New Porn Group to Tackle Piracy

In December of last year, I wrote about how the adult entertainment industry was using “piracy” to its advantage and, despite adult content making up the bulk of file sharing, was a thriving industry.

However, that may change soon. A new organization, The Global Anti-Piracy Agency (GAPA), has been founded by Sureflixx Digital Distribution “with the singular mission of working on behalf of the adult entertainment industry to fight piracy of intellectual property.”

According to their site, the GAPA will help its members by identifying and stopping intellectual property theft, lobbying government bodies and educating those in the industry as well as the public at large.

This organization could amount to a turning point in the relationship between the adult entertainment industry and file sharing.

A Change in Tune

On the GAPA site, the organization claims that various forms of piracy cost the adult entertainment industry over $2 billion per year in revenue. However, unlike the recording industry and the movie studios, the adult entertainment industry has been slow to step in.

Though adult content has made up the bulk of file sharing transfers, the adult entertainment industry has not filed any lawsuits over the practice. However, according to, Carolyn Goldberg, the Interim Executive Officer for the GAPA, this has been because the adult entertainment industry has had other problems to worry about.

As a united front, the adult industry has been so busy fighting legislative and judicial problems that have posed greater threats to our businesses (including criminal liability), such as record-keeping under 2257 regulations, obscenity issues, etc., that until GAPA there has been no trade organization to have the singular focus of piracy.

Though troubles in the adult entertainment industry have been well-documented, this is one of the first times that major industry players have publicly labeled piracy as part of the problem, instead focusing more on increased competition or other economic factors.

It is yet to be seen how the rest of the industry will respond to the formation of the GAPA, but the GAPA is already taking a different approach when it comes to forming a trade group.

A Different Kind of Organization

Though the GAPA is still in its infancy and is not accepting members, Goldberg stated in an email that it will “be establishing a membership structure to accomodate content
providers on all levels.”

This could, potentially, open the door for sex bloggers and small Webmasters that otherwise might have been shut out of a big industry organization. What those membership levels might be or how they would interact with the GAPA remains to be seen or determined.

However, this is in stark contrast to similar organizations. The RIAA for, example, does not accept individual or associate members. The MPAA is only open to a handful of larger studios.

How this more open admission policy will affect and steer the organization will be an issue to follow as it opens its doors and grows.

Conclusions

Right now, it is too early to tell much about the GAPA and the effect it will have on piracy. According to Goldberg, it is too early to think about potential targets or actions against them, and since membership information is not available, there is no way to determine how large this organization might grow.

Nonetheless, the GAPA will be a group to watch and very easily could become a major news-maker in the near future. More importantly for small Webmasters, their more open admission policy could provide new tools and resources for protecting your own content on the Web.

The fear is that this organization could turn into another RIAA, suing people blindly and turning the public against their cause. Hopefully, since they are just now starting up, they’ve had the time to learn the lessons from the past and will find a better strategy.

The GAPA already has at least some differences from its brethren organizations. Hopefully those differences help it stand out in more ways than one.

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