Mike:
You have some valuable insight in your article about adult studios’ response to tubesite and torrent piracy. Unfortunately, you also make conjecture based on anecdotal observations, and most troubling to me, state it as a matter of fact. I would concede that your opinions are informed, but they’re not facts.
As an example, this statement made by you on your site isn’t accurate: “To summarize this, it appears that the companies who use some form of service to protect their content are doing a lot better than the ones who don’t. It is quite obvious that DP, Vivid and Hustler are doing this. It is also obvious that Red Light District, Zero Tolerance, Wicked, Private, Adam and Eve, Evil Angel and Elegant Angel are not.”
In fact, contrary to what you state as the obvious, Evil Angel uses TakeDownPiracy.com for monitoring and DMCA action on torrents and ftp sites like Rapidshare. Additionally, we monitor tubesites in-house and then submit the information to TakeDownPiracy.com who submits the DMCAs.
There may be other factors that that lead to the appearance that Evil Angel and the other gonzo producers are somehow less vigilant, such as the likelihood that our content is more appealing to tubesites because our movies are focused more on niche-driven harder sex than those of the feature producers. This is just my belief about one circumstance that may be leading to your observations about the volume of Evil Angel content pirated online. I won’t state it as fact.
In the future, feel free to e-mail me if you want verification about Evil Angel related articles, or failing that, please be careful to differentiate between editorial opinion and reporting fact. Last, please send me links or let me know when you come across our stuff on sites that appear to be pirating Evil Angel movies. DMCAs will proliferate faster than an internet rumor…
Best regards,
Christian S. Mann
Evil Angel Productions
Now Christian does have a point here, I did presume when I probably shouldn’t have. The fact that so much of Evil Angel stuff appears to be available is just as like because of it’s popularity. I applaud everyone in this business who actively participates in stopping piracy.
2 Responses
[New Post] Christian Mann Responds: – via #twitoaster http://www.mikesouth.com/uncategorized/c…
hey Mike…I know you’re a big fan of Eric and RYC and that’s great. Eric is doing a great job, but don’t just discount the efforts of everyone else to promote the guy you’re using. I’ve single-handedly taken down over 600k infringements this year for all the studios I represent. To say that Evil Angel isn’t doing anything about this is ludicrous and out and out not true. I’ll send you the excel spreadsheet showing you all the Evil Angel infringements I’ve removed in just a few months and it will blow your mind.
There is no studio out there that doesn’t have stuff on the piracy sites, to think that either me, Eric or anyone can just eradicate all instances of piracy is a pipedream. All we can do is try and mitigate it as best as possible. No one can stop a DVD from getting ripped and when pirates are ripping Blu Ray copies of Avatar that leads me to believe there’s not a lot we can do to stop our DVDs from being ripped. At that point the search is on and there’s only about 1000 top piracy sites, 100 top studios and each of those has 300-400 titles…you do the math.
I do all my DMCAs myself, no staff, nothing fancy, just good old fashioned results. I do all of this and still maintain a regular 9-5 because anti-piracy is not a lucrative business, but much like RYC I’m sure, I’m doing this because it’s the right thing to do. I have a great relationship with studios and have been able to convince them to give anti-piracy a chance and so far everyone is happy with the results.
Chris also put it into great perspective that some studios simply get pirated more than others. I know some content producers want to believe that there stuff is the greatest but I’ve had to turn away prospective clients because quite honestly, no one pirates their stuff, and I can’t in good conscience charge them a monthly fee to monitor nothing. Evil Angel on the other hand is one of if not the most pirated studio I represent, because they have a massive library of content to pirate and because they are in-demand. I could dedicate my entire day to Evil Angel and find even more stuff but I also have 30 or so other clients who pay me the same amount of money, but if you’d like Mike, I’ll FWD you the DMCA I sent to Rapidshare on behalf of Evil Angel that had 23k+ links, maybe that will change your mind.
I realize you’re passionate about this issue Mike and trust me I respect that. Some of the other studios you mentioned are dropping the ball about piracy or they are in bed with them…*cough*Jules Jordan*cough, but I know Eric does a great job for all his clients and I know the clients I rep appreciate the job I do for them. It’s incredibly difficult and time consuming and it’s very easy to feel like you’re making no headway but the comments I read from pirates frustrated by the efforts of me and Eric make it all worthwhile.
PS. Eric isn’t the only one who reps Digital Playground, so in a roundabout way…thanks for the compliment.