(Far From) Free Porn

In December, I wrote a short piece on scamsters using the legal system to earn a few bucks out of porn fans unwilling to be identified**.

It looks like it has been noticed and, in a variation of the same concept, the porn industry itself is getting in on the act.

On March 7, Camelot Distribution Group, an obscure film company in Los Angeles, unveiled its latest and potentially most profitable release: a federal lawsuit against BitTorrent users who allegedly downloaded the company’s 2010 B-movie revenge flick Nude Nuns With Big Guns between January and March of this year. The single lawsuit targets 5,865 downloaders, making it theoretically worth as much as $879,750,000 — more money than the U.S. box-office gross for Avatar.

It’s the first step in a process that could lead to each defendant getting a personalized letter in the mail from Camelot’s attorneys suggesting they settle the case, lest they wind up named in a public lawsuit as having downloaded Nude Nuns With Big Guns.

In contrast to the the RIAA’s much-criticized and now-abandoned war against music pirates — which targeted 20,000 downloaders in six years — the movie lawsuits appear to have been designed from the start as for-profit endeavor, not a as a deterrent to piracy.

Hardly surprising, really. The porn industry - which once viewed the internet as a huge opportunity - has been suffering badly under pressure from free sites eroding their copyrights, and illegal file-sharing. They're not getting much help from the courts either, so this really does look to be a conscious business approach. An assessment of the current market environment, with a consequential reaction to it.

Of course, this was all predicted by my Kiwi libertarian economist friend last year.

An alternative litigation strategy that could work would be use of copyright infringing honeypot sites whose viewers would then be threatened with copyright lawsuits for downloading pirated content, with threat of public disclosure of everything the viewer had been watching. I suspect a lot of viewers would pay up rather than have notice served to them at work and the whole list of viewed videos read aloud, for example.

Or, as the original linked piece described it.

“This is a mass copyright litigation machine,” says Lory Lybeck, a Seattle attorney representing dozens of the defendants. “Most people don’t want to have a public lawsuit against them for Teen Anal Nightmare 2, so they settle.”

A bit sneaky? Well, yeah, I suppose. But as a reaction to financial threats to the business interests of porn producers, you've got to admire the ingenuity.

Ain't markets great? No matter the burdens placed on them, one way or another they adapt and realign as long as demand is still there to be satisfied. Governments should take good note. Skiploads of state resources could be saved by freeing up markets rather than wasting resources on ever more desperate tweaks which will inevitably either be woefully unsuccessful, or will push the problem they were trying to 'solve' elsewhere.

** A smattering of visitors per month still reach here via that headline for some reason. I can't for the life of me think why.