A website that hosted adult content taken from models sold on platforms like OnlyFans is down, following a lawsuit filed earlier this week by a popular OnlyFans model.
On Monday, attorneys for Deniece “Niece” Waidhofer filed a complaint against Thothub.tv for hosting her images without her consent. The lawsuit demands that Thothub stop infringing on Waidhofer’s copyright and seeks damages, and is seeking information on who runs Thothub.
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The site went down on Wednesday evening, and as of writing, was replaced by an interactive animation of the solar system and an email address for inquiries.
“Thothub clearly saw the writing on the wall and decided it had no choice but to shut down its criminal activity,” attorney Brett S. Rosenthal from law firm Reese Marketos, who is representing Waidhofer, told Motherboard. “But we are just getting started. We will hold Thothub’s members and the companies that enabled its piracy accountable for the harm they caused. We will continue to chase down online pirates, and we will ask courts to enforce existing law so that companies like Cloudflare must enact reasonable and effective repeat infringer policies to prevent sites like Thothub from flourishing. It’s time to end the era of online copyright lawlessness.”
Prior to Motherboard’s reporting, there were videos and galleries of images claiming to be “leaked” from Waidhofer’s Patreon and OnlyFans accounts. After Motherboard reached out to Thothub to confirm that Waidhofer filed takedown requests, as she claimed in the lawsuit, the site removed those threads.
“We remove on average about 200 entries from the main page and the forums per week and we are constantly in contact with multiple lawyers all over the world to have the illicit material removed, for which we have a dedicated team,” a spokesperson for Thothub told Motherboard before the filing.
“This content is only supposed to be available to paid subscribers through the Licensed Sites,” the lawsuit claims. “Thothub’s primary purpose—its raison d’etre—is to steal this exclusive, behind the paywall content from the Licensed Sites and unlawfully distribute it to millions of its associates.”
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As part of the lawsuit, Waidhofer is also suing adult platforms BangBros and Chaturbate for advertising on Thothub (and therefore funding Thothub’s business, complain claims) as well as internet infrastructure service Cloudflare for protecting the site.
The lawsuit claims that Thothub and the other companies are all in violation of the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organization Act (RICO), in that they’ve “engaged in intentional and willful conduct in service of the criminal enterprise,” including copyright infringement and extortion.
Thothub did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Updated 8/6 11:38 a.m. with comment from Rosenthal.
