Up till then, hardly anyone had been willing to go after individual BitTorrent pirates. The US Copyright Group's suits had all been on behalf of independent films and small studios. At FUNimation, Stone had some success contacting Internet providers directly and convincing them to suspend repeat BitTorrent offenders, but nobody—least of all an anime producer with a rabid, plugged-in fan base—had been interested in getting a Metallica-like reputation as a band that sued its fans.
"I hate hardly anybody," he says, "but when I think about pirates, I do tend to think about a lot of them as smarmy entitled little brats." BitTorrent infringement is the most egregious sort of piracy out there, Stone says, because it requires that everyone downloading a file also shares it with everyone else. But there weren't many lawyers equipped to fight it.
Danny Fulgencio
When it comes to fighting pirates, all's fair for Denton attorney Evan Stone.
Danny Fulgencio
"I hate hardly anybody, but when I think about pirates, I do tend to think about a lot of them as smarmy entitled little brats."
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"It was a total no-brainer," Stone says, the best possible confluence of geek know-how, entertainment business and pirate-bustin' fervor. "I happen to have the perfect set of skills to do this. And I'm not an expert at anything, but I know a ton of tech shit, and I did all right in law school."
These were uncharted legal waters, though, and Stone needed the right client to get him there—and then it hit him.
"I said, you know what, I know a whole bunch of people whose shit is pirated all the time that don't give a fuck about bad press."
From moving pictures to DVDs, the porn industry had been at the cutting edge of each technological revolution, until this one. On the Internet, pornography was thriving, but you could totally bypass the industry trying to sell it. By 2004 it started to show in the porn studios' bottom lines.
YouPorn and other YouTube knockoff sites made homemade porn incredibly easy to find, while some users uploaded clips from big-studio productions right along with it.
Many studios' answer to the flood of low-quality amateur porn has been to make their products even slicker, driving costs higher to help them stand out—like the $3 million Pirates of the Caribbean porn parody Pirates (2005), the most expensive movie the industry had made up to that point.
BitTorrent, though, undercut that whole effort. Beginning in 2002, BitTorrent made it possible to share huge files like movies, software and big bundles of music, plucking little pieces of each file from computers all over the world. As soon as you download a piece of a file in BitTorrent, you start sharing it with everyone else. Years of estimates by research firms say BitTorrent traffic accounts for around one-third of all traffic on the Internet.
"Between the BitTorrent and the tube sites that contain illegal content, they've put a lot of people out of business, and others have lowered their revenues," says Larry Flynt Productions president Michael Klein. "It's putting a big crimp on the industry. If you don't do anything, you're just gonna watch your business whittle away."
From 2004 to 2009, the porn industry's revenues shrunk an estimated 40 percent. "That's pretty consistent with the downturn we took," says Quentin Boyer, a spokesman for Pink Visual, a porn distributor that's organized a pair of copyright protection retreats for the industry in the last year.
The biggest issue, Boyer says, is that people have the same attitude toward porn that they had to music 10 years ago, when Napster was king and iTunes wasn't around yet: Why not steal? "Can we get the public to think of porn as something that they're willing to pay for again? We'll see," Boyer says.
Each company's been taking a different tack against piracy, Boyer says, and there's still no consensus about how to make the pirates pay. Peer-to-peer piracy, like file sharing over BitTorrent, is worth fighting, he says, but at Pink Visual, the risk of losing their fans probably isn't worth it.
"We need to improve the industry's image," Boyer says. "The truth of it is that if [copyright enforcement] creates a mindset in the user where they're hesitant to download porn for free, that's great. If, on the other hand, it's, 'I always knew you guys were scumbags and now you're shaking me down,' that's bad."
Through his work at FUNimation, Stone knew a guy in Irving who did rights enforcement for the adult industry—he prefers to remain anonymous, Stone says, because he's received several death threats. "I was like, hey, you've been fighting for these studios for years now, doing whatever you can outside of court," Stone recalls. "Are any of your clients interested in taking this up a notch?"
As it turned out, some of them were, and Stone parlayed that connection into work for a handful of porn studios, most notably Larry Flynt Productions—parent company of the Hustler brand. Beginning last July, Stone filed a series of Doe suits in federal court in Dallas, one every couple of weeks, each against hundreds or thousands of defendants at a time. It may have been unconventional, but—even though he hasn't won a single case at trial—Stone is confident it worked.
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