Grooby Legal Action against Piracy ...

[GroobySteven]

I concede that I have in the past "stolen" content from Grooby, however this in turn did lead to me subscribing to yum and other sites which i do on rotation each few months as waiting for the best content to hit the net is just not worth it. I'd never however use bittorrent as it's just a horrible horrible way to get content.

I traditionally have a quick look on usenet, see if certain models have sets, and if so, go to the site and download the full set and any associated video's and previous sets.

I realise my actions are rare, but I wanted to let it be known that while I have stolen before, I have repeatedly paid for the content I liked.

More than happy to confirm usernames with steve if required to back up my claims.

As long as there is usenet, theft will continue and there aint anything that can be done about it. However I will continue to pay for any content I am interested in using the same model I have done before.

We have a fail safe for situations like this. IF you did get an intention to sue, it would have a specific note for members. I don't want to get into the specifics of the notice but we have thought of this.
You lost the beard? Looks good.

[Niccolo]

No.

Technically yes, everyone is a potential customer, but you're wrong if you think that 1 x Pirate Download = 1 x Potential Customer Getting Product Free = 1 x Loss Of Paying Customer.

Have you ever downloaded pirated porn sets from anywhere? As a delivery method it absolutely sucks! Trying to find anything relevant is difficult and disjointed, there's no real way of knowing what you're getting or previewing content to see if it's what you actually want, you have to hunt around numerous different sites and it's actually pretty hit and miss as to whether you get anything you were actually looking for. Throw in the shemale niche and relying on pirated content is hugely frustrating and pretty useless.

They isn't some bunch of secret pirate sites with a full catalogue of every photo set ever taken, ready to browse and download at your convenience. In fact a quick visit to ThePirateBay, arguably the largest torrent site on the internet, and a search for 'shemale' brings up a massive, industry bankrupting 9 pirated files:



The stark fact of the matter is, if someone wants shemale porn they're going to subscribe to a paysite, if they're able to. It's far easier, and actually worth the subscription fees (well maybe not ALL sites are worth the subscription fees but whatever).

Downloading a pirated file simply does not equate to a loss of revenue.

(Hypothetical explantion - Not actually my actions!)
If there was a file there called "Shania TitsMcCock - Latest Set!" I'd probably download it and have a look. But that doesn't mean Shania has lost out on a customer. If I had to pay for the file I wouldn't download it, not because I expect things for free but because I'm just not interested in her enough to pay.
(/Hypothetical explantion - Not actually my actions!)

If someone is able to pay for a product they will, they're your real potential customers and will only be convinced of paying for products by the quality of the product and their personal desire for it.

Someone downloading a pirate file is not a lost sale.

Want proof of this? I kept seeing photos of a fetish model around the net and really liked her. I wanted to see more and had a look on torrent sites to see if there was anything available. I found one or two sets, thought she was amazing and decided that I'd go and subscribe to her site.

http://www.themoshroom.com

The fact that there were pirated files of her sets available didn't stop me from subscribing to her site, in fact they actively encouraged me to find, visit and consequently give her money every month. (Should I be prosecuted for piracy after downloading her sets?)

Absolutely. I made this argument too. If I hear a song on the radio, which is free, and I like it, then I'll shoot along to Amazon and download it; usually I'll get the whole album. But if I hadn't heard that song on the radio, and didn't even know that it had been recorded, then I wouldn't have bought that album on Amazon. By analogy then, I argue that it's simply not true to say that one free viewing of a porn scene on the internet equates inevitably to one lost subscription fee from the website that originally filmed the scene. Record companies and artists both want their product to be on radio playlists, because they know that this leads to an increase in revenue, since people are actually more likely to buy a new album (i.e. spend money on their product) after hearing a track from the album on the radio (which is free). I suggest that it's the same, at least to some extent, with tranny porn.

[SunshyneMonroe]

Ya, wanna go grab a bite to eat?

Sure where u wanna go?

[deepthroater]

This is going to be a bit messy, replying to replies of quotes, argh. The boards quote function couldn't cope so I just copied everything unformatted to a text editor.

Originally Posted by deepthroater
What damage exactly? If someone downloads one of your sets it does not mean you have lost money. If 2000 people download your photos it does not mean you have lost the income from 2000 potential subscribers. A download does not equal a lost sale!

DF: Are we talking about legal download or braking and entering here?

I'm talking about individuals and pirated downloads from P2P/Usenet etc.

Originally Posted by deepthroater
In the vast majority of cases you won't have lost any money at all, in fact you'll have attracted many more potential subscribers, as long as your content is of sufficient quality or fills a missing niche.

DF: Not true, saturation makes something undesirable.

