Nate from Porn News has been fighting piracy for 6 months and is winning battles along the way…
We’re coming up on six months since we launched Operation: Takedown Piracy. It all started on April 5th, 2009. On that day I started sending takedown notices to piracy sites on the behalf of Hush Hush Entertainment and Shane’s World Studios. Now six months later we’ve had over 170,000 files removed from piracy sites and have gained around a dozen different studio partners.
For all the success that we’ve had, you might be surprised to learn that we were really close to never even launching this program. When I first started asking other industry insiders about the digital piracy problem the responses I got were overwhelmingly defeatist. They told me there was nothing you could do to put a dent into the problem. I was told that you had to have a high-powered lawyer to send DMCA notices. They said that any content I had removed would just be re-uploaded. So far, on each and every one of those statements, they have been wrong.
The problem with those statements is that they were merely repeating what someone else had told them. Much like the “Richard Gere / Gerbil” story, everyone just assumes it’s true because someone else told them so. That’s not how I’m wired, I like to realize things on my own, I don’t like letting other people form my beliefs.
So I went to a piracy site, read the DMCA policy at the bottom of the page, sent a DMCA in the proper format and amazingly the content was taken down within twenty-four hours. Was it re-uploaded right away? No. In fact I’ve encountered incredibly few instances where something has been re-uploaded. Even still, if pirated content is re-uploaded, the numbers are still in the favor of the copyright holder. It takes someone hours and hours to upload the material, while it takes me just a few minutes to gather the information and send a DMCA notice. No lawyers involved, just my time and effort.
Even with as much pirated content as we’ve had removed, that’s still a drop in the bucket of the totality of the problem. We won’t be able to get a handle on this problem until we have widespread cooperation from all the major studios. As studios we need to take responsibility for our content. It’s your number one asset guys. If you own a studio and you are even considering some day selling your content off, why wouldn’t you want to protect it and keep it as valuable as possible?
Policing our content online is the single best way that studios can support brick and mortar retailers. Right now our stores are competing against the free content online. We’re competing to monetize a generation of consumers that asks “who pays for porn?” If you can easily download a studio’s entire library on a handful of websites without ever paying a dime, how can studios expect retailers to compete with that? The next time you hear a studio representative complaining about sales being down…ask them if they are really doing everything they can to protect their content. If they aren’t, tell them to look into Operation: Takedown Piracy. We’re six months strong and only gaining momentum. The naysayers may say that we’re fighting a losing battle, but I don’t think they’re correct. This is a battle that doesn’t take a lot of money to fight and we have plenty of things working in our favor. It’s a battle worth fighting because to not fight it will lead to a much worse outcome.
It just requires that we make a few sacrifices. We have to actually do some work and not throw up our hands in defeat. We have to work together instead of looking at every other studio as your enemy. And you have to hand out a small amount of money every month. The same studios that won’t spend the money required to stop this problem are the same studios that have a “Release Party” every month where they drop a few thousand dollars to ply porno girls with liquor and engage in a big circle jerk while their sales go to shit, all so that they can get a Press Release about the party up on AVN or XBIZ. Does that sound like the way a successful business should be operating? Mark my word, if piracy does eventually eat our lunch…we need look no further than ourselves for what went wrong.
But how is the Operation: Takedown Piracy program working? Do we represent a glimmer of hope in this tsunami of gloom? Well, like I stated at the beginning of this article, we’ve just recently passed 170,000 files removed. By any estimate that has to equal quite a few terabytes of data. We’ve frustrated uploaders, and many of their whiny complaints have been documented on the PornNewz.com website with my regular “Talk Like A Pirate” postings. We’ve been able to remove thousands and thousands of files of pirated content for each and every one of our partners. We aren’t letting up and we will continue every day to go out there, hunt down the pirates and put them out of business. We aren’t sitting around blaming others and playing victim. We’ve got our foot on the throats of these thieves and we aren’t about to let up now.
Interested in more about Operation: Takedown Piracy? Check out http://www.pornnewz.com/piracy
A well written an intelligent post. My only initial knee jerk reaction is that the executives in porn would love nothing better than half of the industry to go down in flames because of piracy so that they can supposedly grab market share. A lot of my old content is on Red Tube and other Tube sites. When I told the content owners that it should be removed they shrugged their shoulders and said it was good advertising. Some of the same people that are given awards in the business are supporting piracy at tube sites with advertising dollars… go figure.
And how many files go onto piracy sites daily? Seems like a very King Canute exercise to me.
My skepticism may be unwarranted, but… 940+ takedowns a day? That’s more than “a few minutes”. If it’s being done correctly, that’s a big time investment.
On the other hand, maybe “correctly” isn’t all that important. Unlike YouTube, where there all sorts of fair-use edge cases, I doubt porn-related tube sites pose similar difficulties. You could pretty much shotgun takedown notices all day, confident that the chance of being sued for filing a fraudulent or mistaken notice is pretty small.
