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