"Everybody forgets somebody shot Larry Flynt"
I just discovered this article from over a year ago. Why don't people tell you when you get mentioned in the New York Times? I think the key to getting in the press is just the ability to manufacture sound bites. Always repeat the name of a famous person when someone sticks a microphone in your face. But what I said was also true — what was called the skin trade at one time still attracts outsized competition. Somebody did shoot Larry Flynt.
[quote="The New York Times — February 8, 2004“]
The Pornography Industry vs. Digital Pirates
By JOHN SCHWARTZ
THOUSANDS of Web sites
are putting Playboy magazine's pictures on the Internet - free. And Randy
Nicolau, the president of Playboy.com, is loving it. ”It's direct marketing
at its finest,“ he said.
Let the music industry sue those who share files, and let Hollywood push for
tough laws and regulations to curb movie copying. Playboy, like many
companies that provide access to virtual flesh and naughtiness, is turning
online freeloaders into subscribers by giving away pictures to other sites
that, in turn, drive visitors right back to Playboy.com.
When Mr. Nicolau is asked whether he thinks that the entertainment industry
is making a mistake by taking a different approach, he replies: ”I haven't
spent much time thinking about it. It's like asking Henry Ford, 'What were
the buggy-whip guys doing wrong?' ''
The copyright rumble is playing out a little differently in the red-light
districts of cyberspace. That neighborhood is increasingly difficult to
confine, what with a fetishwear-clad Janet Jackson flashing a Super Bowl
audience of millions, and Paris Hilton making her own version of a “Girls
Gone Wild” video. Professional peddlers say they are hard pressed to
compete.
Still, the business of being bad is very good, especially for the biggest
players. Though the industry has felt a financial squeeze during the
economic slowdown, it nonetheless has sales of as much as $2 billion each
year, said Tom Hymes, the editor of AVNOnline, a business magazine for the
industry.
And the pornography industry, which has always been among the first to
exploit new technologies, including the VCR, the World Wide Web and online
payment systems, is finding novel ways to deal with the threat of online
piracy as well. The mainstream entertainment industry, some experts say,
would do well to pay attention.
Music executives say their campaign of lawsuits has been successful. They
say they have spread the word that downloading free music infringes on
copyrights and that there could be consequences for large-scale file
sharers.
But the pornography industry has been dealing with Internet copyright issues
since the 1980's. By comparison, the movie and music businesses are relative
newcomers. Mr. Hymes said companies in his industry had come to realize that
suing consumers and promoting “draconian laws” were not the answer. “No law
written can stem the tide,” he said. And so, he said, companies are seeking
ways to live with the technologies that threaten them and are trying to turn
them to their advantage.
That is not to say that the companies have not been harmed by free copying
and distribution of copyrighted material online. Mr. Hymes's magazine warned
recently that such companies were “losing incalculable amounts of cash” to
peer-to-peer file-sharing networks like Kazaa, LimeWire, Grokster and Bit
Torrent.
“As the networks continue to grow and even more sophisticated programs are
created, the P2P networks might prove a bigger threat to the revenue stream
of the porn world than all the censorious right-wingers in the country put
together,” the article stated.
Maybe. But many companies that distribute X-rated material say they do not
worry too much about consumers sharing among themselves; they often unleash
their lawyers only when someone is trying to profit by copying their goods
and trying to sell them.
When people in the industry talk of copyright, there is none of the grand
speechifying about revering artists and rewarding creativity, and the
near-tearful paeans to the yeoman key grips and stunt men, as is favored by
movie and record executives. Instead, there is just this: We spent a lot of
money to get this stuff out to the market. Somebody else is making money off
of it. We want the money.
“We haven't gone after Joe Citizen who's sharing something he printed off
something from the Hustler Web site with another guy,” said Paul Cambria, a
lawyer who represents Hustler, Vivid Video and other companies on copyright
issues. He does send out some 20 letters a week, he said, warning for-pay
Web sites to remove material owned by his clients.
Mr. Cambria suggests that the mainstream entertainment industry is much more
combative when it comes to consumers partly because the songs and movies are
so carefully and expensively made and distributed. Movies in his industry,
by contrast, are often made in a few weeks, and on budgets that a major
studio may spend on coffee and pastries, so piracy is not taken quite as
seriously. “Maybe a classic is one thing,” he said, “but they're not all
classics.”
