The new face of porn racketeering? Money-grabs, RIAA-style

Image by immensely talented UrbanPgtographer2007.

Carol Queen just sent me this story in the Guardian UK Porn bill for couple who can’t download, which I’d been looking at with a furrowed brow for the past day or so trying to put all the pieces together. And it clicked. You’ll see in the URL string that it says “porn bill mistake” but I think there’s likely something much more malfeasant than a mistake behind the P-2-P (peer to peer file sharing) porn curtain.

Basically, people in Europe are getting letters — official “pre-settlement” letters — offering not to prosecute them for illegally snagging a porn film. The letters from a legal firm called Davenport Lyons are asking for around $772 (£503) in exchange for alleged copyright infringement and to avoid court action for Lyons’ claim that those receiving the letter have allegedly downloaded a porn film. Not just any porn film — particularly a Nazi gay male hardcore flick.

It’s sort of like if someone came up to you on the street and said, ‘hey I think you slandered me in a way that could be really embarrassing to you if anyone found out — but if you give me a couple hundred bucks, I won’t take you to court [where you’d lose even more money].’ It’s estimated that there may be as many as 25,000 of these letters sent out. Here’s where it begins to get ugly, snip:

A Hertfordshire couple in their 60s were horrified to receive a letter last week from a London firm of lawyers accusing them of downloading a hardcore gay porn movie. It demanded they pay £503 for “copyright infringement” or face a high court action. The 20-page “pre-settlement letter” from lawyers Davenport Lyons, acting on behalf of German pornographers, insisted they pay £503 to their clients for the 115 minute film Army Fuckers which features “Gestapo” officers and “Czech” farmers.

The bewildered couple contacted Guardian Money. “We were offended by the title of the film. We don’t do porn – straight or gay – and we can’t do downloads. We have to ask our son even to do an iTunes purchase.”

But this Hertfordshire couple are not alone. A large number of people have received this letter, provoking a massive outcry on web forums such as slyck.com and torrentfreak which estimate 25,000 of these letters have been sent out. If all the recipients paid up, it would net £12.5m – more than almost any porn film has made.

The lawyers also sent out similar demands for a second German gay porn film with an even more offensive title.

Media expert Michael Coyle at Southampton-based solicitors Lawdit, is fighting on behalf of individuals who have received the letter from Davenport Lyons. “Owners of films, music and computer games obviously have to protect their rights and prevent illegal copying, otherwise everyone would get all sorts of content for free.

“But many of these letters have been sent to people who have no idea what a download is. We’ve had straight pensioners complain, and a mother who had the shock of having to question her 14-year-old son about gay porn because he was the only apparent user of the internet connection that was registered to her.” (…read more, guardian.co.uk)

Yes, these look like clumsy RIAA tactics — go after a sweep of possible file sharers, some will just pay up to make it go away, some may be innocent, some may be guilty, it’s a shakedown to see how much fruit falls out of the tree. But what really bugged me was that no one seemed to be asking why the two films in question were pretty much the exact kind of porn that would be offensive to elderly European pensioners and soccer moms. So I looked up the company Davenport Lyons is representing — DigiProtect — to see what other kind of content they offer. I wonder, why not another film like heterosexually oriented, vanilla Big Natural Tits #17 (which DigiProtect also holds the rights to)? Blog Amused Cynicism says,

Evil Angel contracted with German company DigiProtect for DigiProtect to upload 800 of their films onto P2P networks, including eDonkey, Kazaa and BitTorrent. (…) So far, so legal — it’s perfectly legal for a copyright holder to copy and distribute their works. However, if you read the contract (available here) it’s more sinister than that. So DigiProtect get the films and put them on P2P networks, harvesting the IP addresses of everyone who downloads them. Then they pass on the IP addresses to Davenport Lyons, a UK-based law firm. Davenport Lyons then send threatening letters to members of the public, accusing them of illegal downloading and threatening to sue them unless they pay £500. Davenport Lyons then share the proceeds with DigiProtect. (…read more; follow-up here, cabalamat.wordpress.com)

I’ve long been a big, big fan of John Stagliano and Evil Angel, and most of their actors and directors; they have always had a revolutionary revenue model that rewards high quality work and allows customers to purchase direct from the company, so the artists get a chance to make more money from their work. They make a lot of hot porn — director John Leslie is a fave, and many of us love Belladonna. I have to wonder, does Evil Angel know what’s going on? TechDirt asks, Are Copyright Holders Purposely Putting Content On P2P In Order To Demand Money?

We’ve discussed the highly questionable activities of UK law firm Davenport Lyons for its supposed campaigns on behalf of various copyright holders. From what we had seen, the firm wasn’t particularly interested in actually protecting content from being shared online — only in threatening as many people as possible with “pre-settlement letters” to get them to pay up to avoid being sued. This certainly feels like what’s commonly called extortion, especially, as it came to light that the pre-settlement letters are being sent to many innocent bystanders. Since this is a business model issue (squeezing individuals to pay up) rather than actually being about protecting copyright, it’s no surprise that the pre-settlement letters would be sent as widely as possible, even if there was no actual evidence showing guilt.

However, the situation may be even worse than originally suspected. In an article about Davenport Lyons’ latest client, TorrentFreak notes that the copyright holder may be contracting with a company to purposely spreading the content on file sharing networks for the purpose of making it easier to find people to threaten with pre-settlement letters. There are a number of different players involved here, but basically, copyright holders are licensing the copyright on various movies to a firm called DigiProtect. DigiProtect, in turn, hires Davenport Lyons to send out the pre-settlement letters. But in a leaked contract between DigiProtect and one copyright holder, it’s made quite clear in the contractual language, that DigiProtect is expected to upload the movies as widely as possible prior to having a law firm send out the pre-settlement letters… (…read more, techdirt.com)

Update: Torrent Freak (who originally broke this story) just linked here in Sexpert Uncovers Shades of Dahl in Piracy Witch-Hunt adding another dimension to what makes this seem like an age-old practice. See also — here, reader David Hayward comments that Davenport Lyons is the same firm that did the exact same thing to gamers, causing Atari to ethically and unceremoniously dump the law firm (theregister.co.uk).

Someone needs to tell Evil Angel how bad this is making them look.

Update 12.05.08: John Stagliano (Evil Angel) responds — sort of — in this BBC article, Cash demands over porn downloads. “It’s not my understanding that they ask for anything near that. I think the amount was $50 (£34) or €50 (£43),” he said. “I would be very surprised and I wouldn’t be happy because it would mean it was completely misrepresented to me.”