Wammasters:

I was contacted by Leah, and I think she said it better than I could, so I'll quote her:

"We need to find a way to unite and stop this pornhub issue. I just found a video we released a few days ago on pornhub. The producer community needs to find a way to unite and put a stop to it. I have counted over 250 of our Messygirl videos on pornhub. This is way too many and we cannot survive if this continues."

Piracy is here to stay, but that doesn't mean that we have to sit here and do nothing. I don't have the answers, but I'm hoping that we could collect some ideas in this post and explore the technical, legal, and moral possibilities to keep more control over out content ourselves.

For UMD's part, we keep a list of Known Copyright Violating Sites at the bottom the Sales page (linked to the left of your profile). Whenever I get the occasional heads-up from a UMD member, I always put the offending link there for all producers and webmasters to see, and directly contact whatever producers I noticed were being ripped off. I also list links to the DMCA takedown forms for Pornhub and a few other sites.

The two issues I can think of exploring might be 1) their intimidating you from submitting a takedown request by forcing you to give them your real name which they will then post publicly, and 2) the morality of our stores possibly tagging the files with user-identifiable information so that we could try and trace who leaked it (the user would be told).

I think it would be good to bounce some ideas around here. Any suggestions?

Peace,
Messmaster

On Twitter there is a person named PornhubARIA. If you tag her in a post complaining about stolen content and then message her directly she will take it down within a couple days, sometimes within the hour!! I've had a few people flag and tell me about my videos being on Pornhub and Layla Moore is the one who knows this Aria person. So far the removal service has been excellent.

Edit: Just to add, in my experience these take down forms and flagging is useless and they completely ignore it. Having a direct link to someone that works for these companies may be the only way to get them to acknowledge us.

Or that could give new people exploring or curious about Wam the really wrong idea for what we are about Jason!!! Hahahahhaha!

I have no problem getting stuff taken down from pornhub. Fill out the form with the links and your name and its gone within hours, or failing that get ARIA on the case as mypierogative said (not at weekends though)

I also have a username on pornhub and I send 'friendly' friend requests to anyone using stolen content giving them a couple of hours to take the shit down or I'll get pornhub to do it then they risk banning. Many have done as asked, added me as a friend and apologised. I am then informed of anything they upload

if any producers want to give me written permission, the links of any of their videos on pornhub, the original title of the videos plus their websites name and their real name (I have to state who owns the copyright) I can act as an agent to get their stuff removed and will do the donkeywork. I find it very satisfying!

I know the above sounds like a ballache but it's worth it to get stuff removed. I went through getting all the links together for 20 of mine the other day.

Messmaster... I don't think there's any morality issue of tagging files with user identifiable info. I have no idea how that works but it sounds great. It hurts you as well as us if people illegaly share stuff i want only on umd

It's also an issue and a scary thing for models who are happy to be on a niche site, but risk pornhub? nope.. so they just won't shoot at all.

Whatever can be done to prevent it, go for it.

Bodily fluids? Sounds like that rhino had a stomach upset....

More seriously, I'd strongly support some sort of centralised UMDy portal for reporting pirated material. I'm not quite so sure of this idea of putting personalised metadata into files... if it's umd usernames that wouldn't be an issue (except that the only penalty that could reliably be exacted would be banning them from here, in whcih case they'd just re-register under another name) but if it's more than that there'd be a privacy question.

I have also been pretty successful at getting my material removed using the DMCA form on pornhub. When I initially discovered that my clips were up there, it took me a couple of weeks to get about 60 taken down, but now a monthly check seems to cover it as there tend to be between 5-10 new uploads.

By following certain playlists I have managed to keep track of uploads from the most prolific users.

However, despite this I am sure that my work is being shared in many places that I don't know about, and it is depressing. I have certainly observed a downward sales trend over the last 12 months (beyond that I would have expected, as I haven't shot much much material in the last couple of years). I put a large part of that down to both the explosion in available content (generally to be considered a good thing) and the huge increase in illegal sharing of WAM (obviously a bad thing).