A few merchants in the industry who have tried the kind of aggressive
methods used by mainstream entertainment companies say they have not
received much in return for their efforts. One company that tried to track
down copyright infringers and demand that Internet service providers shut
down their sites used BayTSP, an Internet monitoring service that also
serves the music and movie industries. “It was costing us a lot of money and
was producing absolutely zero results,” said Humphry Knipe, who manages the
business operations of Suze Randall, a photographer in the field who has her
own Web site.
Mr. Knipe, who is married to Ms. Randall, said many Web sites were taken
down as a result of more specific legal threats by subpoena to Internet
service providers. But even then, “it was extremely doubtful that any of
this activity had any effect at all in the real world of improving our sales
by restricting piracy,” he said.
MARK ISHIKAWA, the chief executive of BayTSP, disputes that. He said his
company worked for Mr. Knipe almost four years ago, before the threat of
lawsuits became common enough to present a real danger to downloaders. “He
would have a much different effect today,” he said of Mr. Knipe.
In general, Mr. Ishikawa said, pornography businesses have not been a good
market for his services, which can cost from $10,000 to $50,000 a month,
depending on the volume of work. “Nobody wanted to spend the money,” he
said. It was just as well, he said: “We don't want to be known in the porn
space.”
Many of the businesses, however, are trying various techniques to make
paying customers out of people who take their content. Titan Media, a
provider of gay pornography, says it tracks down people who violate its
copyright and, as an alternative to a lawsuit, offers amnesty if the
infringer becomes a subscriber. Identities are not easy to find in the
virtual world, and the company must track the infringement through Internet
service providers, who are often reluctant to reveal the names of their
customers.
So Titan does what many copyright holders do: it sends infringement notices
to the service providers, asking them either to remove the offending
material or to pass along the notice to the customer. Titan initially tried
to unmask infringers by using the same controversial provisions of copyright
law used by the music industry to track down file sharers: a streamlined
system of subpoenas that do not require a judge's approval. Titan backed
away from the tactic when it prompted privacy protests; a federal court has
since ruled that the music industry cannot use those subpoenas against
peer-to-peer file traders.
Wendy Seltzer, an advocate for online civil liberties, says the Titan
approach may point the way for other industries to enforce their copyrights.
Ms. Seltzer, a staff attorney for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a
high-tech policy group that has fought the record industry over copyright
issues, acknowledged that the amnesty offer “sounds a little extortionate
when they say it, perhaps.” But she said it was “a much more sensible
approach” than the music industry's litigation strategy. “People always want
this stuff,” she said, referring to pornography. “Seeing some of it just
whets their appetite for more. Once they get through what's available for
free, they'll move into the paid services.”
Gill Sperlein, general counsel for Titan, said his company must be tough in
combating file-sharing networks because of the nature of the content. “When
we're trying to maintain control of our product, it's not just to protect
our financial interest but also our moral obligation to keep it out of the
hands of minors,” he said. Once an image or movie has been taken from his
site, the company's elaborate precautions to ensure that minors cannot gain
access to the material through the site are defeated. “We are very careful
about who we sell our products to,” he said.
Companies are finding that free images can be a selling point, and not just
a problem. Playboy pays Webmasters $25 or more for every subscription they
funnel to Playboy.com and provides sales and marketing tools to help make
the free Web sites more effective. Mr. Nicolau of Playboy.com said that the
subscription business grew 74 percent in 2002 and that the company's revenue
growth in 2003 was expected to be as much as 60 percent.
Mr. Hymes of AVNOnline said that the salvation for the industry would come
not from laws or lawsuits as much as from bits and bytes. “Technology is
going to solve the problem that technology has created,” he said. “The
people in this space are seeing it as an opportunity to change habits and to
create new opportunities.”
Mr. Sperlein said Titan Media had experimented with software that would
require people who download a video clip to return to the Titan site to
unlock it and view it, but that this process was too intrusive. So, he said,
the company is coming to realize that “the key is to make a product
available that's reasonably priced and reasonably easy to obtain.”
“We're kind of at the beginning stages of that,” he added.
Others in the industry are using bare-knuckled legal tactics, but they are
suing other companies, not individuals. An emerging industry of lawyers and
self-appointed Internet monitors is feeding off provisions in copyright law
that allow automatic damages when infringement is proved in court. Groups
like the Association for the Protection of Internet Copyright, which works
mainly for pornography-related businesses, scour the Internet for signs of
copyright infringement that they can present to the original owners of the
material. They then collect a bounty from a portion of the settlement or
statutory penalties, which can reach as much as $150,000 an infringement.
Some people who have been approached by APIC say tactics of the
organization's founder, Steve Easton, go out of bounds. According to papers
filed by an Internet service provider in the United States District Court
for the Northern District of California last fall, Mr. Easton sent copyright
notices with links to pornographic sites to the company and business
associates “to burden, harass and embarrass” the service provider.
