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Articles by Peter Phinney

opinion

Pirate Who Let His Guard Down Capitulates

If you follow developments in piracy closely, then you know it’s almost constantly evolving. Content theft has become big business, with some prolific pirates actually making more (in some cases by a factor of 10) than the creative folks in our industry who actually produce the content originally. Sad, but true.

Peter Phinney ·
opinion

Piracy Journal: An Industry Coming of Age

I have been ruminating about this column for some time. It started when I read an unflattering article in a mainstream publication after the XBIZ EU show in London about how the industry appeared to be “on its death bed.” The author talked about a “disappointingly beige” conference focused on seminars about payment processors and government regulations.

Peter Phinney ·
opinion

Piracy Journal: Curb Your Enthusiasm

Too often, content owners pursue instances of copyright infringement in desperation and with anger. If you take it as a personal attack that someone is distributing your content without your permission, it might be better to hire someone impartial to pursue piracy on your behalf.

Peter Phinney ·
opinion

Piracy Journal: It’s Perfectly Legal ... But ...

A trademark is a form of protection for any word, name, symbol, or device used in commerce to “identify the goods of one manufacturer or seller from goods manufactured or sold by others,” and to indicate the source of the goods.

Peter Phinney ·
opinion

Knocking the Knock Offs

American copyright law has traditionally been intertwined with how we view patents and trademarks. In fact, the U.S. House and Senate Patent Committee and it’s Subcommittee on Patents, Trademarks and Copyrights was responsible for crafting copyright law until fairly recently, and the individual industries affected by copyright have always been the entities that shape actual legislative updates in the U.S.

Peter Phinney ·
opinion

Piracy Journal: Looking at Leachers

There is a copyright infringement case in Chicago that began two years ago, and it’s still before the court, and everyone interested in digital piracy should be watching it closely. It involves a content producer from Florida called Flavaworks, and a social media and video indexing site called MyVidster.com.

Peter Phinney ·
opinion

The Condom Link

Lots of our clients produce gay content. For some it’s a small part of an otherwise straight enterprise, but for others, it’s their main focus and has been for years. Living and working in adult in Los Angeles, I’ve been following Measure B with particular interest because, as anyone who enjoys gay porn knows, condoms have been completely integrated into that content niche for quite a long time, with a few notable exceptions — outlier studios that have always produced exclusively bareback gay video. Condom use is almost never integrated into a storyline, whether the production is straight or gay — because let’s be honest — much of the content our industry puts out involves storylines having to do with casual sex, unplanned encounters with strangers, or falling victim to seduction or sudden animal urges.

Peter Phinney ·
opinion

Piracy: Making it Harder to Steal Your Content

Site security is complex and I’ll deal with other aspects of it in future columns, but here I want to talk a little about how some sites make piracy more lucrative than others do. You want to be one of the sites that makes piracy pay less.

Peter Phinney ·
opinion

Is File Sharing Theft?

The language we use to frame digital piracy matters, and the real problem is that 20th century notions of theft simply don’t apply. Copying content one did not create is not the same zero-sum game as stealing, because the owner still has his original content. And now, entire generations of “Netizens” draw a sharp moral distinction between file sharing and theft. A March 2012 op-ed in the New York Times posits that “we should recognize that the criminal law is least effective – and least legitimate – when it is at odds with widely held moral intuitions.”

Peter Phinney ·