Personally, I would love for there to be some kind of WAM producers association (perhaps organised through the UMD), where we could register our details, then we could submit takedown requests on behalf of that group - I certainly see plenty of material from producers I either know, or am at least familiar enough with their work to identify, when I am doing searches for my stuff, but am unsure about whether I should be reporting their videos too - I don't want to make it seem that I claim any ownership of their material.

This may be a stupid question, but anyone who has found their videos shared elsewhere - do you watermark you videos?

Not that watermarking will prevent filesharing, but if a mysterious they posts a video with your watermark, maybe your domain, someone will have seen this video, seen the watermark, and if they are interested, they could visit your site, and accidentally make a purchase.

That's just an idea. If they can find who made the original, they might be willing to unass some money towards.

That might mitigate some effects, turn a total loss into a possible gain, but it still wouldn't solve the underlying problem.

I have come across platforms that specialize in proprietary file types, which means a customer can only play the video with a video player downloaded from the website, but I don't particularly like them. They have hidden fees everywhere.

Yeah lets go with this "2) the morality of our stores possibly tagging the files with user-identifiable information so that we could try and trace who leaked it (the user would be told). "

I'd rather prevent some asshole from publicly posting my content even if it means I lose a few sales.

So the main issue I have with people posting my content is not having it removed, it's the fact that right after removing it the same person will just re-upload it. Sometimes from the same account & sometimes from a different account. A big part of the problem is tube sites don't really care what is stolen content and what isn't. They take no legal responsibility for what their users upload and either way they make money off of any content uploaded.

I think everyone should be watermarking their content but that doesn't stop someone from cropping it out and adding their own watermark. Some asshole on youtube did that to a bunch of my video and was pretending to be a video producer.

We are looking into code embedding which will quickly locate pirated videos, basically installing a fingerprint into the make up of the video's code. This is very much in development but if this does become viable, it could be a possible way of locating pirated content a lot quicker.

And, please everyone, WATERMARK YOUR VIDEOS, and end your videos with something along the lines of: 'To see more of this, go to UMD (or site name), at least at worst you might get some exposure if nothing else!

We did a marathon contact of producers last year and so many videos had no watermark or ident so we couldn't locate them.

We have had success using the Pornhub DCMA forms and also reporting the user,posting on their streams that the content is stolen and who from etc
I think one very practical step and simple step is this:
We,on here agree to back up any UMD Producer who see's our content and does a DCMA.
So if we see's Hot Wam HD's we DCMA Pornhub with us as an appointed agent.
Pornbub then check with Hot Wam HD and they confirm us as an agent.
All we have to do is have a thread here with a list of producers willing to co-operate.
So list would be
Messy Jessie
Hot Wam
My Pierogative
Messygirl
Mostwam
etc etc etc
and if anybody gets a notofication from Pornhub asking if it's ok to remove a scene you just ok.
That is a non technical quick and easy method of removal and saves us all time.
It's just extending what happens on PM with us and other producers like Candy,Rev etc
By the way they never print the real name,just the website name.
I'm open to any technology that assists with this but for a fast result this system will work.
Producers just have to want to be on the list.
Thoughts?

Anyone?

hey everyone i'm CJ (katies friend) and thought i should add something here because youre looking for something that isnt possible

There is no way to stop someone stealing your videos unless you splurge a ton of cash on a digital signature (and even that isnt 100% safe!). One way or another someone like me would be hired to rip the contents of a site for someone else to use/resell/whatever
i can tell you so many adult sites that store the full videos in your browser cache ready to be copied to another location for storage and or viewing even if its paid for content they dont even bother setting a stamp of when the content should expire (FFS its so easy: cacheControlMode="UseExpires" cacheControlMaxAge="1.00:00:00" httpExpires="Thu, 01 Oct 2020 00:00:00 GMT"). one of the popular porn sites store the files as .DAT in your browser cache which anyone from the Win95 era would easily recognise as an AVI file so you just need to rename the extension and bingo you have the video or they stupidly split the file into chunks which when reassembled make the full video file

