America’s pornography business has been cast as an industry quick to co-opt new technologies to keep its profit margins larger than the average guy’s. However, when DVD sales plummeted by 50% in 2009 and torrent sites emerged as a factor in limp revenues, mainstream porn faced a new kind of shrinkage: porn needed a little blue pill, or a bailout. So, what new hot tech innovation is set to get porn back in the black?
Holy huge file sharing lawsuits, Batman!
Last Monday saw numbers skyrocket in porn’s war against piracy and torrent sites when four porn companies filed suits in California to target 9,055 alleged file sharers. That was a week after director Axel Braun filed in West Virginia to sue 7,098 alleged pirates for one film, Batman XXX: A Porn Parody.
This is not to be confused with the seven West Virginia suits filed in late September, suing 5,469. That was just before three porn companies came together to file against 1,100 alleged torrent pirates in Chicago. None of these were filed in conjunction with Hustler/Larry Flynt Production’s now-total of four lawsuits for This Ain’t Avatar XXX, with its own defendant total of 7164.
Let me be the first girl to look at the exploding number of defendants and admit that I’ve truly never seen something so big. Neither has the Electronic Frontier Foundation, whose Cindy Cohn told me by phone that the sheer numbers in each filing were themselves unprecedented — whereas, “The RIAA sued around 20,000 people over a number of years; this is an order of magnitude bigger.”
Braun, like many of his co-plaintiffs, sees no reason to hold anything back in order to do what he sees as protecting his investments. Via email he told me, “F**k ‘em all. I’m suing everybody.”
No one wants to be named and shamed over alleged theft of anything called Danielle Staub Raw or Relax He’s My Stepdad 2. However, Batman XXX was a cult hit. In evidence, the YouTube trailer (safe for work):
Triple-X bat-campiness notwithstanding, an avalanche of lawsuits soon to exceed 30,000 defendants filed in less than two months suggests the emergence of a cottage industry – one that raises a lot of serious questions.
The porno lawsuit gold rush: Super size my DMCA
It’s become plain that mass filings over piracy are now part of the economic equation for adult companies. In the middle of lawsuit filings, a select group of adult industry reps (and their lawyers) met in Arizona at an exclusive Content Protection Retreat. Embracing the abbreviation of CPR as a secondary meaning, it was positioned as, “…all about breathing new life into something that might otherwise die. In this case, what we’re trying to ‘resuscitate’ is nothing less than the profitability of the adult entertainment industry.”
Aside from Hustler’s legal team, three entities emerged as porn’s white-knight lawsuit filing factories: Media Copyright Group, Copyright Enforcement Group and Adult Copyright Company had offers that Big Porn just couldn’t refuse. Until then, going after alleged illegal downloaders was a process that was costly, timely and complicated, requiring experienced IP legal teams and software voodoo that most adult enterprises simply didn’t understand.
Sensing a gold rush, companies like ACC offer a one-stop shop where porn copyright holders are offered a contingency-based engagement: no money down, “no expense to rights holders,” they do all the work. ACC alone now represents 8 cases; MCC has filed six suits and claims a dozen clients. Here, Big Porn just signs the bottom line and waits, sits back, enjoys the beautiful stock photography on the copyright lawsuit farmers’ websites, and ostensibly collect the spoils when “infringers pay for their theft.”

It’s not just the “making them pay” part that worries the EFF, who is working on a defendant brief in one of the cases. The EFF has long been against lumping thousands of defendants together in single complaints, and Cindy Cohn reminded me that they’d worked on RIAA claims only to watch the music industry abandon the practice of monetization based on suing fans because ultimately, “it didn’t work.”
Cohn tells me, “Now we have a situation where they’re taking the idea of mass infringement and turning it into a business model for bottom feeders.” Indicating the legal front end of the porn suits, Cohn sees the copyright teams “cutting corners” and casts doubt on whether the lawyers are experienced IP attorneys.
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