The rise of YouTube and all the adult-focused video streaming sites that followed has caused major headaches for the adult entertainment industry. Instead of having to worry about people seeding their content on BitTorrent, so called “tube sites” are now the prime threat.
The owners of these streaming sites tend to be very cooperative and assist in taking down copyrighted material when they’re asked to. In fact, the owners of several popular streaming sites have recently launched a system through which the porn studios can protect their entire catalogs for free.
The system named COP-CMS creates unique fingerprints for each of their videos. It then checks all current videos on the participating “tube” sites and removes any matches it finds and prevents the video from being uploaded in the future.
“We believe we have one the most robust systems available. Videos can be matched even if they’re blurred, resized, rotated or have sections removed. Our system is accurate enough to detect a video from just 1 second of footage,” TorrentFreak was told by David, one of the people behind the COP-CMS system.
The innovative anti-piracy solution was picked up by XBIZ, one of the leading adult news outlets, and is already in use by several porn studios. However, not all studios were equally happy about this free anti-piracy service offered by the ‘pirate’ tube sites, possibly because it directly competes with their own solution.
In the forum thread discussing the XBIZ article on the COP-CMS system, several studio representatives vent their concerns. The overall opinion seems to be that these “scoundrel thieves” don’t deserve the coverage, and not too long after the article was posted the head of leading porn studio TitanMedia replied that “It’s been taken care of…”
Indeed, the article on XBIZ was pulled from the site. “We rang xbiz.com and spoke to the editor who said they had been contacted by someone about us and now the article is “dead in the water,” Steve told TorrentFreak, adding that he never got an explanation why.
Coincidentally, the Free Speech Coalition (FSC), the trade association for the adult entertainment industry announced it’s very own anti-piracy solution on XBIZ a day later. Could it be that this upcoming competitor was one of the reasons why the other article was pulled?
If we take a look at the directors of the FSC we see that they are made up of a TitanMedia lawyer, the founder of XBIZ and the Senior Editor from AVN news. Something smells fishy here, to say the least.
Meanwhile, COP-CMS continues its free service and is currently working with several studios that are not members of FSC. On the other hand, the Free Speech Coalition might have to rethink whether or not it should change its name after this alleged gagging escapade.