It’s hard to have sympathy for a dirty, exploitative medium when the producers of it cry foul over piracy – after all dirty is as dirty does, and karma can be your friend or your enemy. But at the same time, copyrights are copyrights and are intended to protect the truly artful from thieves as much as they protect the scummy.
Porn Picks Bone With Torrents
And this time, I’m not talking about the MPAA or the RIAA, I’m talking about pornographers – who, if you want to get technical and nasty about it, leverage a loophole that immunizes them from prostitution charges so long as it’s done on video.
But, in this instance, we’re not here to make moral judgments – that would be plain, um, inappropriate.
The porn industry is looking for a way to combat online piracy of their films and is targeting BitTorrent as the chief enabler. Overall, in the US alone, porn brings in about $50 billion in legitimate sales.
But on the Internet, where as much as 25 percent of the content is adult in nature – or at least sought after – a maximum of 20 percent of the content available is legitimately acquired.
Again, it’s hard to have a pity party…ask the peddler how large a cut he gave the starlet he exploited, and then about what’s fair and you probably won’t like the answer. It’s a matter of what’s legal, what’s business, and supply and demand.
Regardless, copyright law makes it illegal and they have certain rights, and they’re forming coalitions to fight torrents, where the bulk of their content is pirated. But instead of trying to take down the torrent sites directly, the leading solution is to target the backbone providers like AT&T.
And this is where it gets really problematic. This is where you get ISPs deciding directly what content goes through and what doesn’t at the request of interested parties, without any type of due process, because, as it is, there is no such thing as Net Neutrality protection.
And of course the excuse, especially in light of the DOJ’s recent (confusingly unnecessary) opinion on the matter, will be made in the name of something more heinous, like child pornography.
TorrentFreak cites a proposal by Ron Cadwell, CEO of CCBill, a porn site credit card processor:
I was reading a post that Raw Alex (very smart guy) made in another tread that got me thinking on how you could stop the Torrent sites. You need to attack them like the Spam Groups did on spammers. They went after the backbone providers (Level 3, Sprint, ATT etc). If you could get 7 out of 10 of the major providers to blackhole them they are dead.
The question is how do you do that? Simple.1. You get a group of adult webmasters to file DMCA notices by the truck load or allow you to file them on their behalf to the backbone providers. The laws are very specific on Damages and what an ISP must do if a proper DMCA notice is files. (Be Very Annoying Here)
2. You start sending them URL’s like what Raw Alex showed about Child Porn. This is a HOT topic and no backbone provider that is a PUBLIC COMPANY would want to be associated with Child Porn Traffic?
3. Each of the large adult hosting companies have a good relationship with 1 if not more major backbone providers. We can also put pressure on their Abuse Departments to blackhole them also due to the complaints?
I am not sure if it will work but if you put enough pressure on them and the fear of newspapers/major companies finding out about it they will want to distance themselves very quickly from these sites.
Bingo Problem Solved
Hmmmm. Bingo, more like abuse of the whole system to solve a small problem while creating a larger one.
