Internet Pornographers Attempt to Expose Amateur Pirates
Would you be embarrassed if your mother knew what type of porn you were into?
American pornography producers are fighting internet piracy in the same way the music industry has since the early 2000s, but adding an extra tactic: shame.
Yes, to prove just how sex-positive and trustworthy the industry is, litigators will be using porn viewers' sense of shame as a both an extra punishment and a deterrent. If tried for porn piracy (not the 'big sword' kind), one's sexual fantasies and viewing choices will be made public to family, friends, colleagues, future bosses, etc., with the defendant's porn-viewing habits forever on public record, guilty or not. Downloads prominently featuring transsexuals and "barely legal" 18-year-old women are the first to be targeted (ignoring the young, legal, nothing-wrong-with-that girls for a moment, we clearly still have a long way to go in queer acceptance if transsexual porn is deemed the most embarrassing and shameful of the entire industry) on torrent sites, as well as YouTube-style websites like XTube and YouPorn, which rely on user-uploaded content and only remove offending videos when requested to.
"It seems like it will be quite embarrassing for whichever user ends up in a lawsuit about using a popular shemale title," offered Pink Visual President Allison Vivas when speaking to AFP earlier this week, confirming this heteronormative stance. "When it comes to private sexual fantasies and fetishes, going public is probably not worth the risk that these torrent and peer-to-peer users are taking,"
The great irony is that so many porn developers once took advantage of these technologies in the early days of their careers, using web-based channels that ignored the traditional distribution methods. Now that such technology has evolved so that users can easily get content for free, it no longer suits those at the top of the industry.
It's not unreasonable that content creators in a bad economy would want to keep their intellectual property theirs. It's quite sad, however, that an industry so derided by the anti-sex lobby, and that is so often attributed to a greater proliferation of sexual knowledge around the globe, would use the exact same methods to keep money in the bank that its detractors have been using to sabotage it: shame. If this method is used, the porn industry is simply playing into the hands of those that would have it shut down, and I find that far more shameful than any honest kink.
[Via Mashable]
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