LOS ANGELES —Today Piracy Stops Here (Porn Guardian) announced the release of its 2013 Piracy Report.
The report lists the top files hosts, tube sites and torrents that unlawfully host or distribute content belonging to Porn Guardian’s clients. The report also lists the top ISPs that are hosting these sites, and that host piracy blogs and forums.
“Producers have a right to know what ISPs are harboring these criminals, and what sites (especially tube sites) that court their advertising business, are profiting more from piracy than they are from legitimate business,” said Dominic Ford, the company’s co-founder.
According to Ford, the 2013 report shares some similarities with the 2012 edition, but also reveals differences inidcative of emerging trends in piracy. For two years in a row, file host Extabit.com took the top spot as the file host with the most reported piracy. RapidGator.com moved up to the number two slot, replacing Oron.com and Filesmonst.com. Porn Guardian was instrumental in the dismantling of Oron.com.
MyVidster.com ranked number two for the second year in a row in the category of tube/leeching sites. Other sites on the list include PornHub.com, XHamster.com and RedTube.com.
The list of ISPs contained a few surprises this year including the introduction of a new category of host, the CDN. CloudFlare, a Content Deliver Network (CDN) was rated the number one offender this year “because it works in a way that masks the actual ISP a site is hosted on,” Porn Guardian reported, adding that while the pirate sites still host the files on their own “origin” servers, CloudFlare has become a roadblock to discovering the location of those files.
“Cloudflare's Content Distribution Network is changing the way some pirates distribute stolen content,” Porn Guardian co-Founder Peter Phinney explained. “We hope that this is an unintended effect that we will be able to work through with their administrative staff. So far, our efforts to reach out to them have been largely unsuccessful. It may be that a legal challenge will be required to focus their attention on the unintended obfuscation their system puts between infringers and intellectual property owners."
Both the 2013 and 2012 Piracy Reports are available for free on PornGuardian.com.
Porn Guardian also announced the addition of leading gay porn brand Sean Cody to its roster of clients.