The notoriously fragmented porn industry is uniting to expose Internet Age pirates threatening its survival.

Studios have begun collaborating on lawsuits targeting people who share digitized adult videos at peer-to-peer networks and are exploring technology tools for automatically tracking and protecting copyrighted material online.

Pink Visual is rallying dozens of adult entertainment studio operators at an unprecedented Content Protection Retreat in Arizona in October to train in ways to combat piracy and defend intellectual property.

“We joke that we can’t agree on where to go for lunch, but this is getting big and we are ready to put aside the egos and sit down to work together on solutions,” said the head of Lightspeed studio Steve Lightspeed.

“Piracy on the Internet is much more available to the average user than it ever was.”

Internet technology that started as a boon for porn producers by allowing videos or images to be discreetly viewed on home computers has turned against the adult industry, according to Pink president Allison Vivas.

“People were willing back then to pay top dollar for porn, now it looks like the majority of users think adult content is free,” Vivas said. “That is a huge shift in just a few years.”

In recent weeks, porn producers began filing lawsuits against “John Does” that share copyrighted adult material at BitTorrent sites that use peer-to-peer networks of personal computers to swap digital content.

Larry Flynt Publications sued 635 individuals in a court in Texas on September 20 in the company’s first suit aimed at users of BitTorrent sites and vowed many more such suits were to come.

Suits threaten to expose names of accused porn pirates as part of the legal process, and that alone might prove a deterrent.

Studios are working with lawyers at Media Copyright Group and Copyright Enforcement Services on the litigation, with an initial legal barrage focused on videos touting shemales or 18-year-old girls.

“It seems like it will be quite embarrassing for whichever user ends up in a lawsuit about using a popular shemale title,” Vivas said, using a term that refers to a person who has female features but male genitalia.

“When it comes to private sexual fantasies and fetishes, going public is probably not worth the risk that these torrent and peer-to-peer users are taking.”

Studios are also taking legal aim at “tube” websites, porn versions of video-sharing service YouTube, which they decry as willing stages for pirated content.

Studios expressed frustration with unscrupulous adult video-sharing websites packing pages with pirated material and only being required by law to remove the content after proper owners notice and complain.

Lightspeed likened the situation to a car thief only having to return a stolen vehicle after the owner found him and asked for it back.

“The technology has outpaced the laws,” Lightspeed said. “We really need to organize ourselves and lobby for a change in the law.”

Part of the retreat will be devoted to educating studio operators about technology designed to swiftly find and identify copyrighted content posted online and then remove it or overlay it with advertising or labels.

“Companies are going out of business left and right,” Vivas said. “You either have to change your business model or regenerate the value; a lot of companies are doing both.”

Pink has been focusing on content for Internet-linked mobile devices including Apple’s popular iPhone smartphones and iPad tablet computers.

Vivid Entertainment has fashioned itself as a purveyor of celebrity sex content and porn parodies of classic films or television shows such as “Batman.”

Lightspeed launched as an adult pay website in 1999 and has grown to 40 online venues.

Lightspeed spent 25,000 dollars and months of work to launch a new website, but shut it down because pirates were giving all of the content away free online within a day.

“The economy in general is forcing everybody’s hands,” Lightspeed said.

“Piracy is just a glaring gap in everyone’s revenue.”

Lightspeed contended that the company’s entire library of content, valued at 10 million dollars, was scattered across the Internet.

“A lot of people think porn producers make enough money already and won’t pay them,” Lightspeed said. “The truth is everyone is just working for a living here and we pay our taxes like everyone else does.”

Click here to view the embedded video.

Source: AFP

SpaCash glad to announce the official release of SPAcash Poland. All the Dating, Videos and Webcams sites are already available along with their corresponding tools and local payment methods (SMS, mBanku, Ingeligo, MultiBanku, Credit Cards and ePayments).

Why Poland?

It is a country with over 38.5 million people of which 20 million are internet users.

The growth in internet user in Poland is really astonishing. Figures we gathered talk about a growth of 3 million users in the last two years.

Adult content is amongst the most viewed by Polish internet users, only behind social networks in the first place. Oddly enough, the potential of the Polish adult market hasn’t been exploited by webmasters yet, so this is a great time to start positioning yourself and getting tons of traffic.

Every day there’s more and more talk about this emerging market and SPAcash has jumped ahead of the pack, already offering all the tools to take full advantage of it.

