consequential ruling for foreign piracy sites that cultivate and monetize substantial U.S. audiences.”
“It does not mean that every foreign website accessible in the United States is now subject to U.S. jurisdiction,” Silverstein said. “But it materially reduces the ability of a commercial website to claim that its U.S. traffic is merely incidental when the site knows about that traffic, profits from it and depends upon it for advertising revenue.”
The decision in Briskin v. Shopify, Silverstein added, not only underpins Brnovich’s decision on jurisdiction, but also likely means that MW would face a “substantially more difficult” appeals process should it lose the Fornix/CPP case and again appeal to the 9th Circuit.
