Last Updated on January 5, 2026 by Rob Cashman

The alternatives to suing in federal court provided to copyright holders like Strike 3 Holdings LLC do not provide them anywhere near the money they could make in settlements by using (or in my opinion, misusing) the federal courts [link to my article sword and shield] to solicit settlements from each and every accused accused defendant.

I know this because I’ve seen the other methods fail.

I have seen copyright holders do the following:

1) Send DMCA copyright violation notices telling defendants to “cut it out” and stop downloading their copyrighted titles. This failed because they would cut off their own stream of settlement money. This goes against their business model of “sue [or threaten to sue] to solicit a large settlement payment.”

2) Send DMCA settlement demand letters demanding that the ISP account holder log into some website they set up and pay a settlement for the titles they have allegedly downloaded. This model failed because it was inefficient and had some really laughable weaknesses [just one – because they relied on the ISPs to send the accused ISP account holder defendants the settlement demand letters. Historical secret: they didn’t, and their revenue stream from incoming settlements was cut off by the ISPs not complying with their requests.]

3) Try to sue the ISP itself (or the VPN provider itself, or the bittorrent website owners themselves to try to get them to cooperate with their future requests).

[This requires another short article, but there are attorneys such as Kerry Culpepper of Culpepper IP, PPPLC [check that] who, instead of going after the accused downloaders of his movie clients’ videos, he went after the VPN providers who allowed their customers (the accused defendants) to use their networks to pirate his clients’ videos. Gil Sperlein? did this successfully years ago. Alternatively, Culpepper is trying to take over the domain names (and thus the websites) of websites such as YTS and other pirate entities perhaps to monetize the traffic that is coming from those websites for his clients].

This is a relatively new approach, and I am interested in seeing how this turns out.

4) Strike 3 Holdings LLC could (G-d forbid) simply try to sell their subscription services like any other adult film company does.

Most adult film companies try to provide valuable content to their customers who pay a monthly subscription to access that content.

To market their services (and to try to attract new paying subscribers) I understand that these traditional adult film companies allow tube-like adult film websites to play short clips of the adult film videos. To get the full video, there is usually a message or some link they provide to the viewer to visit their website. There, they sell the viewer access to all of their content in return for a subscription fee to view their adult film brands.

In other words, they could try to sell their servies like every other company does.

5) They could move away from the BitTorrent networks and start using Google trackers to determine the IP addresses of those accused downloaders who visited or downloaded content from a particular infringing website (whether a tube-like adult film website which hosts an unauthorized video without the copyright holder’s permission, or whether uploaded by another user).

For a while, as an attorney, THIS is the direction I thought these lawsuits would be going. I suspected that certain governments and entities would sue either Google (who have Google Adwords trackers on almost every site on the internet), OR, they would sue the website owners of the various bittorrent websites (e.g., The Pirate Bay, Kickass Torrents, and various Tube-based video websites) to obtain the list of IP addresses that visited a particular website [containing a particular copyrighted video].

They would use this list to file a “John Doe Subscriber assigned IP address XYZ” lawsuit against the account holder assigned that IP address by his or her ISP. This would be the alternative to searching the BitTorrent networks.

[For your reading enjoyment, I wrote these articles explaining what I thought would happen.]

[OTHER ARTICLE: WHY THE ALTERNATIVES TO SUING ACCUSED DOWNLOADERS IN FEDERAL COURT ARE UNPROFITABLE]
What is their alternative to suing ISP account subscribers?

“CUT-IT-OUT” DMCA copyright violation notice.

1) They could use the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) to force an ISP to send a letter to the ISP account holder to either tell them to stop downloading. This is not profitable for them at all because they stop the copyright infringement which funds all of the settlements from their lawsuits. So there is almost ZERO CHANCE they will do this.

DMCA SETTLEMENT DEMAND LETTER.

2) They could use the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) to try to get the ISP to send a “DMCA settlement demand letter” as companies such as CEG-TEK (no longer in business) did, as Rightscorp (no longer in business) did, and as RIGHTSENFORCEMENT.com (no longer in business) did. Do you see the common thing in between these operations? They are all out of business.

SUB-HEADER: WHY DMCA SETTLEMENT DEMAND LETTER ATTEMPTS ALWAYS FAILED.