Rog, it takes a few hours to check all the tubes for files. Xvideos, redtube, porn8, etc (I do not want to give them free publicity). For companies like Wicked, Vivid, Evil Angel, and others where 80% of their profit is DVD, they will have to put together a small staff that monitors things or else they will perish. The big problem is that DVD companies are computer illiterate and incapable of even understanding what Nate is talking about.
You’re not “winning” unless your efforts result in, ceteris paribus, increased profits (or decreased losses, as the case may be). And I can guarantee that that is not happening. The problem is with piracy’s cumulative effect–i.e., unless someone NEEDS to watch a particular studio’s video, they’re just going to watch whatever catches their fancy on PornTube et al.
It’s called “a start” and while Nate is not the only one doing this, he is having an impact on people that want to see Jesse Jane scenes, Stoya scenes, and various others that are only available via the movies he has protected. Over time, if others get with the plan and start their own DMCA programs, and go further, the impact will be more readily noticed.
Otherwise, if no one protects their content, it is a moot point and devalues the content considerably. Some of the things Nate does are partially automated and steps could be made to continue that trend to speed things up.
Houstondon:
Assuming, arguendo, that it is impossible to find a free full-length Digital Playground video on any of the tube sites: Would the people who wanted to watch for free now pay? If so, is the new revenue greater than the cost of enforcing the copyright?
If not, that is a horrible way to operate a business. The RIAA has already proven this.
NG, again, regardless of any incremental sales, if you do nothing to protect your copyrighted material, you lose on several fronts, not least of which has been suggested as legal rights, but at very least the value of your material goes down. When people see a company, any company, do absolutely nothing to remove such movies, they are less willing to pay for it, or at very least, less willing to pay full price.
Regardless of the actual pirates then, the ones actually doing the stealing (and my years old suggestion to upload partial copies of such movies laden with extensive malware is apparently not workable under the law these days), those who see the titles available for free will find it less valuable and even if they might purchase some titles, will be reluctant to buy titles that they know are available freely in droves.
The current level of protection Nate is offering is cheap and he has removed tens of thousands of titles at various websites. As I said, this is just a start and there are other avenues for addressing the issue to be taken so thanking Nate is not such a big deal from my perspective. 🙂
Houstondon:
First, thank you for taking the time to thoughtfully reply to my posts. I’m not trying to troll. The whole piracy issue just really intrigues me–like, what’s the incentive for someone to upload in the first place?
I understand your argument that enforcement of copyright is necessary to protect the value of the work. However, I’ve heard quite compelling contra arguments that in this age of nearly effortless and costless global distribution, copyright enforcement is impossible. For example: thepiratebay dot org/legal.
I’d like to think there’s a way the studios could produce a new “product” worth purchasing instead of pirating, given the choice, but I don’t see it.
You guys don’t get it, do you? Most porn nuts don’t give a damn about whole porn videos. You actually think we’re going to watch a 1 to 2 hour porn video all the way to the end?
The amount of stroke material we need to get off is only about 5 to 10 minutes, sometimes even shorter.
The tube sites that I’ve seen have thousands of clips which I know have been illegally obtained.
What makes it even harder is that the clips can be renamed in a near infinite amount of combinations. For example, I’ve seen a clip of Samantha Styles with some nameless meat puppet fucking her hard. This clip came from “Sky’s Day Off”. I’ve seen 15 clips of that same scene with 15 different names.
Trying to remove copyrighted content from the internet is like trying to “remove pee from a swimming pool”.
Porn producers have lost the war.
Lotefa hit it on the head
NG, yet to consider the “all is lost, let’s just bail” argument as the final say in all this just begets a conclusion that doesn’t have to be. Congress and the EU are woefully behind the times in protecting copyright, the consequences helping to effectively “dumb down” the content but that doesn’t have to remain the case.
I’m half surprised that some of the mainstream companies don’t work on getting Goggle and other search engines to dump torrent links altogether while simultaneously pressing ISP’s to drop subscribers that upload/download. As it stands, the impact is telling about all the hardworking people losing their shirt making porn, thanks in large part to the assholes that steal content as though they are owed it, but ultimately, a few companies will manage by selling hard copies to those that are casual users or collectors as only one part of their revenue stream.
PS: Attacking the tube sites via legal proceedings should have been done years ago, just as anyone in the hierarchy of the major content crooks, but it can still be done. And while individual scenes may well be the preferred way for some of the idiots to steal, if Nate’s program were expanded upon, it could certainly have an impact for those wanting those individual scenes of stars in an easy to find manner (ie: how many of these losers are constantly posting questions regarding a particular scene, even those already on the websites multiple times?).