An Effort To Clog Up the Tubes

There are ways to put a dent into P2Ps.

Can anything be done to prevent the tubes from putting all of you out of business? You will not get an answer here, but maybe a start.

Tubes are increasing in number, increasing in their numbers of full-scene clips, and increasingly moving offshore.

Here is an example of one of the more prolific adult tubes: This is a tube with no gay clips. Nonetheless, there were 220 clips downloaded in about the past week, 125 of which were more than 15 minutes in length, meaning an entire scene from a DVD. And that is conservative, because DVDs in some genres offer 20 8- to10-minute clips, rather than six or seven 15- to 30-minute ones. So, we will assume for calculation that there were an average of at least 18 new, full-scene clips posted per day.

Now, go to the DMCA, which is the villain in all of this. The DMCA allows a copyright owner to send a takedown notice to a DMCA-protected site infringing on its copyrights, and such notices can be sent by e-mail. Assume for the moment that the DMCA notice is sent the day after a clip is posted. Give the tube 10 days to forward the notice to the alleged perpetrator and another 10 days for the perpetrator (presumably) to fail to respond. That is a total of 21 days - three weeks.

Now, making the absurd assumption that the tube actually takes the clip down as soon as the second 10-day period expires, it will have been up there for three weeks. And even assuming that every clip is infringing and that each one is taken down immediately after three weeks, the numbers are staggering. Even with that theoretical limit of containing piracy, at any given time there would be an expected 375 over-15-minute clips, a group that would entirely rotate every three weeks, with close to 20 new ones every day.

How much harm can three weeks do? Well, according to the tube site examined for this article, the average three-week-old clip has been viewed a staggering 174,000 times. Put another way, there are millions of views per day of over-15-minute clips. If you assume that an average DVD costs 3 bucks wholesale and has six scenes in it, that is the equivalent of a half a buck per scene. Video manufacturers are being ripped off to the tune of hundreds of thousands of dollars a day, and that is just by this one tube site!

Now, there is something else. Millions of site visits per day translate into tons of traffic that can be monetized. And it seems like a new tube site pops up every week.

Is there a way to put a dent into this? It seems as though everybody is waiting for everyone else to do something. Titan Media has done a good job of making a dent in the gay market, but has not had much luck against the tubes as of yet.

There is a huge lawsuit pending in New York - because mainstream Hollywood is getting dinged by this, although not to the extent that adult is. Uploading a 30-minute television show is as easy as a 20- to 30-minute porn clip. And it is not much of a stretch to upload a 100-minute, first-run motion picture before it is on DVD, before it is on pay-per-view, even before its premiere theatrical release. The latter is accomplished by practices that the motion picture industry is feverishly fighting against, including duplicating screening copies, sneaking video cameras into screening rooms, internal theft, etc.

The New York case is Viacom's billion-dollar suit against YouTube. As noted in an earlier column, there are armies of lawyers on each side, and the case will take years to resolve. Viacom recently succeeded in forcing YouTube to turn over information about its subscribers, although Viacom has publicly stated that it does not intend to use the information to pursue any of them.

Along the same lines, the recording industry recently announced that it would cease filing and threatening lawsuits against P2P users that are infringing copyrights, a practice that gave the already embattled industry yet another black eye. But, because there is now online availability of single songs - eliminating the beef that you had to pay 20 bucks for a CD just to get one song - the recording industry has done much in the direction of brightening its image.

Perhaps its song-by-song marketing model has accomplished enough damage control to the forces killing the recording industry's revenues that the industry has resigned itself to living with piracy on some level. Likely also figuring into this is the industry's victory in the Supreme Court in the Grokster case, allowing it to attack the P2P networks directly, although those operations presumably are moving offshore, as are the tubes.

There obviously is a legitimate place for the tubes in the marketplace. In an apparent response to Vivid's lawsuit against it, PornoTube has now taken steps to limit the length of submissions. One- or two-minute clips can serve the legitimate advertising function; and a minute-long clip is not a marketplace substitute for a 20-minute scene.

From our industry's standpoint, suing P2P consumers is something that should be seriously considered. Unlike the recording industry, which is entirely dominated by a handful of companies, adult video is fiercely competitive among literally thousands of companies, and cannot be accused of ripping people off. The problem is to make lawsuits into a break-even proposition, and technology is close to making that feasible.

This article originally appeared in the April 2009 issue of AVN Online. To subscribe, visit AVNMediaNetwork.com/subscribe