Torrent Freak reported on a conference by 65 players in the porn industry who want to do something about internet piracy. Unlike the music industry and it’s heavy handed enforcer, the RIAA, the porn industry hasn’t tried to address piracy until now.
According to attorney Greg Piccionelli:
“The lack of enforcement over the years has left the pirates and consumers with the impression that copying and stealing adult content is something that has absolutely no punitive consequence associated with it whatsoever, and so the industry has really sort of dug its own grave to this degree”
It is estimated that only 15-20% of porn in people’s homes is legitimate. In an industry worth $50 billion, that’s a lot of lost revenue.
At my old ISP I used to sign the cheques for our in-house Usenet servers. The usage profile over the course of the day told a quite telling picture, and it was fairly obvious that the majority of use was for porn. Not only could we see which groups were being accessed the most, but there was always a massive spike at 11pm for one hour.
What was happening was that our more technical users who tended to the Usenet users, were coming home from the pub (they close at 11pm in the UK) by themselves (again) and were all jumping onto our Usenet servers looking for a bit of ‘inspiration’. The techies had a special name for this ‘hour’. I won’t repeat it as this is a family site, but lets just say that it rhymed with banking.
It’ll be interesting to see if the porn industry will create a body similar to the RIAA to name and shame users. I imagine that if they did it would be very effective like the schemes they have in certain areas of the UK where they post photos of kerb crawlers on billboards, to drive them away. I’d imagine if BitTorrent/Usenet users were worried about their names appearing somewhere in print, they’d think twice about downloading ‘Topless Polish Women In Tights XI’.
