Roughly a week ago, Xbiz held a Piracy Seminar during their Hollywood Conference. The panel for this conference consisted of Andrew Stoddard from Hush Hush (and Shane’s World), as well as Jason Tucker from Falcon Foto. Several lawyers were also on the panel as was Diane Duke from the Free Speech Coalition.
During the seminar it was revealed that Andrew and Jason, along with other industry players, had created an adult industry organization to combat piracy. Apparently they held a private meeting with other industry owners behind closed doors and made sure that anything that was discussed at the meeting would not be revealed. This organization is called the PAK Group.
The main focus of the seminar seemed to be on the popularity of "Tube" sites (adult versions of YouTube). These sites offer a myriad of stolen content for free and in turn offer the ability for webmasters or affiliate programs to advertise on their sites. Andrew S claimed during the seminar that the affiliate program Brazzers is behind such Tube sites as PornHub.Com and RedTube.Com. I believe Brazzers denies ownership of these sites, but I can’t find any formal statement. The GFY forums have been rife with conjecture over what Brazzers real involvement is with these sites. According to one source I talked to, Andrew’s position seemed to be that if you buy any form of advertisement on a Tube site with content not legally purchased, you are contributing to the theft of said copyright.
The heated argument I alluded to last week was between Andrew and Sean Christian from Adult Friend Finder. I’ve been told by several webmasters that AFF has a nearly limitless budget when it comes to advertising. The argument was over the fact that AFF has paid for ads on Tube and Torrent sites. AFF Sean tried to defend the companies position, but porners in the crowd said to me his various defenses didn’t add up. One of these defenses was that if AFF doesn’t buy the ads, then their competitor will. Why are people surprised over a lack of moral ethics in this business?
The Brazzer issue has become a hot topic on the Webmaster Forum GFY. Pornreviewsource posts:
thats the truth right there…. like i said in a similar thread… Brazzers don’t give a sh*t… they have ads on redtube, megatronic, pornbb.org and many more content stealing sites… we can make as many threads about this as we want but unless REAL legal action is taken nothing will be done to stop this… brazzers doesn’t give a sh*t if 1, 2 or 15 webmasters stop promoting them… the sales they lose from those 1, 2 or 15 webmasters will be made up by all the ads they are taking out on the very high traffic content stealing sites… not to mention the fact that 90% of their webmasters won’t even care about this because brazzers will continue to make them money… as i said earlier, without real legal action this shit will never end…
ismokeblunts writes:
Doesn’t Brazzers OWN Redtube? It’s seems brazzers is the program of choice for piracy forums, media upload joints, and tube sites. They are the only one I ever see pop up as a paysite type program supporting these type of operations.
Voodoo (who I believe works for Andrew S at Hush Hush) posted this graphic:
Who exactly owns Brazzers? Several Webmasters I talked to seemed to concur that they are one of the strongest affiliate programs currently out there.
Can the industry actually stem the tide on the increasingly rampant theft happening online?
Update: A similar disscussion about piracy in general is currently going on over at Adult DVD Talk. The user LubeNLuv posts:
The REAL piracy isn’t taking place on Rapidshare. It has, and always will, take place on Usenet newsgroups. Just to prove my point. Go to the front page of AdultDVDTalk. Now take a look at the top 10 Price searches. Using my Newsgroup providers search tool, 8 of those movies are available on Usenet for download right now. And I’m not talking DIVX conversions….these are complete DVD-4 or DVD-9 rips, so once you download and reassemble the parts, you have a complete ISO image of the ORIGINAL DVD, without any kind of compression or loss in quality at all.
THAT is piracy. And it’s been like this for as long as I can remember. Every once in awhile, I see some push to shut down some of the websites that index these illegal uploads to Usenet. But for all the ones that are shut down, 5 more pop up in their place. It’s ridiculous.
Regardless of the impact on porn sales, I also think one other thing is biting into the market. There is, quite simply, not a whole lot of “new stuff” left to show. We’ve got a decade of anal, gangbang, scat, piss, mock (or real) abuse, BDSM, cum gargling, bukkake,lesbian, TS, etc etc etc. What the hell else is there to show? Snuff films?
I occasionally buy a porn title these days. But frankly…nothing new under the sun for me. So my money goes elsewhere.