Porn Industry To Crack Down On P2P File-Sharing

The porn industry has always billed itself as being the motor behind technological innovations in the entertainment industry. As the music industry and Hollywood have been busy fighting P2P file-sharing for years now, the porn industry has tried to use file-swapping as a way to portray themselves as more technologically advanced than the mainstream entertainment industry. They figured if they offered some free content on the torrent sites, it would encourage more viewers to subscribe to their premium services. Of course, over time this strategy has failed horribly and now everyone can find paid content on torrent sites as well.

Porn torrent sites such as Epornium, Puretna, and The Pirate Bay all have millions of users and tens of thousands of active porn torrents and are slowly beginning to cripple the industry. With tiny profit margins, small porn companies are beginning to strain with diminishing sales and this worries the industry giants who double as distributors for the smaller companies movies.

Now that the big players are being affected, the porn industry as a whole has decided the time for a crackdown on file-sharers is now. In early September, representatives of 65 porn studios got together in Los Angeles to discuss strategy for their anti-piracy campaign. Some companies have decided to form an association that will go ahead and sue file-sharers. In fact, gay porn studio Titan Media filed 22 lawsuits this week against both file-sharers and porn bloggers to kick things off.

Interestingly, while the porn industry's play on being technologically innovative has got them into this mess, Janko Roettgers from NewTeeVee pointed out that while the music and movie industries have been experimenting with ways to get around online piracy with iTunes, Joost and others, the porn industry has done nothing. It seems the "innovative" label no longer fits. Times are definitely changing in the world of TV and video.

Via NewTeeVee

October 7, 2007

Porn Industry To Crack Down On P2P File-Sharing