Re: ManHub.com - Making money on your stolen content?
oh wow. I’ve been on the road and not logged in for a little bit. Boy, I missed a lot. My “silence” on here has not been intentional. And thank you to those who spoke up on my behalf. I believe I am one of the most ethical and caring people in this industry, so it cuts very deep when people jump to conclusions.
So about the issue at hand… Peter has been more on the front-lines with all of this, but he’s not available today (I emailed and told him about this thread and told him to read it). Hopefully he’ll got in here to clear up anything further, but here are my thoughts.
We had a LONG debate about whether we would work with people whom I would deem “the bad guys” if they came knocking. But we decided that if a bad guy wants to earnestly clean up their act, part of our responsibility to the rest of our clients (and industry) would be to help them do that. I am not speaking about Manhub specifically here, but in general. For example, we had a meeting with LeaseWeb in Phoenix. I basically said, “you are enemy number one as far as I am concerned,” but I would happily work with them so they are on the “recommended list” instead of the “black list” next year. If you weren’t there, Porn Guardian made a poster of the “worst offenders” and how many DMCAs we sent them (or in the case of ISPs, DMCAs we sent people who host with them). How “earnest” companies like this really are obviously remains to be seen.
When BangBros came on board earlier in the year they wanted to know how bad the problem on ManHub really was. (Yes, Bjorn, it seems incredulous that they don’t know, but that’s the question we were asked). We told them it was pretty bad and we would investigate and get some real numbers to show them just how much they had to clean up their act if they really wanted to go legit. Our first step was to catalog our clients’ material (there was a lot of it), and email our clients to make sure these were 100% illegal. To our surprise (and personally to my immense dismay) many/most of our clients came back and said “we license content to them”. Personally, I was floored by this, and clearly you guys are too. This is why I wrote in my response here that I think licensing to tubes is a horrible idea that blurs the line too much as far as I am concerned. I wanted all that content to be illegal. I wonder how much money these content producers make to justify licensing to the tube sites.
I see that Titan responded here that his stuff isn’t licensed by them. Dominic Ford doesn’t license to them either. We don’t license to ANY tube sites. But other big guys do. I am not sure I want to start a witch hunt by listing them, but ask your favorite content providers whom they license content to and (if you feel like it) tell them why it matters. I certainly say at EVERY event I am speaking at that we need to STOP supporting piracy by playing ball with tubes that smile to your face while stabbing you in the back. I have said this over and over and over and over.
Bjorn, the google submission tool doesn’t let you single out a specific site to report. Instead, you report by client. So if a certain site (like Manhub) isn’t getting as many google reports as you think it should there is no easy way for me to goose the system. Actually, as I write this, it occurs to me that I could have the database sort the client files such that tubes and torrents are at the top of the list (instead of filehosts). That shouldn’t be too difficult to do. I don’t know if it will move the needle, but we can try.
And no, Porn Guardian is not and will never be in anyone’s pocket. Hell, Men.com is a client for 2 years and we DMCA the shit out of Manwin properties. We make this very clear to clients when they join that if they also own properties on our watch list that won’t change. I certainly get that conspiracy theorists want to think there are more complicated politics afoot, but I assure you there aren’t. My moral compass is pretty strong and certain, and this is not an area in which I will budge. We would just as soon drop a client that puts us in an ethical grey area than continue with them. And if any of our current clients put us in that grey area, that is what we will do. Maybe its naive to think that some guys really do want to go good, but that’s the point of all the litigation we’ve helped in the last 2 years: to scare them into realizing they are next if they don’t clean up their acts. So I am happy to help them clean up their acts if they really mean it.
If gay-torrents.ru came to us tomorrow and said “I want to go clean, help me do that” I would. Why? Because I believe they are of the worst, most evil sites out there. And fixing them would change the landscape for the industry. Imagine if we had to approve every torrent before it went live. There would be no piracy on that board. Our last round of digital fingerprinting showed that all copies of a pirated file (later found on filesmonster.com, etc…) all originated on gay-torrents.ru. If they were a serious company that wanted to turn themselves around (they aren’t), I would jump at the chance to get into their system and personally remove the hundreds of thousands of files that are there. They’ll never do that, but it looks like some tube sites see the writing on the wall.
As rawTop mentioned, Marc Randazza said on the Ethics panel (which I was on and spoke about these topics at length!!) that he refers tube sites and other such sites to us. Our hope is to put best practices in place in these companies and tell them that simply responding to DMCAs is not enough: they need to pro-acively make sure they aren’t hosting illegal content. So far none have hired us to do that, but I am looking forward to the day one does. I believe it could instantly change the way tubes work.
We are 100% transparent in who our client list is (just go to DoNotPost.org to see them all) and what work we are doing (except in the case of legal proceedings, where we can’t comment on things that are currently in the courts).
I hope this at least helps to answer some questions. I wrote my initial response here because I was shocked to find how many of our clients’ material were actually licensed on ManHub. I had not known this before and I thought it would be beneficial to the conversation because it is not apparent that this is the case when you are just browsing. I will ask Peter if there are more specifics he can provide in this realm. And Keith, I assume Peter reached out to you to ask if your content was licensed? If not, I will tell the group we put on that project to make sure they found all the Titan material and reported it.
Thanks guys,
Dominic