SETTLEMENT PAYMENT SYSTEM IS EXPENSIVE TO MAINTAIN.
Why? Because setting up a settlement payment system is simply expensive. The owner of that system would need to sell their copyright enforcement services to copyright holders (e.g., Strike 3 Holdings LLC, Malibu Media LLC (x-art.com), other adult film companies, and other movie copyright holders).

BITTORRENT SWARM TRACKING IS EXPENSIVE.
Then, they would need to track the bittorrent networks to identify the IP addresses who allegedly downloaded their client’s copyrighted titles. This in iteself costs them a lot of money.

RELIANCE ON SOMEONE ELSE FOR SUCCESS OF YOUR METHOD — THEY RELIED ON THE ISP TO SEND OUT DMCA SETTLEMENT DEMAND LETTERS.
Then they need to send the DMCA violation notices to the ISPs and hope the ISPs will forward their DMCA settlement demand letters to the accused ISP account subscribers. Some did, many didn’t. So their copyright enforcement system died right there where the ISPs never told the ISP account subscribers that a particular copyright holder was asking them for a settlement or else they would be sued as a “John Doe Subscriber assigned IP address XYZ” in a federal court copyright infringement lawsuit.

I saw this flaw immediately when CEG-TEK first started sending these notices which is why I wrote the articles “Why CEG-TEK’s Settlement Demand System Will Die” in [correct this] June, 2016 (link).

So you see that sending DMCA settlement demand letters or DMCA “cut it out” letters was not profitable to the copyright holders trying to “cash in” on forcing the accused downloaders to pay a settlement.

ISP ACCOUNT HOLDERS VIEWED THE DMCA SETTLEMENT DEMAND LETTERS WITH SUSPICION.
But their problems did not end there — the accused ISP account holders who MAYBE received the DMCA settlement demand letter (if it ever came to their correct e-mail address) looked at the letter with suspicion. “Is someone trying to scam me?” they asked. “What if I ignore their settlement demand letter?” they would ask. Many ignored the letter, and as a result, they did not pay the settlement amounts requested of them in the DMCA settlement letters — if they even received the letters at all.

ATTORNEYS LIKE ME COMPLICATED THE PROCESS TO PROTECT THEIR CLIENT’S LEGAL RIGHTS AND RELEASE THEM LEGALLY FROM LIABILITY.
Then the copyright holders’ problems were compounded by attorneys like me (Rob Cashman), because I would never just instruct an accused defendant to just go pay the settlement. I would ask the copyright holders for proof that the downloads actually happened (referencing the PCAP file, and noting that they actually did not have any evidence that it was my client who did the download). Then, if my client did want me to settle the claims against them based on the copyright holders’ response, I would always ask for a dicount or a lower settlement amount. I would also refuse to pay multiple per-title settlement for duplicate titles that were downloaded and then seeded by my clients, along with a bunch of other checklist items we did for our clients. This diminished the amount of settlement money the DMCA settlement demand letter copyright holders would receive by sending their DMCA settlement demand letters.

Then IF a settlement was reached, I always required the copyright holders to agree to a settlement agreement releasing my client from liability. So now the copyright holders needed to hire someone to always work with me and other attorneys to write up and agree to a legal contract before they would get paid. This was time consuming and cost them money.

COPYRIGHT TROLL ATTORNEYS OFTEN DID NOT PAY THEIR CLIENTS THEIR SHARE OF THE SETTLEMENT MONEY.
Lastly, the copyright enforcement company needed to pay the copyright holders (e.g., the adult film companies and movie companies who signed on with them to enforce their copyrighted videos). Funny enough, even in the federal court copyright infringement lawsuits, adult film copyright holders often ended up suing the “copyright troll” attorneys they hired to enforce their copyrights. Why? Because the copyright troll attorneys often neglected to pay their clients for the settlement money they generated with their lawsuits. I am personally remembering the Malibu Media LLC lawsuits and Lipscomb, how Malibu Media LLC sued their own attorneys again and again. Malibu Media LLC is no longer suing defendants as they once did.

[At the time, I had in mind to merge the end of another article into this one, and to put header links from this article into the other one. I am not sure if I did this or not, but I am posting the article as is, just in case the information contained here becomes useful to someone implicated in one of these lawsuits].