Mr. Easton said that he was the one being victimized by the lawsuit, but
conceded that his tactics had made him vulnerable. “I've said things to
people that I probably should not have bothered,” he said, “instead of
sending notices and keeping to the straight and narrow.”
A pornography merchant, Norman Zada, has sued Web sites that use pictures
from his site, Perfect 10, and has also sued the companies that process
payments for those sites. (Those suits are still working their way through
the courts.) Last month, he took his campaign a step further and sued
MasterCard and Visa, which he said contribute to online piracy by processing
bills for Web sites that post pornography that rightfully belongs to his
site and magazine.
Mr. Zada argues that piracy has cost him some $29 million. “If you create a
product and everybody else can sell your product” without paying for it, he
said, “you can't survive.”
Neither credit card company would comment for attribution, but a lawyer from
one of the companies scoffed at the suit, saying that it had no legal basis
and that the company was too far removed from copyright infringement to have
any liability.
Mr. Zada said his lawsuits were legitimate. “They're all accusing me of
extortion and they're accusing me of using litigation as a profit center -
I'm out $29 million!” he said. “This is not a profit center.” He said he
believed, however, that he could make back that sum and more if he could
only have the courts give him total control over images he owns.
He has the right to make his case in court, he said: “This wonderful country
gives you the opportunity to right the playing field.” Companies like his,
he said, must litigate aggressively because they do not get the kind of
support from law enforcement that the music and movie industries receive.
TOUGH industry tactics should come as no surprise, said Charles Carreon, the
lawyer suing Mr. Easton. Pornography, after all, is a business with a
history. “Everybody forgets that somebody shot Larry Flynt,” he said.
Pornography merchants say that they have the advantage over free
file-sharing networks, at least for now. They say the networks are not well
suited to the needs of their consumers, who like images and movies that push
their very specific buttons for, say, blondes or cheerleaders.
“Free is very anarchistic and hard to deal with, and you don't know what
you're getting,” said a pornography entrepreneur who goes by the online
pseudonym T. Lassiter Jones. “Cheap is more convenient.”
That notion could be the great hope of the mainstream entertainment
industry, where fledgling services like the iTunes store and Rhapsody that
offer inexpensive, easy access to legal music are beginning to catch on.
So, yes, sex sells, but so can music.
Howard R. Harmatz[/quote]
[quote="The New York Times — February 8, 2004“]
The Pornography Industry vs. Digital Pirates
By JOHN SCHWARTZ
THOUSANDS of Web sites
are putting Playboy magazine's pictures on the Internet - free. And Randy
Nicolau, the president of Playboy.com, is loving it. ”It's direct marketing
at its finest,“ he said.
Let the music industry sue those who share files, and let Hollywood push for
tough laws and regulations to curb movie copying. Playboy, like many
companies that provide access to virtual flesh and naughtiness, is turning
online freeloaders into subscribers by giving away pictures to other sites
that, in turn, drive visitors right back to Playboy.com.
When Mr. Nicolau is asked whether he thinks that the entertainment industry
is making a mistake by taking a different approach, he replies: ”I haven't
spent much time thinking about it. It's like asking Henry Ford, 'What were
the buggy-whip guys doing wrong?' ''
The copyright rumble is playing out a little differently in the red-light
districts of cyberspace. That neighborhood is increasingly difficult to
confine, what with a fetishwear-clad Janet Jackson flashing a Super Bowl
audience of millions, and Paris Hilton making her own version of a “Girls
Gone Wild” video. Professional peddlers say they are hard pressed to
compete.
Still, the business of being bad is very good, especially for the biggest
players. Though the industry has felt a financial squeeze during the
economic slowdown, it nonetheless has sales of as much as $2 billion each
year, said Tom Hymes, the editor of AVNOnline, a business magazine for the
industry.
And the pornography industry, which has always been among the first to
exploit new technologies, including the VCR, the World Wide Web and online
payment systems, is finding novel ways to deal with the threat of online
piracy as well. The mainstream entertainment industry, some experts say,
would do well to pay attention.
Music executives say their campaign of lawsuits has been successful. They
say they have spread the word that downloading free music infringes on
copyrights and that there could be consequences for large-scale file
sharers.
But the pornography industry has been dealing with Internet copyright issues
since the 1980's. By comparison, the movie and music businesses are relative
newcomers. Mr. Hymes said companies in his industry had come to realize that
suing consumers and promoting “draconian laws” were not the answer. “No law
written can stem the tide,” he said. And so, he said, companies are seeking
ways to live with the technologies that threaten them and are trying to turn
them to their advantage.