Most profitable local payment methods:

There are 6 available payment methods for the Polish market:

* SMS
* Electronic Bank Transfer via mBanku
* Electronic Bank Transfer via Inteligo
* Electronic Bank Transfer via MultiBanku
* Credit Cards
* electronic payment

These 6 payment methods are offered in one lightbox, which makes it very simple for the user to choose the one of his/her preference.

Bank Transfer and SMS are the two most popular payment methods and obviously, we’ve implemented both of them.

Content, sites and Programs fully translated to Polish:

All the Webcam, Videos, and Dating sites are already available in Polish.

Promotion Tools::

SPAcash Poland is coming out with most of the tools and resources we offer for the rest of the markets: Iframes, FHG, Baners, exporting formats, Layers, Peels, Payment Box etc. We’ll soon be adding the rest of the tools so we can offer our affiliates 100% of our system’s resources for the Polish market.

Pole tech support:

For this market, we have serious tech support in Polish and English with great knowledge of the adult business, which will make it possible for all webmasters (regardless of their origin) to receive advice and take advantage of this brand new market.

His email and MSN is prez [at] spacash [dot] com.

Twitter co-founder Biz Stone said the service takes cyber-security seriously. In fact, he’s been saying that a lot lately.

Kathee Brewerk YNOT
CYBERSPACE — It’s a sign of the high-tech times: Any Web-enabled tool that can be put to good uses can be put to just as many — or more — bad ones. And the bad ones get the most press.

The latest hot property to fall victim to conservative outcry is micro-blogging social network Twitter. Because of Twitter’s anonymous registration and operation, the service is rife with pornography, other content inappropriate for children and crimes like phishing and spamming.

Like every other cyber-savvy commercial endeavor, professional escorts and adult entertainment performers have found Twitter to be an excellent place to market their wares. That, according to some, cheapens the service and makes it less valuable to “legitimate businesses” and downright dangerous for children. Twitter’s terms of service require new users to affirm they are at least 13 years of age before they will be given an account, but Twitter does not require users to back up their affirmations with proof.

“As we have found with any new communication form, pornography and other types of issues creep in,” Ben Smith, chief executive officer of coupon distributor Merchant Circle told MediaPost.com’s Online Media Daily. “The problem with this type of activity is that it undermines the trust in the communication channel, which will have a disastrous effect on the channel.”

WeeWorld, a virtual community catering to tweens and teens, has threatened to pull its support and its 3,893 Twitter followers off the service if “something isn’t done to clean up [Twitter],” OMD noted.

Individual Twitterers, too, have voiced dissatisfaction with the amount of adult content that has shown up on the service recently. One recent tweet referred to the “annoying strong increase in porn spam traffic” on Twitter. Another asked, “What the heck? Porn messages on Twitter? I’m so not down.”

The “porn situation” may harm Twitter if the network doesn’t figure out a way to deal with the problem. Twitter has yet to find a profitability model, and as long as porn continues to proliferate it may never find one, according to one media analyst.

“If Twitter builds an advertising-supported model, they will need to develop a way to isolate the [adult] content,” Paul Verna, senior analyst at eMarketer told OMD. “YouTube did. Facebook did it. They had to be tough cops when it came to the content. On one hand they try to provide an open platform, but on the other if they don’t set limits it could backfire.”

Verna also mentioned phishing scams and celebrity impersonation as other problems with which Twitter must deal.

Dan Hubbard, chief technology officer at internet security firm Websense, agreed.

“We’re starting to see a groundswell of [malicious cyber-]attacks,” he told USA Today. “Spam is usually the first bad thing we see before it escalates to things more nefarious.”

Twitter’s format is the very thing that makes it most useful as a distribution tool for malware. Because messages are limited to 140 characters, users are encouraged to embed links using tools that abbreviate long URLs — and consequently obscure the true destination. Frequently links embedded in tweets lead to executable files or automatic downloads. By the time the reader realizes what’s up, it’s too late for him or her to avoid exposure.

In addition, hackers have found ingenious ways to compromise popular Twitter add-ons like TwitPic and Twitter clients that allow users to manage more than one account simultaneously. The end result: Computers added to botnets and private data stolen.

Twitter co-founder Biz Stone said the service takes cyber-security seriously. In fact, he’s been saying that a lot lately.

“We understand that this job is never done, so we are actively recruiting staff and developing tools to combat spam and enhance security,” he told USA Today. “Sadly, security is rarely viewed as a top priority” by add-on developers.

Kathee Brewer is an award-winning news, feature and opinion writer, editor and photojournalist. After five years of designing adult and mainstream websites, she spent seven years on staff at AVN Online before departing for the glamorous and financially fulfilling world of full-time freelancing. Food and shelter, she says, are overrated.