If you browse pornographic tube sites most of the content you notice seem to be scenes from movies or even clips taken straight from paid adult sites… in other words - copyrighted stuff.
How those sites avoid being charged for copyright infringement?
Do they have deals with adult movies production companies?
Or maybe it is copyright law cannot be enforced as long as the owner is not complaining (and seeing how many porn sites are there it’s hard to keep track of all of them)?
Maybe they consider it a form of advertising: Free samples
I know they don’t have deals with everyone because I remember Samuel L. Jackson getting heat from the porn industry for Tweeting something like “Go visit Redtube”. I’m not going to search for the story since I’m at work but the gist of it was the industry isn’t keen on sites that show their stuff for free and make it more difficult to earn a check. So they were pissed at him giving the sites free advertising.
Man, I typed that whole thing avoiding words like “harder”, “blow back” and other innuendo.
My guess is that those sites get so much “new” material so quickly that, if someone made a real claim, they’d pull it and it’d just wind up on there again in a little while. And some places actually just use it to advertise now with five minute clips and “See the whole thing at…”
Some sites post their own clips, hoping to drive traffic back to the subscription site. Some site owners issue take-downs immediately when they find their content on a tube site. Some tube sites ban posters who accumulate too many take-downs.
All the sites are protected by Section 520. It is the posters’ responsibility to get copyright permission, and the tube sites only have to take-down a video when notified of infringement. While major copyright owners would like to change the law, the tube sites don’t have to pro-active in preventing videos from being posted, they just have to be proactive in removing illegal content and responding to take-down notices.
I think this is true in some cases. I believe a lot of companies cut up their movies into individual sex scenes and sell it as content to websites.
Are they really though? Do they only have to remove videos that were reported, and if they are uploaded again can they just pretend that they didn’t notice? Aren’t they obligated to do as it is possible to remove copyrighted content?
I mean isn’t that what megadownload case was all about?
Slightly off topic: The movie “Sex Tape” this weekend dealt with this issue. All the people needed to do was request that the movie be taken down and the site took it down. I don’t know how realistic this is, since it is a movie, but it seems reasonable to me.
J.
OK here’s the problem. The Digital Millennium Copyright Act was written with a safe harbor provision for “user uploaded content”. What that means is they claim not to know the content was copyrighted (even though it has my watermark on it) and it falls on me to notify them of the infringement and it gives them reasonable time to remove it. What reasonable time is…it doesn’t specify.
Now here’s how it really works, they either pay people to upload it or they have in house employees whose job is to do so. They create a link to the original upload and it is that link that gets posted. I catch them send them what is called a DMCA notice and they take usually 72 hrs and then they delete the link.
in a few days they generate a new link and it starts over again…It’s like playing whack a mole.
To make matters worse8 of the ten largest tube sites are all owned by the same company…originally called Mansef, then manwin and now Mindgeek. They used the devaluation of the industry that they created to move in and buy large chunks of it. Manwin/mindgeek now owns (in addition to the tube sites) Digital Playground, Brazzers, Mofos, Wicked Pictures (web properties), Reality kings, myDirtyHobby, Twistys, Babes and many many more.
Additionally they have relocated all of the tubesites to Hong Kong (after merging with Redtube) which technically means they could ignore the DMCA requests all together.
Its a mess with no real end in site except to say that combined with other things it has cut production in the adult film industry by more than 75%
I have worked in the biz since 1992 as a performer, producer/director, photographer and writer. I’m best known these days for my eponymous website where I write about the industry. CNBC called me one of the ten most powerful people in porn in 2013, that may reflect more on CNBC than it does on me LOL…
Duke Skywalker (producer of some of the most vile porn out there, I’m ashamed to admit that I know that) seems to be quite successful at taking his videos down though - you can’t find his content on tube sites…
Maybe he pays them so they don’t host his videos?
thanks for the insight.
As always, power corrupts. In this case, the power to steal corrupts and destroys the very organizations being stolen from.
Since everyone and his dog now owns a movie camera, the porn industry was on its way out anyway, apart perhaps from the more esoteric stuff.
Heh. You said “pull it.”
They’re also legally headquartered in Luxembourg City, Luxembourg. Luxembourg has a reputation as a tax haven and is probably a better place today for secretively housing money than Switzerland. It may not be fair but any American company putting its headquarters there might as well be flying the skull and crossbones.
That would be true if professionally made porn were being driven off the market by amateur porn. But a quick survey of online porn shows this isn’t the case. Most porn is still professionally made, albeit production values are declining.
Same thing with “esoteric” porn. The overwhelming majority of porn being made nowadays is virtually the same as the overwhelming majority of porn that was being made twenty years ago. Esoteric genres were a niche then and they remain a niche now.
The porn industry isn’t exactly known for its respect for law.
I have to ask, do you think there will ever be another “major” porn movie like “Behind the Green Door” or “Debbie Does Dallas”.
As i understand it, most professional porn outfits actually go out of their way to comply with the law, because they know that if they don’t, there are people watching who will do everything possible to make their lives difficult.
What sort of lawbreaking are you asserting here?
It’s not necessarily about lower production quality it is about that users generally prefer so-called gonzo porn, probably because it doesn’t look as artificial as proper productions…
Porn sites promote via affilliates. These come in different forms and with different rules, but generally they make a certain amount of content that is for free consumption. It may be in lower resolution, in brief clips (or selected images), or are specially created, in order to make their site still worth visiting or subscribing to.
Most porn sites do not need many full subscribers to make shitloads of money - a few thousand people is enough, and they can be sourced worldwide, so it doesn’t ultimately matter that the other 4 billion potential subscribers do not join their site or can access a tiny percentage of their stuff for free; As long as they are making their money, they don’t care about any imaginary “losses” they incur via piracy.
A major business magazine once looked into porns supposed high profits and found out they “exaggerate” on most everything.