Where is the saturation? You're acting as if every photo & movie you've ever been in has been stolen, neatly organised and conveniently placed in a folder by a villainous group of pirates and passed around everyone on the internet with the ease of one-click-sharing. That's just not happening, my whole point is that there's so little tgirl porn (I'm still grouping you in with tgirl stuff, idk why I'm worried that might offend you. If it does then soz, not intentional) available from filesharing piracy that it simply isn't a viable alternative to legally subscribing to pay sites.

People don't download a torrent with a couple video clips and a couple photo sets from a site and think, "Woohoo! I was going to pay to join that site, but why bother when I can see 0.5% on here for free?!". If someone is willing to subscribe to a site then they'll subscribe, so they can have 100% of the sites content. If they're not willing or able to subscribe then they're not going to subscribe, the fact that they looked at some of your content that was pirated isn't anywhere close to being what influenced them to not pay you for a subscription and you can't assume that a pirated download is a loss of a subscription. So, some people subscribe and some don't, either way it's not influenced by filesharing piracy. And if filesharing piracy isn't affecting subscriptions, which it's not, then you're not losing money and you're not losing potential money.


Originally Posted by deepthroater View Post
I'd actually suggest you experiment and shoot a set that you'll solely release on P2P via torrent sites. Release it (anonymously) and I gaurantee you'll see an increase in site visitors and completed subscribers. Go a stage further and do some A/B testing, using a different url watermark on the photos so you can track visitors coming directly from typing in the url they see.


DF: We already do that - it's called affiliate pages. we release tons of free content so to lure people in. Surely we are not expected to do this for free??? LOL Ridiculous argument.

Oh yeah, affiliate pages and ads, the utter bowels of the internet. So you're happy to give away not just content but actual cold hard cash to affiliates introducing people to your work. Yet if someone is introduced to your work for free, meaning that affiliate commission stays in your account, you're aghast and want them sued for stealing from you. I'm pretty sure grooby has inadvertently and unknowingly made more money from people being introduced to their content via filesharing who later convert to paying subscribers once their circumstances change, than they've lost via "filesharing copyright theft".

If you're actually getting significant new subscribers completing the sign-up from an affiliate landing page then stop and ask yourself why? All the affiliate does is distribute and publicize your content, he doesn't make it better or enhance the product in any way. He's literally just showing your content to people, people who without doubt are actively looking for your niche anyway and in doing so are highly likely to convert into paying subscribers. The affiliate just manages to get to them first, either making them think his landing page is actually your site, or just direct linking straight to your own landing page, either way it's your content that convinces people to subscribe, not any affiliate hoodoo (no matter what they say!). People who want to subscribe will subscribe!

So yeah, why not skip paying a few affiliates their referral and distribute material yourself. Seriously, try it. Shoot a model or a set, don't put it on the site, don't give it to affiliates, upload it as a torrent with a specific url watermark that you can trace as solely originating from that set.

Anyway, quite apart from all that crap: You're not seeing this properly. Piracy is never going away, in fact it's the new digital delivery model. Not so much the piracy/theft aspect of it, but the consumers sharing with/to consumers, without restriction and without the need for distribution and management by companies or agencies. Want to understand what that means to you? Probably at least a 90% reduction in your hosting and bandwidth fees.

Piracy isn't costing you money, stop saying it is. If it's not costing you money then it's not a negative, start looking at how to use it as a tool. You're never going to 'beat' piracy as it stands in this moment.


Originally Posted by deepthroater View Post
I'm not being greedy at all. I'm not trying to make money from anyone here under the guise of combating piracy. I subscribe to pay sites.

DF: That is all we want. People to pay for fair use. Just because one is hiding behind a computer screen doesn't make it legal or right.

Listen I'm not trying to say filesharing copy protected content is right or legal. I'm not saying that at all. It's illegal by the definition of the law and I'm not arguing against that. What I am trying really hard to say is all this talk like "piracy is costing me money" etc etc is complete rubbish. It's not costing you money at all. (and by piracy I mean the individual filesharers targeted by this proposed lawsuit, not clone sites or tube sites that are run for profit and making their own money from your content. But as none of those sites seem to be related in any way to this case I think that whole aspect is irrelevant)

Originally Posted by deepthroater View Post
All I'm trying to explain is that if you want to combat piracy, great. If you want to root out the causes of piracy and act on the torrent sharing sites then that is admirable. Extorting money out of people is wrong.

DF: That is not what is going to happen. First they will send a letter, a warning for say. If you continue to do it... well... there are consequences to being a scum!

No actually that's exactly what's going to happen. No warning letter, no "Hey, stop that!". Just straight in with the lawsuit as soon as they get the details from the ISP. Why? Because it's not about stopping piracy, it's just about making money.

