Why Are Gay Porn Producers So Quick To Get Involved In Shakedown Copyright Pre-Settlement Schemes?

from the hoping-people-pay-an-embarassment-tax? dept

Thu, Aug 26th 2010 1:17pm — Mike Masnick

Over in the UK, where firms like Davenport Lyons and ACS:Law made the whole mass "pre-settlement" letter "pay us or we'll sue your for infringement" practice popular, it seemed that many of their early customers were gay porn producers. And now, we're seeing something similar in the US. While US Copyright Group is getting lots of attention for bringing this sort of campaign to the US with some independent films, the gay porn producers are jumping into the game quickly.

In July, we noted that one such gay porn producer had filed a bunch of lawsuits for sharing films via BitTorrent, and now THREsq is reporting that litigious porn producer Io Group is also suing a bunch of John Does for the same thing. If Io sounds familiar, that's because they were also one of the first to sue a video site for infringement, in this case Veoh, in a lawsuit that Io lost.

Of course, with gay porn movie claims, the privacy questions for ISPs who received demands to turn over names associated with IP addresses becomes a bit trickier. One reason why gay porn producers may be drawn to these sorts of legal actions is because they're assuming that at least some of those they target may not be "out," and having it go public that they were being sued for accessing gay porn could present a bigger issue -- so they may be more likely to pay up quickly. But for ISPs, this also makes the privacy issues a lot clearer. I could definitely see some people turn around and sue ISPs right back for revealing their private info in these cases.

THREsq notes that many ISPs are getting sick of these pre-settlement schemes, but it's not yet clear how far they're willing to go to stand up for the privacy of their subscribers.

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Filed Under: copyright, gay porn, pre-settlement
Companies: io group

27 Comments

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Dark Helmet (profile), 26 Aug 2010 @ 12:52pm

Uh oh....
Methinks the "answers" you get to the question in your title are going to be rather unfortunate. You might consider rephrasing....
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- Anonymous Coward, 26 Aug 2010 @ 2:23pm
  
  Re: Uh oh....
  Why is Mike so interested in whats happening in the Gay Porn world?
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Anonymous Coward, 26 Aug 2010 @ 1:40pm

Because
Because they're so f*****g gay.
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Anonymous Coward, 26 Aug 2010 @ 1:48pm

I was involved with one of their copyrights earlier in the week and pre-settled everywhere.

ty, ty very much.
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cc (profile), 26 Aug 2010 @ 1:59pm

The reason may be that the gay porn market is (much?) smaller than the straight porn market, so those guys are looking for a way to make easy money...
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- LDoBe, 26 Aug 2010 @ 2:06pm
  
  Gay porn market
  The Gay porn market may be a little smaller than the straight porn market, but you gotta realize, the reason you don't see gay porn too often is because you don't look for it. Due to cookie based tracking, advertising companies know whether you're gay, straight, or bi, and serve up your ads that way. I'm bi, I've looked for gay, and straight, and ads for both show up in about equal portions.
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  - interval (profile), 26 Aug 2010 @ 2:24pm
    
    Re: Gay porn market
    @LDoBe: "The Gay porn market may be a little smaller..."
    
    I've heard this a lot from the homosexual contingent. Going by what scholars like Kinsey have said, at least 10% of American males have had homosexual experiences, and GayDemographics.org claims that 1.16% of the American population is gay. The actual number is probably in the somewhere in middle. Never the less, I would venture to say, and not with any kind of pride, sense of righteousness, or anything like that; but this banner of "Everyone is Gay, they just don't know it" or even "A lot of people are gay" that I often hear from your contingent is just plain wrong. You're not even close. So when you say that the gay porn market might a little smaller, let me qualify that by saying 1) That sounds like your opinion, and not backed up by hard fact & 2) Your not even close. I would venture to say that the homosexual porn market is in fact considerably smaller than for the strait market. Probably by quite a huge margin.
    
    So lets not go there, shall we?
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    - LDoBe, 26 Aug 2010 @ 2:36pm
      
      Re: Re: Gay porn market
      Your points are valid, but let me clarify myself. Even if the gay porn market was only 1/10th of 1% of the size of the straight porn market, you'd still have huge amounts of competition between studios and producers. Let's do a little math:
      Google search for porn OR pornography OR xxx gives 462 million results. .1% of 462 million is 462000 sites. This is all a very rough estimate of course, but that's still a lot of pages.
      I realize it's very small in terms of the Internet, but in an individual's browsing experience, that's still a lot.
      
      I don't claim this as anything other than my opinion
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    - Dark Helmet (profile), 26 Aug 2010 @ 2:37pm
      
      Re: Re: Gay porn market
      Wow...I didn't get ANY insinuation that "A lot of people are gay" out of his/her comment....
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      - Ccomp5950 (profile), 26 Aug 2010 @ 2:56pm
        
        Re: Re: Re: Gay porn market
        me neither.
        
        interval, tell me about your childhood, what did you think of your mother?...
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        interval (profile), 26 Aug 2010 @ 3:01pm
        
        Re: Re: Re: Re: Gay porn market
        No no no, you're reading more into it, or let me embellish, since it doesn't appear that I was clear enough;
        
        I've heard this before from gay people, many, many MANY times. So many times I'd frankly be surprised if you're going to next tell me you haven't. That's it. If that means I had a messed up childhood to you, so be it.
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        Anonymous Coward, 26 Aug 2010 @ 3:38pm
        
        Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Gay porn market
        Why don't you go into an adult video store, and browse the gay porn section? It's significant. It isn't 1% and it may be as large as 10%.
        
