RN
Put `daftsex.com` into a browser now and you do not get an error. You get a 301 redirect to a Brazzers channel on RedTube, and the address it hands you carries the tracking string `utm_source=daftsex.com&utm_medium=redirects&utm_campaign=tldredirects`. The domain is not dead. It is working — for the company that sued it. `biqle.com` does the same thing, stamped with its own name in the same campaign.
Both of those domains were recommended on this page, in a section headed websites that can be used as YesPornPlease alternatives. The escape route became the destination it was an escape from, and the parameter name suggests somebody built a repeatable process for it.
That is a better answer to what happened than the one this article printed in 2020, which was an anonymous denial from someone claiming the outage was a server problem.
What the record shows
The campaign began with a DMCA subpoena in September 2019 and a complaint filed in February 2020 by MG Premium Ltd, a MindGeek subsidiary, over 3,078 works. Because US copyright law allows statutory damages of up to $150,000 per work where infringement is found to be willful, the arithmetic produced the $462 million headline that circulated at the time. That figure was always a ceiling on a claim, not an award, and it is worth separating the two — a great deal of coverage did not.
The case landed in the Western District of Washington in front of Judge Benjamin Settle, and it is the subsequent rulings, not the filing, that are actually informative.
September 2022. MG Premium asked for an injunction that would have bound a list of companies who were not defendants — Verisign, Cloudflare, Namecheap, FDC Servers, NameSilo and PrivacyGuardian.org — requiring them to disable domains and cut ties. Settle refused. He was not prepared, he wrote, to issue a sweeping injunction against numerous non-parties on a conclusory and unsupported allegation that the operator was in privity with them. Rightsholders do not automatically get to conscript the plumbing of the internet, and a court said so.
November 2022. The operator, named in the proceedings as Vasily Kharchenko, did not appear to defend himself. Settle entered default judgment: $32,145,000 in statutory damages over 2,143 works, covering daftsex.com, artporn.com, biqle.com and daxab.com. He noted that actual damages could plausibly have exceeded $1.2 billion, working from 125 million visits in a single month in 2021, and wrote that only a large award would deter the defendants from further illegal action. Verisign, the .com registry, was ordered to transfer the four domains to MindGeek's registrar.
Which is where the redirect comes from. Those domains were not seized by a government or quietly abandoned. They were transferred by court order and then pointed at a paysite channel.
The part still unanswered
Here is what the record does not show, and this article is not going to pretend otherwise.
No final judgment against the YesPornPlease or VShare operators themselves surfaced in any public source. The Daftsex judgment is a different defendant in the same court before the same judge, brought by the same plaintiff, and it is not evidence of how the YesPornPlease matter concluded. The 2020 piece asked what really happened to that specific site and answered with an unnamed source; six years later the honest position is that the outcome for those operators is undocumented, and the domain itself returned nothing readable when checked for this rewrite.
What can be said is that the anonymous account — no copyright trouble, just technical problems — is not corroborated by anything, and was not corroborated then either. It was one interested party's unverifiable claim, printed as a counterweight to a filed complaint. Those are not equivalent kinds of evidence and presenting them as two sides of an issue was the original's real error.
Why the alternatives list aged the way it did
The eight sites recommended here were selected on catalogue size, video quality and absence of pop-ups. Nobody asked the question that turned out to determine which ones still exist.
Every one of them was pitched on carrying material from named production companies — Brazzers, Mofos, Reality Kings, Blacked, Naughty America, BangBros — and several of the write-ups treated that as the selling point. A site whose appeal is that it carries a specific rightsholder's catalogue has an obvious dependency on that rightsholder's tolerance, and the two that were most explicit about it are the two now redirecting to that rightsholder's own channel.
The rest have simply drifted. Checked for this rewrite, `pornktube.com` refused the request outright and `xxxfiles.com` still resolves under its own name. Nothing more than that is claimed about either, because nothing more was established.
The one durable observation is structural: recommending free tubes by catalogue depth is recommending them by how much exposure they have accepted. That is not a criticism of anyone's viewing habits. It is just the wrong axis to rank on if you want the bookmark to survive.
What changed around the case
The plaintiff is no longer called MindGeek. Ethical Capital Partners acquired the company in March 2023, and in August that year it announced the name Aylo. The corporate identity behind the litigation, the RedTube channel the old domains now point to, and the Brazzers catalogue they were accused of carrying are all the same group under a newer name.
For the current state of the destinations discussed here, this site's own entries are the place to look: HQporner, PornGO, XxxFiles, PornDish and PornKTube, each reviewed on its own terms rather than as a replacement for something that went away.