That is not to say that the companies have not been harmed by free copying
and distribution of copyrighted material online. Mr. Hymes's magazine warned
recently that such companies were “losing incalculable amounts of cash” to
peer-to-peer file-sharing networks like Kazaa, LimeWire, Grokster and Bit
Torrent.
“As the networks continue to grow and even more sophisticated programs are
created, the P2P networks might prove a bigger threat to the revenue stream
of the porn world than all the censorious right-wingers in the country put
together,” the article stated.
Maybe. But many companies that distribute X-rated material say they do not
worry too much about consumers sharing among themselves; they often unleash
their lawyers only when someone is trying to profit by copying their goods
and trying to sell them.
When people in the industry talk of copyright, there is none of the grand
speechifying about revering artists and rewarding creativity, and the
near-tearful paeans to the yeoman key grips and stunt men, as is favored by
movie and record executives. Instead, there is just this: We spent a lot of
money to get this stuff out to the market. Somebody else is making money off
of it. We want the money.
“We haven't gone after Joe Citizen who's sharing something he printed off
something from the Hustler Web site with another guy,” said Paul Cambria, a
lawyer who represents Hustler, Vivid Video and other companies on copyright
issues. He does send out some 20 letters a week, he said, warning for-pay
Web sites to remove material owned by his clients.
Mr. Cambria suggests that the mainstream entertainment industry is much more
combative when it comes to consumers partly because the songs and movies are
so carefully and expensively made and distributed. Movies in his industry,
by contrast, are often made in a few weeks, and on budgets that a major
studio may spend on coffee and pastries, so piracy is not taken quite as
seriously. “Maybe a classic is one thing,” he said, “but they're not all
classics.”
A few merchants in the industry who have tried the kind of aggressive
methods used by mainstream entertainment companies say they have not
received much in return for their efforts. One company that tried to track
down copyright infringers and demand that Internet service providers shut
down their sites used BayTSP, an Internet monitoring service that also
serves the music and movie industries. “It was costing us a lot of money and
was producing absolutely zero results,” said Humphry Knipe, who manages the
business operations of Suze Randall, a photographer in the field who has her
own Web site.
Mr. Knipe, who is married to Ms. Randall, said many Web sites were taken
down as a result of more specific legal threats by subpoena to Internet
service providers. But even then, “it was extremely doubtful that any of
this activity had any effect at all in the real world of improving our sales
by restricting piracy,” he said.
MARK ISHIKAWA, the chief executive of BayTSP, disputes that. He said his
company worked for Mr. Knipe almost four years ago, before the threat of
lawsuits became common enough to present a real danger to downloaders. “He
would have a much different effect today,” he said of Mr. Knipe.
In general, Mr. Ishikawa said, pornography businesses have not been a good
market for his services, which can cost from $10,000 to $50,000 a month,
depending on the volume of work. “Nobody wanted to spend the money,” he
said. It was just as well, he said: “We don't want to be known in the porn
space.”
Many of the businesses, however, are trying various techniques to make
paying customers out of people who take their content. Titan Media, a
provider of gay pornography, says it tracks down people who violate its
copyright and, as an alternative to a lawsuit, offers amnesty if the
infringer becomes a subscriber. Identities are not easy to find in the
virtual world, and the company must track the infringement through Internet
service providers, who are often reluctant to reveal the names of their
customers.
So Titan does what many copyright holders do: it sends infringement notices
to the service providers, asking them either to remove the offending
material or to pass along the notice to the customer. Titan initially tried
to unmask infringers by using the same controversial provisions of copyright
law used by the music industry to track down file sharers: a streamlined
system of subpoenas that do not require a judge's approval. Titan backed
away from the tactic when it prompted privacy protests; a federal court has
since ruled that the music industry cannot use those subpoenas against
peer-to-peer file traders.
Wendy Seltzer, an advocate for online civil liberties, says the Titan
approach may point the way for other industries to enforce their copyrights.
Ms. Seltzer, a staff attorney for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a
high-tech policy group that has fought the record industry over copyright
issues, acknowledged that the amnesty offer “sounds a little extortionate
when they say it, perhaps.” But she said it was “a much more sensible
approach” than the music industry's litigation strategy. “People always want
this stuff,” she said, referring to pornography. “Seeing some of it just
whets their appetite for more. Once they get through what's available for
free, they'll move into the paid services.”
