GoFuckYourself.com - Adult Webmaster Forum - Copyright infringement or excellent publicity, that is the question

Long live the pirates - is this laywer right?

Another interesting read... looks like we are helpless when someone "borrows" i.e. downloads our pics, builds his "own" gallery, uploads it to a free host and is posting them over and over the boards. And .htaccess won't help, they have powerful key gens and do *spoofing* and find the backdoors always. Or you know what? They are willing to sign up for a trial membership to get what they want.. it is a never ending war.

Damn it has happened that I emailed to Tommy at Tommy's Bookmarks about the vulnerability of one of his premium AVS pornstar sites.. actually a huge pornstar set of his was posted over the net, eating his bandwidth this time. LOL he did not even entertain me with saying thanks or replying at all but fixed the backdoor in 3 days or so, for a while at least. Reading the lawyer's email I am quoting I realized that maybe he was not mad at the pirates at all? :)

On spoofing. you al know itt allows you to visit many sites by sending 'faked' referrals, that means you can visit a membersection without U/P. I am not familiar with the way spoofing works. Being on a Mac I can't run the proggies which rip referrer passes. But I was told that some places, the pass will last about thirty seconds, at others they keep working for a couple of days. Long enough to have a good "pillage"... and now read the comments of an experienced lawyer on the topic.

Looks like the keyword is "non-profit" and pay site owners can even benefit from unauthorized posting?! I mean the *excellent publicity* part.. oh well, they should rather start a Yahoo group IMHO:) Interesting email to say at least, feel free to add your own comments.

Sorry for the long post,

digifan

"Has it ever occurred to you why the vast majority of paysites never take action against those who post their material (and I'm not talking about professional ripoff sites that actually charge a fee, I mean the average porn poster who makes nothing)?
Firstly, it is excellent publicity for their site. People see what they have to offer and in a lot of cases become paying members of whichever site as a direct result of seeing an unauthorized posting. The paysites also have the legal fees to think of. Most sites simply couldn't afford to take the risk of bringing a prosectution. There is no guarantee they would win. They also have to first prove that an individual has actually violated their copyright. Though it may seem cut and dried, in a court of law it would be quite a different matter because the web world is a remote medium. The company would need to track through whichever anonymous proxy service the poster is using (and most of these companies refuse to give up details of their customers even if they have been peddling illegal material unless forced by a judge to do so). In the very unlikely event of them obtaining a poster's IP number, they then have to prove that the person whose home address would eventually surface is the person doing the posting. All that person has to do is deny all knowledge of the violation. It is highly unlikely that a competent jury would find a person guilty on this evidence.
Furthermore, judges have far better things to do with their time than chastise one perv for stealing smutty pics from another. I think you'll find that most of these crusty old bastards have even less time for those who sell pornography than those who borrow the pics and post them.

You might find a little work with alsscan - but give me one case where they have actually prosecuted a individual for copyright violation where that person wasn't passing on their images for profit. <b>And before you come back at me with another rejoinder, yes, I do know what I'm talking about because I have been a practising lawyer for nineteen years."