The film and music businesses couldn’t stop file-sharing, but the porn industry has a plan to drive piracy into the shadows in 15 months or less. Can DogFart, Lords of Porn, and Naughty Bank succeed where others have failed?
They certainly hope so. To that end, a company called Pink Visual rounded up a huge collection of porn studios and lawyers for a “content protection retreat” (CPR) in Tucson last week, one designed to get the industry working together on an anti-P2P strategy. CPR was designed to “revive” the business, and backers hope hope they can “significantly reduce digital piracy of adult content and to effectively drive those who engage in adult content piracy completely underground by January 2012.”
The event was secretive enough that the location and agenda weren’t revealed publicly, but we do know that lawyers engaged in widespread “Doe” litigation against anonymous file-swappers were present to make their case. These firms included Media Copyright Group, the Minneapolis/Chicago company that recently brought large-scale porn litigation to the heartland (and which is represented in federal court by a family law attorney with little discernible practice in intellectual property cases).
The industry routinely claims that it is being decimated by piracy—it’s even worse off than the mainstream film business. (In 2007, the now-defunct Portfolio did a terrific piece on this, called “Obscene Losses.”) In part, that’s due to the huge (indeed, record-setting) box office numbers put up by theaters in the last few years. Porn, which is highly dependent on individual sales to home users, doesn’t have the theatrical revenue stream and is therefore more at risk from the free Flash-based “tube” sites that now cater to every kind of fetish. These sites, modeled after YouTube, are awash in copyrighted content.
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