Page 38 - AVN May 2013

Business Sense_05.13 4/19/13 5:14 PM Page 38
STOP, THIEF | By Nate Glass
Do Pirates ‘Age Out’? Is there a light at the end of the tunnel?
Takedown Piracy is an anti-piracy service started in
2009 by Nate Glass, a 13-year veteran of the adult
industry. TDP offers copyright holders an affordable
and effective means to fight back against content
thieves. To date TDP has removed over 1.6 million
content infringements, and it closely monitors 200
piracy websites. For details, visit TakedownPiracy.com.
Being a freeloader is
cool when you’re 16
or 18, but at some
point it stops being
an attractive trait and
starts becoming a
red flag to would-be
partners.
”
LEGAL NEWS
At the recent Internext conference in Las Vegas, I heard a very interesting con-
cept advanced by Spike Goldberg from Homegrown Video. The concept is at
some point most pirates “age out” and can be converted to paying customers. It
was a concept that made so much sense, but one that had not really dawned on
me. And looking around at my own life and the lives of many of my friends, it
was a concept that, at least from my anecdotal point of view, was completely true.
Let’s be realistic. When you are a young person, you don’t have a lot of dispos-
able income to throw around on DVDs or website subscriptions. And there’s
such a plethora of free content out there that the need for an 18-year-old kid to
fork over some of his Wal-Mart paycheck isn’t all that great. At a young age, your
taste in erotic fare is probably not all that refined; really, anything will get the job
done.
Young people, especially males, have been using things like the Sports
Illustrated swimsuit issue, Cinemax (or Skin-a-max, if you prefer), or even the
Sears catalog for their erotic viewing for some time now. I remember as a teen
desperately searching through my step-dad’s dresser seeking out a years-old issue
of Playboy or trying to visually unscramble a scrambled Cinemax cable feed. The
idea of paying for any adult content was ludicrous to me at the time. Moral or
ethical dilemmas aside, I simply didn’t have the money—nor did I need to pay
for it.
And for myself, and I’m sure most of you, it was a time before you could get
on the internet and watch the latest pirated DVD on Pornhub. Let’s refer to the
time as BT—Before Tubes. While legitimate adult content producers have no
desire to attempt to sell their products to kids with no money, tube sites like
Pornhub don’t have to worry about things like age verification or credit cards.
They can make money showing ad-supported adult content (much of it pirated,
mind you) to viewers regardless of age. And if you don’t think 14- and 15-year-
old boys are watching porn on Pornhub, you are delusional.
Where once pubescent boys had to jump through hoops and obstacles to get
the slightest glimpse at anything pornographic, now it’s there at the click of a
mouse. There’s no age verification on free tube sites like Pornhub or xHamster.
You can go to the main page and start watching German fisting or Japanese
bukkake porn without the need for a credit card; no one asks your age—they just
put hormone-raging teens on the honor system and ask them not to look at all
that free porn until they’re 18. Something tells me it doesn’t dissuade very many
teens.
But the alternative—requiring credit cards just to look at pornographic con-
tent—isn’t very appealing either. Consumers want to see just what it is they are
potentially spending their money on. Consumers typically don’t want to be sur-
prised that a purchase was actually worth it; they want to have confidence in the
purchase before they ever make the decision. So for the meantime it would
appear the current state of things isn’t going to change anytime soon. But is there
a light at the end of the tunnel? Are all those people watching free pirated porn
on Pornhub ever going to become paying customers?
Well, there’s a good chance some of them will. Simply because as you get
older, being the “guy who doesn’t pay for anything” becomes less and less cool.
When your girlfriend asks you to take her to the movies and you respond with
some long-winded diatribe about how the MPAA is a soulless corporate monop-
oly that stifles innovation, chances are the date is off to a bad start. The last thing
she wants is a rant about how a bootleg rip of the newest Channing Tatum
movie is covered by fair use and how you’re expressing your First Amendment
right. She just wants you to take the time to care about making a dinner reserva-
tion and laughing together in a dark theater. And though it took some time to
get there, accessing content legitimately is quicker, easier, and more affordable
than ever.
It might be a red flag to your potential date if you’re too cheap to pay for a
couple of movie tickets or a $20 Blu-ray. Between Netflix, Hulu, Amazon, iTunes
and digital copies, there’s very little need to pirate a new DVD movie, and
watching a camcorder pirate rip of the most recent
Hollywood blockbuster doesn’t scream romance.
Pirating media is slowly becoming the way of life for
young high school aged kids and basement-shut-ins
with Pirate Party memberships. For the rest of adults,
legitimate services have eliminated the need to pirate
our entertainment. Even a recent article on the hip
tech-savvy site LifeHacker.com was titled: “Why I
Stopped Pirating and Started Paying for Media.”
This isn’t to say we still don’t have a lot of work to
do. There is still not a Netflix or iTunes-esque service
adequately catering to the adult industry. The day will
probably never come when that service would have an
iPhone app. Streaming sites like AEBN, HotMovies,
and Gamelink have great VOD libraries, but there still
doesn’t seem to be a way to get the top content from
the best studios and web producers for a flat monthly
fee.
But there is hope a generation growing up with the
ability to get hardcore porn without paying for it will
mature and figure out paying for stuff is the adult
thing to do. Once you actually have a career where
you can set your own worth, you start seeing the value
in compensating others for their efforts too. Being a
freeloader is cool when you’re 16 or 18, but at some
point it stops being an attractive trait and starts
becoming a red flag to would-be partners and even
within your social circle. Sure, there will always be
hardliners who refuse to pay for that which they can
get for free, but they shouldn’t be your concern.
There’s nothing you will ever be able to do to convince
them to stop being freeloaders. The vast majority of
people can be swayed, as iTunes and Netflix have
shown. Pirates do eventually age out—you just have to
be there to meet them when they do.
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