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Mr. X
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I got an email from a customer recently. He was complaining that he had to pay to join my site and I didn't have everything I ever made available yet he could go to S*******g or x***** or other sites and get all my works for free and he didn't think that was fair.

Fair. Hmm..

Pirates gonna pirate. I get that. No way to convert a pirate. However there is a group on the fence and that group finds it easier and easier to simply grab a pirated item than to pay for it every day.

It got me thinking. Am I working so I can merely provide free content to a bunch of pirate freeloaders? Is my business simply going to go out of business at some point given the moment I post something for pay its the re-released for free? Is this a viable business anymore? Am I an idiot for making material at all? I appreciate the paying customers but at some point will this dwindle to nothing.

What's worse is when a hosting company demands I put in massive effort to prove the pirated material is mine (DMCA, name, number, links) yet they NEVER demanded proof of the poster to show they created or owned the rights to redistribute that material.

Not sure how to compete with 100% free. Worse the hosting company then uses my material to draw in customers for their pay material. Like spankbang using my material to then advertise their pay per cam girls.

What's even more bizarre is when pirates will complain one pirate "stole" the rar or zip file of another pirate and redistributed it and its my material. Seems some people have a jaundiced view of "fair" and "ownership".
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sugarcoater
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That customer email is galling. As someone who has never and will never pirate videos, I am infuriated by the attitude of people who somehow think they deserve to be given the fruits of other people's hard work for nothing. The most obvious reason for people to pay instead of pirate is for the selfish motivation of having great creators continue to create. If I like someone's work, I want to pay for it as I want to incentive them to create more of their work. And if more people pay, the cost per unit stabilizes perhaps. With pirating, producers either need to increase the cost, move solely to commissioned work, or quit.

Admittedly, I am ignorant to how videos are released. But perhaps one step to reduce piracy is to continue emphasizing what piracy does to producers. Perhaps opening each video with a brief reminder of the harm caused by piracy could help. For example, if I were to create a superheroine peril video, I would have the model in the superheroine's costume speak directly to the viewer regarding the issue of piracy. Do so in a light-hearted yet sincere manner, not accusing the viewer of being prone to piracy or planning to pirate the video, but instead thanking them for not pirating the video and explaining how preventing piracy allows for the entire production crew to continue creating great content. As people often don't read any printed notification, a brief sexy request by the heroine--perhaps in bondage and forced to read the anti-piracy message, or instead in a power pose pushing her anti-piracy message--may create a bit of a difference perhaps. Just a thought.
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Mr. X
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One of the more galling emails I got was someone asking me to renumber one f my products. He had gotten this 400 page product from a pirate site and the pages were out of order and could I put them in the correct order for him.

Another blamed me for getting pirated, not blaming the pirate for pirating.

:blink:
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five_red
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Video game makers used to upload broken copies of their games to BBSs back in the day. The game would appear to work fine with only a quick initial play, but as you went further you'd encounter unbeatable enemies or missing key objects. The logic was that pirates are lazy, and will race to grab and redistribute the first copy of a game they see. Even if someone uploads the true unbroken game later on it usually gets lost amidst the numerous broken copies that flooded the pirate sites from that initial upload.

I often wonder what would happen if a video producer put out a deliberaty truncated version of the video onto pirate sites themselves a couple of days before the release of the true video. Heavily redacted scenes, and a missing ended, etc., but with no indication that this was anything other than the real version. My guess is that the pirates, being lazy, would assume they'd already distributed that particular video, and wouldn't pay much attention to the genuine release a couple of days later. Even if they did notice that the version they'd distributed was doctored, putting a another version out under the same name would cause so much confusion, particularly as after 48 hours the doctored version would probably already be all over every pirate site.

One way to test this idea is to take a video that has already been heavily pirated, and put out a director's cut with a lot of extra material. My guess is that the pirates will largely ignore it, because they are too lazy to upload a second copy of a video that is already well distributed, even if the second copy has substantially more material.

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sugarcoater
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Is it possible to release a video with each one having a unique key to it? Something in the credits could give away which specific sale it connects to. Then, when the pirated video is found online, the unique key in the credits could help reveal who had pirated the video (or allowed the video to be pirated).
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Mr. X
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sugarcoater wrote:
2 years ago
Is it possible to release a video with each one having a unique key to it? Something in the credits could give away which specific sale it connects to. Then, when the pirated video is found online, the unique key in the credits could help reveal who had pirated the video (or allowed the video to be pirated).
Giga does that but its a huge pain in the butt to maintain. And what do you do with the customer that says "your software doesn't work" or "I lost my key" or "I moved machines and now the video doesn't work" when they are really just trying to get a free copy.
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Mr. X
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five_red wrote:
2 years ago

I often wonder what would happen if a video producer put out a deliberaty truncated version of the video onto pirate sites themselves a couple of days before the release of the true video. Heavily redacted scenes, and a missing ended, etc., but with no indication that this was anything other than the real version.
I was thinking of doing that with my material. Before posting it on my store I would make a 400 image zip with the first 10 pages being legit then the rest being blank pages or "pirate is bad m'kay" then post this on rapidshare or keepshare then to the pirate forums. Not as me of course.
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Mr. X wrote:
2 years ago
Giga does that but its a huge pain in the butt to maintain. And what do you do with the customer that says "your software doesn't work" or "I lost my key" or "I moved machines and now the video doesn't work" when they are really just trying to get a free copy.
I don't know about Giga, but AFAIK the idea with fingerprinting stuff is not that they need a key to unlock it, but that the video contains information that uniquely identifies it. You can then refuse to sell further material to someone who redistributes. (you find videos on torrent, spankbang or whatever, look at the fingerprint and know which account bought the video) This only works if creating accounts is hard, incurs some significant cost or requires validation in a way that doesn't allow people to just make a new account to get around the ban. Doing KYC when selling skin flicks will put people off though, and embedding watermarks in videos presumably requires transcoding each instance of a video, which might be costly.

