Piracy Did We Seal Our Own Fate?

JimmyD brought up a good point. Piracy is a huge problem for all of us. But did we bring it on ourselves? For years now we have dumped product on the market, we have whored ourselves to the point that we are little more than five dollar crack whore street walkers.

The entry into this business required about as much talent and about as much capital. We started emphasizing quantity over quality and we made no efforts to control our output. We completely ignored the first rule of success in entertainment, “leave them wanting more”

We inundated the market with the cheapest product we could shit out, comps, sell throughs, catalog content, then we repackaged all the same content and sold it over and over. And I’m not talking just companies that specialized in bargain basement porn, I’m talking companies that wanted to be known for their quality.

We let anyone who could hold a camera proclain him/herself a “director” and we assumed that just because some chick who dropped out of high school could suck cock then she could be a director.

And for ten years we dumped this shit on the market at the rate of ONE THOUSAND releases a MONTH. That’s 250 porn videos a WEEK.

Now many of those companies have come and gone and video companies struggle to survive in a market where predatory distributors will take as long as possible to pay you, hoping to starve you out so that they don’t have to pay at all.

All of this leaves a LOT of porn with no owner and no one with any money to protect the copyright.

Is it a big surprise to find it all over the net? Is it a surprise to find everyone elses product mixed in with it?

So now we are trying to plug the dam after it burst, not by lowering the lake level until we can rebuild and fix the dam, but instead by trying to patch it while the water is flooding out. It won’t work.

I don’t care who the studio is: Evil Angel, Digital Playground, Jules Jordan, Wicked, Vivid etc. When you release a DVD today, tonight I can go online and get that DVD, in a full quality identical copy of the DVD menus and all and I can get it faster for free online than I can go to the local video store and rent it.

But it isn’t just us, Hollywood is suffering the same fate but to a lesser degree. People know it’s wrong to download Hollywood movies for free but don’t consider porn to have the same value. Why? because we don’t put any value into the product and we don’t value ourselves, our performers or our business.

So what do we do? We file lawsuits. We attempt to use the legal system to enforce our rights in a world court. (many of these sites are in other countries) Tube sites, torrent sites look out we are going to sue you and even though you made millions of dollars you are now going to face a 200,000 dollar fine for enabling piracy (reference the current case against thepiratebay.com) and this is suppossed to deter you and others from doing what piratebay did.

Now here’s the cold hard truth, these guys are just the scavengers pulling the last bits of flesh off of the carnage we brought on ourselves. Eventually there won’t be anything left and there won’t be enough output from the industry to keep these sites afloat and we will again be in a position to prosper, but it’s going to be a long hard ride to ride out that storm.

And speaking of scavengers heres comes our old buzzard friend the Free Speech Coalition, they see some scraps they might pick up by posturing and making noise but not doing anything substantive, same as they have always done. Maybe gopher is a better term for them,,,go for this, go for that…Like a pornchick who always says she is going to get her GED and of course never puts any effort into it.

I guess she can always become a director…..And so it goes.