Originally Posted by deepthroater View Post
You have to get out of the mindset that just because someone downloaded something it means you've lost money. Whether the file was there or not, if they wanted to subscribe they would have.

DF: THAT IS NOT WHAT WE ARE SAYING ! GET IT THROUGH YOUR THICK HEAD!

No that's exactly what you're saying. You're harping on about money, getting paid for your content etc etc You're saying that these filesharers owe you money because they effectively withheld giving you their custom, therefore you lost money. Your whole argument is that you've lost money because if they hadn't downloaded the pirated content they'd be subscribing to your site and paying you money to see that same content. So yeah, that's exactly what you're saying(Also, on a side note, I don't think my head is particularly thick actually, certainly no more than average. But I do have a thick co.....never mind, probably not the best time to bring that up)

DF: I need to get payed, I need to get through school! In other words, there are girls who do this because they have no other choice, or feel as if they have no other choice.

Yes, everyone wants more money. But you're literally demanding cash by creating an entitlement to something that never existed and is intangible. You can't suddenly decide to demand payment from someone on the basis that they took away the potential possibility of choosing to subscribe to your site at some time in the future. It's ridiculous. Once again and for the last time, yes what they did was wrong, yes it's illegal but NO you haven't lost any money because of them and they certainly shouldn't be sued for whatever the inevitably ridiculous amount will be. Everyone is freaking out about piracy as if it's killing people, leaving photographers and trannys starving in the streets.

DF: You like porn right? You like to pleasure yourself? Then pay for it and we can continue to produce it - if you don't - you won't get any!

Srsly, I subscribe to pay sites.

[Trans-Promo]

Absolutely. I made this argument too. If I hear a song on the radio, which is free, and I like it, then I'll shoot along to Amazon and download it; usually I'll get the whole album while I'm at it.

If I hadn't heard that song, for free, and didn't even know that it had been recorded, then I wouldn't have made that purchase on Amazon.

By analogy, I argue that it's not true to say that one free viewing of a porn scene on the internet equates to one lost subscription fee from the website that originally filmed the scene. Record companies and artists both want their product to be on radio playlists, because they know that this leads to an increase in revenue, since people are actually more likely to buy a new album after hearing a track from it (for free) on the radio. Same with Tgirl porn.

When you hear a song in the radio you don't know when you will hear it again, you buy the song so you can hear it when you want it, at your discretion. Radio stations don't give you the time they will play it and usually unless you are a big station, have to pay royalties to the artist because radio stations unlike News Stations make money off their advertisements and endorsements.

When you see a free scene on the internet there is an address you can go to whenever you want to view it and get off.

I used to have a cock, don't need but one minute of something looped to get off.

You guys are never satisfied, do you read what you say? What is said in the web boards? You complain about small things like pubic hair and if a girl's boob is slightly misshaped.

We give you an arm and you want a leg, we give you the leg and you want a foot. Do you not see this at all, anyone else see this beside me?

In any case, there is a handful of you that are arguing this. But the rest of you could care less, you just pay for your stuff, jack off to it and go on about your day, so it isn't to my surprise that you are complaining about someone protecting his rights.

[Trans-Promo]

This is going to be a bit messy...

It's like talking to a brick wall

[GroobySteven]

I'll quickly answer some of your points as I'm not going to get drawn into the rights/wrongs too much. Basically, you are right, my attitude is that you steal (by choice) then you are a target. Whether these individuals would have became members/buyers if there wasn't stolen content sites, we'll never know - but they made that choice. Adult website sales (not just ours) have grown stagnant or dropped when tube sites and file sharing sites became rampant and worse so, when people could make money by stealing and posting our content - nobody is arguing on these facts, the same as the record industry has dropped because of the same issues.

Those were just a number of recent files we selected, every week our whole sites updates are ripped off and stolen - so it's not just a small sampling of our catalogue.

We're going after bit torrent users in this initiative. Tube sites are protected by the DMCA safe harbour and we personally, don't have the capital to begin those sorts of legal cases yet, unless we can prove the owners upload that content.

Going on with the famer and his apples analogy; You're making mistakes by assuming a few things:

1. That everyone can get to every apple on every tree for free. In reality they can only grab the odd few apples that hang out over the wall.

Not when people have removed the walls and the gates and give access to all the apples for $1.

2. That everyone wants to buy your apples. Just because they take them for free does not mean they'd be willing to buy them. Suddenly find a way to force them to pay for every apple they take and they'll just walk down the road to were apples grow at the side of the road for free and take whatever they want. Your apples don't get stolen anymore, but you don't sell anymore than you did before either.

There are no more of this type of apple. You can walk down the avenue and get a different apple but I've created these apples. You can choose to walk away and get different ones for free, or buy my specific apples. Whether they're willing to buy them or not is irrelevant.

