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A lot of webmasters would post their e-mail from Steave Easton on YNOT. He was like a crazed madman with a flame thrower on you.
The basic problem is the guy believes guilty until proven innocent.
His tone is caustic and without any sense of lets see what we can do here to resolve this. He just starts punching right out of the shoot.
However you do have to bear in mind when Steve was really going around banging on webmasters, the majority of webmasters were still using a lot of unlicensed content or scanned content. It was kind of funny looking back now how most guys got content.
And there was no strong case law yet to really do much legally, so I imagine he figured intimidation was his only recourse.
Keep in mind what the photographers feared most, losing their core customers, was happening in the marketplace. Prior to the Net, these porn photographers made their bucks selling to a handful of porn powerhouses that published the newsstand mags, and mags that went in adult bookstores, and for video guys. That was it. It was a very controlled and consistent work environment for them.
Then the Net came and zapped the rules of the game. Magazines got hit hard by the Net. They still are getting whacked down every month. Most good sized webmasters have bigger viewing audiences then Hustler's print magazine does and if you think about that, it's quite amazing.
So now the photographers at first thought ok we'll lose biz with the cutbacks from the big print guys, but will make it up with these new web guys. Problem was most web guys were just rebel pornsters that had no concept of doing business legally. They were fearless, because the Net was pioneer town. No rules no marshalls. A lawless place where you could get away with anything you wanted. So the photographers started seeing scanned magazine images popping up all over the place, and then when they would sell a webmaster content legally, 100 others would jump on the site and lift the guys pics for their own sites.
So like any industry experiencing rapid transformation, the established players all start to panic and run around not being able to think straight how we can we survive this new onslaught and change in the dynamics of this business. Hence you get desparation and see tactics like Steve used.
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