Using their Public Policy Blog, Google announced a number of reforms to their platform for the purposes of fighting piracy today. Some elements are pretty unimportant for adult entertainment (such as YouTube & AdWords changes), but I think that there’s a real potential here for shifts in the porn industry and its ability to protect its content from pirates. The blog post itself is just a quick overview of the ‘How Google Fights Piracy’ report. You can click here to read the report, and I suggest you take a look at page 18 in particular for the most important aspect toward fighting piracy in porn.
Here’s the quote I think best sums up the potential of this policy update for our industry:
In addition to removing pages from search results when notified by copyright owners, Google also factors in the number of valid copyright removal notices we receive for any given site as one signal among the hundreds that we take into account when ranking search results. Consequently, sites with high numbers of removal notices may appear lower in search results. … In October 2014, we have improved and refined the DMCA demotion signal in search results, increasing the effectiveness of just one tool rightsholders have at their disposal.
Adult entertainment has had a huge issue with piracy and given the nature of the industry, options are limited for those that want to get control of their media back. One of the major problems has been huge tube sites take material from paysites and publish full-length clips. Outside of the industry, some file lockers have also started to share entire site rips and profit from membership accounts to their communities for faster download speeds. You’ll also find camgirls having full-length videos of their activities uploaded across a multitude of sites without attribution or affiliate linking to the site it came from. Put simply, piracy in porn is rampant and not much can be done about it – until now, that is.
Google has obviously realized that piracy is becoming a big issue, and some of the larger names in the industry may stop supporting Google’s platform if they continue to allow pirates to profit from their search engine. There’s been a 15-fold increase in the number of DMCA requests sent to Google over the last 24 months – check their official copyright report statistics to see how this has become a real issue for the big G to handle.
So what’s this going to do for the industry? Well hopefully, a shift away from the standard tube model of stealing full-length videos from sites that haven’t authorized for their content to be distributed in that format.
Here are just a few of the offenders:
Pornhub
The biggest porn site in the world has had 20 individual reports made against it in the last week for infringing content against more than 10,000 URLS. You can read their report here.
XVideos
Definitely not a Manwin tube site. Yesterday, over 40,000 URLs were reported by Piracy Stop Here, LLC on behalf of 12 content owners. Only one URL was not removed from Google’s search engine. XVideos DMCA report.
Porn-W.org
As far as I know, this site has the largest number of DMCA requests made against it in the adult industry. More than 24,000 requests have been made for a grand total of 870,000 URLs infringing on copyright. Their report can be read here.
So how do we move forward? Well, the best thing that content owners can do right now is make DMCA requests, and lots of them. Websites are now receiving direct pressure from Google for hosting illegal content: trust me, they’d be stupid not to react. So the bottom line is either you see your content removed, or a major source of traffic will start to decrease as they’re brought down lower in Google’s SERPs.
This is great news for the porn industry, and I hope over the next few months, changes are made across the board to instigate a response from sites that steal adult material for their profit.