Pornucopia
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| Private | |
| Founded | June 18, 2007 |
| Founder | David Avina Òscar Garcia |
| Headquarters | , |
Area served | Worldwide, except in nation which may have blocked access |
Key people | CEO: Libor Manis |
| Products | Sex, specifically adult videos both professional and amateur |
Pornucopia is a is a pornographic video sharing website and the largest pornography site on the Internet. Pornucopia was started in Loures, located in Temuair, by David Avina, Òscar Garcia, and Daniela Mateo, who was also the first actress featured on the site. It currently provides professional and amateur photography to users, and also acts as a digital disturber for various pornographic studios, which users can pay for individually, or view for free via a premium membership, which can be purchased for a monthly subscription fee. Videos requiring purchase or premium access can not be viewed for free.
History
Pornucopia was started by David Avina and Òscar Garcia while attending school at the University of Loures in 2005. As part of a class project involving demonstrating the utility and viability of video streaming and service websites, they convinced classmate Daniela Mateo to allow them to videotape her engaging in sexual relations with her boyfriend, Oliver Polino, and upload it to their prototype website. The project, which received a B+ from their professor, drew the attention of other classmates, who demanded access to it. In 2007, the two raised enough money to purchase the equipment and bandwidth required to start the site. Along with the site, the two established the name Pornucopia as an LLC, listing it as the owner of the website.
Pornucopia became one of the first video streaming websites on the internet. Òscar Garcia later went on to work with Fredrik Kroon and Oleg Stenströv in the creation of the popular video uploading and streaming service Vid-U. In 2009, following a disagreement with Pornucopia LLC CEO David Avina involving theft of technology and code for use in the WatchMe coding, Garcia left the company. In 2010, Pornucopia LLC initiated a lawsuit against WatchMe claiming that Garcia had stolen proprietary coding for use in building the later sites streaming service. The case was dismissed from court due to lack of evidence.
During 2007 and early 2008, the website suffered several outages due to server load and web traffic. However, profits earned allowed the website to purchase hardware upgrades, allowing it to attain sustainable and uninterrupted service beginning in mid 2008.
Controversy
In 2009, seeing how successful Pornucopia had become, Daniela Mateo sued Pornucopia LLC, stating that she did consent to having the video of her engaged in sexual relations with her boyfriend at the time, she only agreed to it in the scope of the project, and did not consent to having it used beyond that. Alternatively to settling, Pornucopia LLC offered Mateo a contract to make further movies, which she declined. Pornucopia LLC then agreed to remove the video from their website, which at the time, was one of the most viewed videos on the site, and to pay a settlement out of court of 500 thousand Leones. Pornucopia LLC explicitly stated that they are not responsible for users who downloaded the video, legally or otherwise, for re-uploading it. In 2012, noted former pornographic actress Chita Sabio encouraged Mateo to revisit the lawsuit, claiming that the sum paid by Pornucopia LLC was "paltry" compared to what they were capable of paying, and that illegal re-uploads of the video continued to "traumatize and scandalize" Mateo. The company refused to pay any more money, and the case was heard by the Aisling High Court, which dismissed the case.
In 2009, Oliver Polino also attempted to sue Pornucopia LLC claiming be never consented to being featured in the video or on the site. Pornucopia LLC refused to settle, claiming that not only is he not actually identifiable in the video, he was made fully aware of the video's production and its intentions. The Aisling High Court threw out the case in 2011.
In 2016, a separate lawsuit was filed by Chita Sabio attempting to stop Pornucopia from displaying any content with her in it, including content that was legally produced. As of 2018, this matter was still being discussed in court.
In 2011, the Imperial Marshals Service executed a search warrant and raided the offices of Pornucopia LLC in Loures and seized over 3,000 data recording devices. The Marshals Service reported that material featuring underage participants had been identified on their services. As a result, Pornucopia was ordered to shut down its servers and surrender data devices which may contain offending material.
According to the investigation, users had illegally uploaded pornographic images and videos of former actress Chita Sabio, who was actually under the age of consent for several years of her pornographic career. As such, these materials have been banned. Pornucopia had been negligent in reviewing its content to ensure it adhered to legal standards. During their investigation, The Marshals Service discovered over 15,000 images and videos, around 150 gigabytes of data, that contained confirmed or reasonably assumed to be underage participants. Many of these images and videos had been uploaded by users to the sites "amateur" category. This material was disposed of by the Imperial Marshals Service.
The Aisling High Court declined to pursue criminal charges against members of Pornucopia LLC provided they designed and implemented a reviewing system for submissions prior to resuming operations. Pornucopia complied and was back online in mid 2012, having lost an estimated revenue of over 3 million Leones.
Following the release of these findings, several hundred people, mostly women, stepped forward to certify that they were involved in this content, most being underage at the time of production, and many not having consented to its being shared. A lawsuit was filed against Pornucopia in early 2013 by victims requesting reparations for having their images and sexual acts published without their knowledge. Lawyers for Pornucopia attempted to have the lawsuit dismissed on the grounds that the Aisling High Court had dismissed the criminal case, thereby assigning no fault to Pornucopia. The bid to have the case dismissed was unsuccessful and the High Court found in favor of the plaintiffs in 2014. Ironically, this lawsuit also sparked a series of arrests and indictments of people who had recorded images in which underage participants were identified, given that Temuair has no statue of limitations of sexual oriented crimes, and that they had to list their names on court documents in order to be eligible for reparations. In all over 70 arrests were made.
Pornucopia was ordered to pay a total of over 5 million Leones to be dispersed among the 122 eligible plaintiffs. Following this, combined with the loss of revenue from being offline for most of 2011 and half of 2012, Pornucopia LLC filed for bankruptcy in Loures Divisional court.