3. That people who managed to get a couple of apples for free one day didn't get a taste for your particularly juicy breed of apples and want more. They liked those apples so much that they couldn't stand only getting the ones that dropped over the wall, so they keep coming back to you to buy more apples.

Anybody who comes to my front gate or to my friends stores in town, can get free apples which I give out from each season and each tree. I have to regulate how many apples I give out but more than enough to enjoy a good taste. I have free apples at http://www.tgirls.com and on this site.

4. You think that people aren't buying your apples at market because they've taken enough from the overhanging branches and don't want more of the same. Actually they never managed to get many apples themselves at all. Instead another farmer keeps walking into your orchard, takes as many apples as he wants sets up a stall right next to yours and gives those apples away for free in wrappers with adverts on. He gets paid everytime someone opens a wrapper to eat an apple. You see this and do nothing about it becuase he's bigger than you and has a gun. As soon as someone unwraps the apple you accuse them of stealing money AND apples from you. You threaten to take them to court unless they pay for a years worth of apples.

Ah, but that farmer has a sign up which says, these are farmer Steven's stolen apples but I don't care because I have a gun. You can have them for free but you do know, that they are stolen.
So fuck those people - they took their choice. It is no different from buying a stolen car from a thief, you are enabling that thief.

That's great and actually pretty straight-up of you. So every model featured in any of the content listed in Exhibit A will be getting a fresh cheque. Girls start looking for new shoes, those settlements are normally outrageously large!

That's not what I said. Anyone who is a partner in those sites where we are suing on, will get their split from any revenues. The settlements we're asking for are fairly small, in comparison.

This is the last time I'll answer your questions as I'm not here to debate the issue and I've been pretty open about it all.

[BellaBellucci]

I almost shuddered when people started responding to her posting, and did shudder when the OP finally came on. This could go on for days now, she is nuts.

Blah, blah, blah. You're as crazy and biased against me as Nicole, and you waited until the OP came on to talk, so now you're also a coward.

... and then I read this which pretty much seals it for me:

I think what's really sad is that so many people gave her a chance, and in one way or another she's burned each bridge. Generally, I don't like seeing people get the ban hammer, but she's proven herself to be treacherous at each and every opportunity. Much like "Michelle Sabrina" being doted on by HD's original mods, I think permitting her to stay here and behave this way is a form of enabling a sociopath.

Everyone has a right to their opinion, but people should also consider the source of their 'information.' I've been 'permitted' to stay here because my opinion is as valid as anyone elses. You just don't like it. Well boo hoo for you.

along with the idiotic and ill-formed that you've came to expect from HA ... with the ramblings of a lonely lunatic thrown in.

Ditto. I'm a lunatic? You're the one that does a lousy job with first time models and then blames them when the shoots turn out bad. In my case, you even accused me of 'heavily' photoshopping which everyone knows I don't do. Then you banned me on HD, not because I broke the rules, but because you don't like things I've said. Well, that feeling's obviously mutual. You're a sorry, sorry man with an ego the size of Texas and a bully complex. Who can believe a word you say?

From HD? I did, I've no reason to give a forum or a soapbox to someone who owns sites in which she spreads her mad theories and so-called propaganda against me or my company. She's completely irrelevant and it's sad to see a handful of people buy into her, compared to the majority who just see her as the sad clown she is. She's entitled to her freedom of speech but I'm not going to help her with that.

A handful of people? You mean anyone you can't buy off? That's actually a pretty large group and growing everyday. Frankly I think it's funny how much time and money you throw at maintaining your dominance because you obviously know how fragile it is. Enjoy going broke to defend your 'empire.' Apparently you learned nothing from the politics of the Iraq War because you're making the same mistake. More power to you.

~BB~

[BellaBellucci]

Nothing wrong with your way of thinking - we just have different opinions that is all.

The most enlightened comment yet. Thank you Danielle. I agree.

~BB~

[Trans-Promo]

" But you're literally demanding cash by creating an entitlement to something that never existed and is intangible."

§ 101. Definitions2 http://www.copyright.gov/title17/92chap1.html#101

(a) Copyright protection subsists, in accordance with this title, in original works of authorship fixed in any tangible medium of expression, now known or later developed, from which they can be perceived, reproduced, or otherwise communicated, either directly or with the aid of a machine or device. Works of authorship include the following categories:

(1) literary works;

(2) musical works, including any accompanying words;

(3) dramatic works, including any accompanying music;

(4) pantomimes and choreographic works;

(5) pictorial, graphic, and sculptural works;

(6) motion pictures and other audiovisual works;

(7) sound recordings; and

( 8 ) architectural works.