Gill Sperlein, general counsel for Titan, said his company must be tough in
combating file-sharing networks because of the nature of the content. “When
we're trying to maintain control of our product, it's not just to protect
our financial interest but also our moral obligation to keep it out of the
hands of minors,” he said. Once an image or movie has been taken from his
site, the company's elaborate precautions to ensure that minors cannot gain
access to the material through the site are defeated. “We are very careful
about who we sell our products to,” he said.
Companies are finding that free images can be a selling point, and not just
a problem. Playboy pays Webmasters $25 or more for every subscription they
funnel to Playboy.com and provides sales and marketing tools to help make
the free Web sites more effective. Mr. Nicolau of Playboy.com said that the
subscription business grew 74 percent in 2002 and that the company's revenue
growth in 2003 was expected to be as much as 60 percent.
Mr. Hymes of AVNOnline said that the salvation for the industry would come
not from laws or lawsuits as much as from bits and bytes. “Technology is
going to solve the problem that technology has created,” he said. “The
people in this space are seeing it as an opportunity to change habits and to
create new opportunities.”
Mr. Sperlein said Titan Media had experimented with software that would
require people who download a video clip to return to the Titan site to
unlock it and view it, but that this process was too intrusive. So, he said,
the company is coming to realize that “the key is to make a product
available that's reasonably priced and reasonably easy to obtain.”
“We're kind of at the beginning stages of that,” he added.
Others in the industry are using bare-knuckled legal tactics, but they are
suing other companies, not individuals. An emerging industry of lawyers and
self-appointed Internet monitors is feeding off provisions in copyright law
that allow automatic damages when infringement is proved in court. Groups
like the Association for the Protection of Internet Copyright, which works
mainly for pornography-related businesses, scour the Internet for signs of
copyright infringement that they can present to the original owners of the
material. They then collect a bounty from a portion of the settlement or
statutory penalties, which can reach as much as $150,000 an infringement.
Some people who have been approached by APIC say tactics of the
organization's founder, Steve Easton, go out of bounds. According to papers
filed by an Internet service provider in the United States District Court
for the Northern District of California last fall, Mr. Easton sent copyright
notices with links to pornographic sites to the company and business
associates “to burden, harass and embarrass” the service provider.
Mr. Easton said that he was the one being victimized by the lawsuit, but
conceded that his tactics had made him vulnerable. “I've said things to
people that I probably should not have bothered,” he said, “instead of
sending notices and keeping to the straight and narrow.”
A pornography merchant, Norman Zada, has sued Web sites that use pictures
from his site, Perfect 10, and has also sued the companies that process
payments for those sites. (Those suits are still working their way through
the courts.) Last month, he took his campaign a step further and sued
MasterCard and Visa, which he said contribute to online piracy by processing
bills for Web sites that post pornography that rightfully belongs to his
site and magazine.
Mr. Zada argues that piracy has cost him some $29 million. “If you create a
product and everybody else can sell your product” without paying for it, he
said, “you can't survive.”
Neither credit card company would comment for attribution, but a lawyer from
one of the companies scoffed at the suit, saying that it had no legal basis
and that the company was too far removed from copyright infringement to have
any liability.
Mr. Zada said his lawsuits were legitimate. “They're all accusing me of
extortion and they're accusing me of using litigation as a profit center -
I'm out $29 million!” he said. “This is not a profit center.” He said he
believed, however, that he could make back that sum and more if he could
only have the courts give him total control over images he owns.
He has the right to make his case in court, he said: “This wonderful country
gives you the opportunity to right the playing field.” Companies like his,
he said, must litigate aggressively because they do not get the kind of
support from law enforcement that the music and movie industries receive.
TOUGH industry tactics should come as no surprise, said Charles Carreon, the
lawyer suing Mr. Easton. Pornography, after all, is a business with a
history. “Everybody forgets that somebody shot Larry Flynt,” he said.
Pornography merchants say that they have the advantage over free
file-sharing networks, at least for now. They say the networks are not well
suited to the needs of their consumers, who like images and movies that push
their very specific buttons for, say, blondes or cheerleaders.
“Free is very anarchistic and hard to deal with, and you don't know what
you're getting,” said a pornography entrepreneur who goes by the online
pseudonym T. Lassiter Jones. “Cheap is more convenient.”
That notion could be the great hope of the mainstream entertainment
industry, where fledgling services like the iTunes store and Rhapsody that
offer inexpensive, easy access to legal music are beginning to catch on.
So, yes, sex sells, but so can music.
Howard R. Harmatz[/quote]