as an example while i was browsing a website the other day i noticed something funny in the URL and within about 10-15 seconds i could view every single image and the videos would've taken another few seconds to obtain. if i had put this into my (code) and set it running i could have the entire site downloaded in an hour or two. but this was a site with a fully locked down members area with IP and country filters and all sorts of other junk. some of the pics i checked were verification details of members and included personal information like drivers licenses or birth certificates. definitely not something for public viewing. the admin clearly knew what he was doing and security was good so this was just a loophole i found but it shows how easy it is (the admin has been notified of the loophole but not yet fixed and he has 22 days left before i post the info and censored samples on their forums)
so content can be ripped from websites. fact. unavoidable. what else?

the media files themselves?
nope you cant stop theft with anything like metadata as theres no way to lock the text into the file and stop someone else editing it and if you try inserting some code into the actual MP4 file it has to be done in a very specific way and then no one else knows the tag is there unless they look at the file contents
VLC used to be good at showing extended metadata but not so much these days and iTunes do whatever the hell they want and screw the standards

so what do we do? one realistic answer is Streaming as it moves the content off a HTTP(web) server and onto a different type of platform where its just not possible to see the MP4 files unless you can get onto the host itself. and if you can do this dont bother stealing anything just delete everything because it means the host wasnt protected very well and the admin deserves everything that happens thereafter

UMD appears to have a new feature allowing streaming of videos and if katie hadnt jacked it in i would be moving all her stuff over to stream-only. however we also watermarked the videos quite heavily (which i didn't like) but seems to have prevented them being shared around- or our videos were just too crap to steal

Although not foolproof as i've built apps to capture streams and live cams its certainly a lot more ballache getting it stored on your machine mainly due to the time it takes as its usually streamed in realtime. although some streams will allow a buffer theres not many that will send the entire stream to your machine in advance. if you have a sky box for example these use HDCP which was made by Intel and lets face it anything made by them is just a box of bad tricks with a brand name on it that everyone recognises like Adidas or Nike so everyone thinks its fantastic but its not so the signal for scrambling can be made to go away if you know how and then simply pluck the video files off the sky box)
anyone remember how quick the Blu-Ray CSS and AACS encryption was cracked? cost millions to create that did! so they made AACS v2 and in the last few days (25 June 2017) its confirmed as cracked so well done on that score!

so in reality there are just 2 options and neither is guaranteed
1) remortgage your home ten times over to get a digital signature (DRM)
2) move over to streaming data

i prefer option 2 as its free and puts little shits like me in a bad place when tasked with grabbing streamed data - even if its done multithreaded it still takes forever and clogs up a data mining machine or two

Jessies solution of having a maintained list is good but too much manual work involved. it has to be something thats fully automated and checked in a nanosecond.
If the list was controlled by MessMaster for example that could work but is dependent on something at the other side knowing what to check and where to check it.

i'd also like to stress that i gave up my white/black hat several years ago!

Jessie's post, A list of producers who can act as agents for each other is good, it's quite good fun to remove an entire list of stolen media, rather than just your own, very satisfying.

I have been well and truly savaged by file sharing in the past.
Whole site rips on VK.
Honestly it is so disheartening, people really suck.
It was great when I blew that gig though, the Russians were so upset that I killed their groups.

Then I took a different approach.
File sharing was one of the main things that inspired me to launch Mostwam.tv.

I noticed that in most cases it was easier to watch my videos in the places it was being shared, than it was on my own sites.
People were streaming my media and I had to admit, it worked great.
Really easy to watch my content.

So my tactic was:
Create a site for all my content.
Make it easy to navigate and watch.
Make it good value.

Basically by creating Mostwam.tv I was making it so much easier to just pay me for my content than searching all the file share sites.
Why bother going to all that effort, if you can get access to it all anyway at a good price.

It's been amazing, it hasn't stopped people sharing my media.
Streaming also has its flaws, we know this.
But our profits literally tripled when we launched the site and have remained constant.

I still really hate file sharing, but, I can't let them beat me or get me down.

I think in the end I won the war.

Rule 1 of business: Make it easy for people to give you money