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http://www.xbiz.com/news/155519
U.S. Marshals Service Raids Media West Entertainment
If this had happened in 2006, instead of the Republican administration's efforts on Girls Gone Wild, maybe we'd have a better economy now.
One thing I can say about my working by myself, no one steals from me! Well not since 2008 when someone did.
I was surprised to see some studio names in there. Or maybe not. I guess I was surprised others didn't know they were being pirated, too.
I spend a couple of hours each week Googling myself - my name, my brands, some keywords - looking for Pirate sites that do illegal filesharing of my videos and eBooks.
I'm surprised that the big studios don't Google themselves as well, to find where consumers are getting pirated copies of their downloadable and tangible products.
Last Winter, I spent some time fighting and winning with Ebay over a couple of sellers who were using unacceptable methods to list "used" copies of my DVDs. I won in that I learned about and got the special Ebay account for producers of IP, and I got my items off of the Seller's account. (He was using screen caps from the video on the DVD in his listing to promote the DVD he was selling. That is against Ebay listing policies. Now he has a photo of the clamshell case like he's supposed to. So far I'm not noticing a trend that he is listing the same title over and over...)
The past several months, I have succeeded getting my videos off of filesharing sites, and getting PayPal to stop processing for one of them. Found another yesterday that uses CCBill. 12 hours later, the CCBill payment page still works. But my video is gone.
I may be a one-man shop, and I may only earn what big shops pay menial labor employees, but how big do you have to be to NOT notice that some pirate has thousands of copies of your DVDs, and is selling them for 95-cents? Or giving them away as promos or perks?
To me the porn industry has always been about the treadmill of producing tomorrow's next big new release, with tomorrow's next piece of meat, buying into the premise that some third-party marketer is the Golden Goose that knows how to deliver customers, or the makeover and relaunch of a site.
But spending some time managing one's inventory, and herding one's flock is more than a penny saved being a penny earned, when clowns like this can send a big name studio DVD to a big name Replicator, and get a couple thousand copies shipped to a warehouse in the desert, no questions asked!! Multiplied by multiple studios and multiples of each studio's DVDs.
There's a dozen points of failure in this chain of events revealed yesterday. And they all add up to less and less money for producers of content to have to continue producing content, taken away by pirates operating in the bright day light.
My guess is that the big companies simply make enough money so they don't bother about the pirated stuff. I can see no other reason why they would be ignorant to those things going on. Oh wait, there is another reason that comes to my mind.. well, I think I'd rather not follow that line of thought..