Bloomberg News Comes Out Against Copyright Protection—for Porn

CYBERSPACE—It may have escaped someone's attention, but the internet is an incredibly popular place to find sexually explicit content, otherwise known as "porn." Sure, in the U.S. and many Western countries, it's easy to find on the internet, but in some areas of the U.S., porn can't be sold in retail stores, not to mention it's outright banned in countries like Iran, Saudi Arabia, China, Nepal, India, and several others, making those places fertile ground for piracy. Now, it's almost a given in the U.S. that those who create content own it. That's how they make their money: by selling it online or on DVDs and magazines. And yet, porn piracy still exists here, and that has spawned organizations like Takedown Piracy, which helps companies police websites that may have put the companies' products online without paying for them. But there's a secondary way producers lose money on their creations: When people copy scenes from DVDs or other sources and put them on sites like BitTorrent, and other people download the material without paying for it. But suppose someone were to go to a news site like, oh, say, Bloomberg.com, find an interesting news article there, copy it to a Word doc or reproduce it in some other way, and post that article on their own website without any mention of its source? We're guessing Bloomberg would be pretty angry about that. That's what makes it perplexing that Bloomberg.com would publish an article on its site Monday taking to task companies like Strike 3 Holdings, which owns popular porn sites Tushy.com and Vixen.com, for attempting to enforce its copyrights against internet pirates through federal lawsuits. And make no mistake: Strike 3 Holdings has filed thousands of lawsuits against "John Doe" pirates, and sought thousands of subpoenas to force ISPs to identify the person(s) behind the IP addresses that illegally downloaded the material—but it's hardly Strike 3's fault that its material is so popular that a massive number of lawsuits are necessary to protect its brands. But Bloomberg doesn't quite see it that way, lauding the judges who have recently ordered wholesale dismissals of Strike 3's and others' copyright claims. One such judge, Royce Lamberth of the District of Columbia, claimed that Strike 3 “treats this court not as a citadel of justice, but as an ATM,” and calling the subpoenas "a high-tech shakedown." Reads the Monday article, "Two companies that make and sell porn are responsible for almost half of the 3,404 copyright lawsuits filed in the U.S. in the first seven months of this year, according to an analysis by Bloomberg Law’s Tommy Shen. Malibu Media LLC, which distributes such titles as 'Stunning Sexy Shower,' has filed some 8,000 lawsuits nationwide since 2012. Strike 3 Holdings LLC, operator of such sites as 'Tushy' and 'Vixen,' has filed about 3,500 lawsuits in just the past two years, according to Bloomberg Law dockets. "The companies say they are protecting their movies from piracy and infringement under U.S. copyright law, as major movie studios have done for decades, and suggest that the content of their films is the reason for the wrath of the judges. But some of the tactics used in their infringement suits to identify targets and force settlements have critics—and some jurists—up in arms and may require congressional actions to fix." Congressional action to thwart companies' attempts to protect their copyrighted material from piracy? Is Bloomberg serious? Now, it's not as if there haven't been some bad actors in the copyright protection game. Take the principals of Prenda Law, a law firm that used to track and sue illegal downloaders of their clients' porn products until they got the brilliant idea to create porn scenes themselves, upload them to the web with no protection, track who downloaded that material and sue those downloaders, usually offering to settle "the case" for a couple of thousand dollars rather than have a lawsuit filed against the pirate. But they were hardly what Bloomberg describes as "Two pornographers ... jailed for coercing settlements"; they were simply corrupt attorneys taking advantage of a legal loophole to extort money—and they're both now serving several years in the slammer for their scheme. And we won't go into the long history of Malibu Media's thousands of copyright suits, some of which were over simple reproductions of thumbnails of its works; a search for "Malibu Media" on AVN.com will provide much of the story. The point is, if some Hollywood studio were getting its works pirated as often as Strike 3's have been, it's a pretty good bet that Bloomberg would be up in arms defending however many lawsuits that studio had filed against infringers. An interesting side-note to this situation has just come to light. Some may have heard that the internet security company Cloudflare has just terminated its relationship with far-right-wing discussion site 8chan, which posted the "manifesto" of the guy who just killed 22 people in El Paso, Texas—and in the process, may have given up some of its protections under Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which immunizes ISPs from liability for material posted on their sites over which they do not exercise editorial control. Hence, Cloudflare's actions may have opened the door to MG Premium, a subsidiary of MindGeek, which has sent several subpoenas to Cloudflare, seeking to "find out the identity of people who were uploading their copyrighted content on several sites such as Waxtube, Vivud, and Veporns, all of whom used Cloudflare’s services." With Cloudflare's action against 8chan, it may have crossed over the line from being simply a security company to being a host, and therefore possibly be required to provide the information MindGeek is seeking. Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.