May 13, 2011 | The Biz

Industry unites to fight video piracy

Imagine having the dream of running a porn site. You invest your blood, sweat and tears to achieve your goal. You do all the research to determine the best niche to target, have a site designed, implement a content management system, make sure all the back-end technical details are working. Then there's actually making the content -- recruiting the models, getting them to show up, filming the porn, learning by trial and error what works and what doesn't.  The videos have to be edited and made web-ready, in several formats. And you have to market the site by, among other things, establishing and maintaining an affiliate program.

It's a year after you've launched your site. You've done everything right -- and you're losing money. Why? Your porn is very popular, but many fans are not paying for it because it's so easy to find for free.

The war of attrition being waged by porn free-loaders on gay porn producers has claimed a lot of companies who simply cannot survive the current climate of  "why pay?"  While many porn producers have simply gone under, others have merged, but this has been by necessity, not choice. And there are still more that are just hanging on from month to month.

Enter Porn Guardian, the brainchild of Dominic Ford, who was so frustrated with his own videos being pirated he invited other producers to work together with him. Porn Guardian staff patrol blogs, filesharing sites, torrents and newsgroups looking for illegally shared videos. As soon as they find one, it's entered into the Porn Guardian system, which automatically sends out copyright infringement notices; offending sites are legally obliged to remove the material or be subject to legal action. 

Porn Guardian also works to prevent videos from being illegally uploaded in the first place. A watermarking service embeds a digital signature onto each video a pay site member downloads. If that video is subsequenlty discovered on a file-sharing service, the pay site owner will know which member broke his Terms of Service by illegally uploading that video, and can take appropriate action. 

Porn Guardian offers hope to a beleagured industry; moral suasion hasn't worked, maybe decisive action will.  

Dominic Ford's Porn Guardian adds new clients, services [XBiz]