Best way to reduce piracy IMO is make getting it the proper way easier. I notice some videos can be bought on Odysee, for example - someone who purchases can view on the site or download. That doesn't prevent redistribution, but more people might bite if they can buy stuff anonymously using crypto. There are probably other options available to do similar. https://reclaimthenet.org/odysee-overview/
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five_red
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sugarcoater wrote:
2 years ago
Is it possible to release a video with each one having a unique key to it? Something in the credits could give away which specific sale it connects to. Then, when the pirated video is found online, the unique key in the credits could help reveal who had pirated the video (or allowed the video to be pirated).
About 10 years ago I wrote a PHP script (shows you how long ago it was) that simply injected a unique identifier into pictures or video. Most formats have meta data, like content creator or copyright, and so what I did was to set one of these fields to something distinct, like __REPLACEME__. When the PHP served the file it looked for that text as the data was sent out, and replaced it with the identifying tag. (If you know that the meta data is always inside the first 50k of a file, you don't end up doing an expensive search and replace on a file that is megabytes in size.) The tag was padded so it was a direct byte-for-byte replacement for the placeholder text. It didn't affect the picture or video itself, only the meta data. Assuming the downloader didn't re-encode the file before uploading it elsewhere the original meta data would be intact, including the unique I'd.

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argento
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I agree with you! Our ethical values were developed over thousands of years, but they are ignored many times for the desire to get some "likes" or satisfy the ego. But what is really outrageous :evilmad: , is that Spankbang and others make money from pirated material. It is totally unequal to compete with a site that offers undue material for free.
ThatOnePervert
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Mr. X wrote:
2 years ago
I got an email from a customer recently. He was complaining that he had to pay to join my site and I didn't have everything I ever made available yet he could go to S*******g or x***** or other sites and get all my works for free and he didn't think that was fair.

Fair. Hmm..

Pirates gonna pirate. I get that. No way to convert a pirate. However there is a group on the fence and that group finds it easier and easier to simply grab a pirated item than to pay for it every day.

It got me thinking. Am I working so I can merely provide free content to a bunch of pirate freeloaders? Is my business simply going to go out of business at some point given the moment I post something for pay its the re-released for free? Is this a viable business anymore? Am I an idiot for making material at all? I appreciate the paying customers but at some point will this dwindle to nothing.

What's worse is when a hosting company demands I put in massive effort to prove the pirated material is mine (DMCA, name, number, links) yet they NEVER demanded proof of the poster to show they created or owned the rights to redistribute that material.

Not sure how to compete with 100% free. Worse the hosting company then uses my material to draw in customers for their pay material. Like spankbang using my material to then advertise their pay per cam girls.

What's even more bizarre is when pirates will complain one pirate "stole" the rar or zip file of another pirate and redistributed it and its my material. Seems some people have a jaundiced view of "fair" and "ownership".
Reading through some old threads here and spotted this, wanted to give my insight as someone whose been on both sides of buy and pirate and is a little younger.

Short version is I think you make a good product and you price it fairly, I don't know what your margins look like, but I still think you have a product that's worth supporting and I've been subscribed to your page on and off for a while.

I find the fight against piracy to be kind of futile, if someone is writing you messages like that they're already too far gone. Rather than worrying about them it's best to focus on user retention and making a good product. The only thing I could really advise as far as avoiding being pirated is to set a fair price for your work and make it easily accessible which I feel you already do.
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tallyho
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Surely the guy who wrote that was saying he DOESN'T want to be driven to using the pirates.
Yet he can't access all of the product as a genuine paying customer, so it's pushing someone towards using pirates if they can't access it legally. I think the fact they started a dialogue to try and get them by being a site member proves they are NOT too far gone.


(Note I EDITED OUT THE SITE NAMES IN THE ORIGINAL AND QUOTED POST as it makes no sense to advertise them)
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ThatOnePervert
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tallyho wrote:
2 years ago
Surely the guy who wrote that was saying he DOESN'T want to be driven to using the pirates.
Yet he can't access all of the product as a genuine paying customer, so it's pushing someone towards using pirates if they can't access it legally. I think the fact they started a dialogue to try and get them by being a site member proves they are NOT too far gone.


(Note I EDITED OUT THE SITE NAMES IN THE ORIGINAL AND QUOTED POST as it makes no sense to advertise them)
Yeah, I was probably a little hard on the guy. Honestly I do think Mr. X offers a pretty big library of pics to those who subscribe, but if you're a completionist type then I understand the appeal of pirating there. If you don't want to sell that work for your own reasons I respect that, X, but if you just don't have access to it and you know people want it and have it you could just copy what they took and post that? Not sure on how that works out.
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