Round of applause for you, Violet, but a standing ovation to Jennifer Barker.

Reading the news article you link to and doing a bit more background reading leads to a lot about the phenomenon of Copyright trolling, an unscrupulous practice in which copyright holders (which in recent years has been primarily porn companies and mainstream movie companies as well) farm out recovery rights to shady and aggressive lawyers who do mass searches on torrent IPs, subpoena the names from IP providers, then make extortionary demands on the end user, who may or may not be guilty of anything more than having an open WiFi connection or being hacked. (I was also very disappointed to learn that one of my favorite free speech bloggers, Marc Randazza of Legal Satyricon, is a practicing copyright troll. Won’t be linking to his blog anytime soon.)

It also amazes me that porn companies who’s reputation is already under siege from people like Gail Dines, Shelly Lubben, and Michael Weinstein would court this kind of bad publicity. Even RIAA has abandoned this strategy several years ago. If anything, the porn industry should be trying to avoid the perception of being greedy corporate Goliaths.

This is not to say that piracy isn’t a very real problem. I googled up several of X-Art’s titles, and sure enough, found all of them on multiple sites, including a movie X-Art only put up on their own site in the last day. There were even a few boards that looked like they had a site rip of most or all of X-Arts content. And while I can definitely see why sites like X-Art would very well have cause to sue pirate boards and pirate sites like MegaUpload out of existence, the strategy of going after end-downloaders, particularly based on mass IP searches, is so utterly misguided it’s not even funny.

I was so upset when I saw the article. Not just for the business association of my own, but also because the hypocrisy of a porn company threatening to out, name and shame its customers for money… it makes me SO sick to my stomach.

Thanks for the support. It means more than you know!