        Kinsey interviewed his subjects over 50 years ago, when homosexuality was way, way in the closet. If "10%" back then were found to display homosexual traits, I wonder what the number would be like today, where gay marriage is on the cusp of acceptance?
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        interval (profile), 26 Aug 2010 @ 3:48pm
        
        Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Gay porn market
        I've been to a number of adults book stores. The number of gay titles in a typical store means... what? The number of gay porn titles produced was not the question.
        
        I cited Kinsey, and... you left one out. One considerably more current. One that might answer your question. If you want to argue with me I think you need to come in better "equipped."
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    - Anonymous Coward, 26 Aug 2010 @ 2:38pm
      
      Re: Re: Gay porn market
      There may be fewer gays but they make up for it in the porn market by being much more into porn.
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- austin, 29 Aug 2010 @ 1:45pm
  
  Re:
  "It is estimated that one-third to one-half of the $2.5 billion adult industry is gay sales and rentals." Mickey Skee. 1997. "Tricks of the Trade." Frontiers 16 (August 22):43.
  
  Admittedly, that may be out of date, but it seems to jive with what I've seen of the industry.
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- Anonymous Coward, 2 Apr 2013 @ 10:01pm
  
  Response to: cc on Aug 26th, 2010 @ 1:59pm
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Anonymous Coward, 26 Aug 2010 @ 3:20pm

I don't know, but I wouldn't put it past him. But it will be confirmed when he writes a story about his Aunt Susan Walker's new CD and business model experiment.
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Simon, 26 Aug 2010 @ 3:58pm

Same motivation for paying up...
http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Lock,_Stock_and_Two_Smoking_Barrels#Tom
Listen to this one: you open a company called the "Arse Tickler's Faggots Fan Club". You take out an advert in the back page of some gay mag, advertising the latest in arse-intruding dildos. You sell it with, I dunno, "does what no other dildo can do until now", "the latest and greatest in sexual technology", "guaranteed results or your money back", all that bollocks. Now these dils cost twenty-five quid a pop – that's a snip for the amount of pleasure they're gonna give the recipients. But they send their cheques to the other company name, nothing offensive, er, "Bobbie's Bits" or something, for twenty-five quid. You take that twenty-five quid, you stick it in the bank until it clears. Now, this is the smart bit – you send back the cheque for twenty-five pound from the other company name, "Arse Tickler's Faggots Fan Club", saying we're sorry, we couldn't get the supplies from America because they ran out of stock. Now you see how many people cash that cheque – not a single soul, because who wants their bank manager to know they tickle arse when they're not paying cheques?
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minijedimaster (profile), 26 Aug 2010 @ 6:28pm

Seriously? Who's pirating gay pr0n? Especially on the intarwebs where most things can be found for free legally. As a side note, how does one copyright gay butt sex?
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vicarious infringer, 26 Aug 2010 @ 6:59pm

wasn't this article about legalized extortion and privacy issue? or for gays to 'come out' in the comments?
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Chucklebutte (profile), 26 Aug 2010 @ 7:28pm

Women?
My wife enjoys watching the occasional gay porn, it would be as if I was watching some lesbian porn.

Women watch more porn than you think, they enjoy men, and sometimes enjoy watching 2 men.

To me its all the same, porn is porn, it has one real purpose, and that is to rub one out. Be it men, women, animals, or what ever is your thing, its still just porn...

Labeling gay porn as "just men on men" or just for "men" is just wrong, I am sure there is a hell of a lot of gay women that would be offended. Gay is not just men, it is both.
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Bob Vila, 26 Aug 2010 @ 9:05pm

Best Techdirt headline so far. Fucking hilarious.
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grumpy (profile), 27 Aug 2010 @ 1:38am

The interesting thing is that as this information is related to sexual preferences, at least here in Rightpondia it is a lot more protected than mere buying behaviour. Trying to coerce the information from an ISP, or giving out the information if you're an ISP, could carry very stiff penalties. I wonder if anyone has explored that particular defensive approach...?
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RIFPI, 27 Aug 2010 @ 5:56am

It could be a business model Mike
Hypothesis: If you do not want the big ones to sue you later, pay a small and stupid one sue you first. Perfect 10 Perfect 10

Could it be???
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Michael, 27 Aug 2010 @ 6:00am

who would have thought...
They would be so easily butthurt?
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Streamen, 19 Jan 2011 @ 1:57pm

the state of the industry
porn is suffering overall... gay and straight. private media group is doing the same thing, trying to go after pirates and others alike
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sprearson81 (profile), 9 Jun 2012 @ 6:57am

Hmm, nice :(
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