This place makes me nuts. There are several networks on their platform that have huge numbers of complete videos on them (Manifest, Titan, Colt, Sean Cody, Randy Blue, Blake Mason) and yet they make it damn near impossible to have them removed. Along with very high quality (unlike youtube) there is a handy embed code so the surfer can grab the video and post it where he likes. The network owner even takes the time to put the watermark of this stolen content OVER the watermarks of the producers.
Want to have stolen material removed? Well, dig around for an hour and find a snail mail address, PROVE you own it and pray.
2257? Who needs it?
All of this on top of a “Hurray we are worth $500,000,000 dollars” news release.
Oh, it gets even better! The owner of this network is an affiliate! I demanded he remove it and was told he would try “Sometime next week…Have a good weekend”.
Okay, so can I now cut this guy and cease all payments?
If it’s any consolation, I’ve seen then shut down quite a few sites. I even got a frantic e-mail from one of the site “owners” 'cause he thought what he was doing was legal and yet they were sending lawyers after him. I wasn’t very sympathetic - put it pretty bluntly to him that he needed a good lawyer.
Oh yeah - I’ve even seen stolen videos misattributed. There was some Treasure Island stuff on one of the sites that someone had spliced an intro onto that said it came from somewhere else. NING is horrible in that respect…
I’ve said it before… but these type of sites really are my pet hate. There is too much free stuff available! Ok this one is outright illgal, but its all about the same. Sponsors seem to happily hand out most of their content to Tube sites which in turn contributes to these sites growing.
People dont see any difference, if they upload a video or if a sponsor does. Its all the same and by using and supporting any video sharing site its contributing to educating surfers that they dont have to buy anything!
What kills me is that this stuff was taken from the largest size available in our members area 896x504 and shrunk with a great codec. It looks like a million bucks. At least on a crap tube site they don’t get to see a really great stolen video. These are tight!
“You should be grateful I am helping make your nothing site famous!” I so want to kick this dude’s ass.
I found at least 2 of our scenes on there. I reported them both. The company that host’s it is in California and I am writing my letter now. We will see what we can do about this.
DMCA notice to Ning.com and 3 notices to the site owner advising him to take down the content and the member or loose the entire social network site. Sounds good, maybe it will work.
Funny you should say that. The ning sites I know that was brought down, were brought down by Titan.
When the sites were brought down one of the site owners wrote the following…
[INDENT]Not sure if you are aware, but Titan Media is trying to sue Myself along with 44 other John Does who operate Ning Networks! What they are doing is totally unacceptable and will not be tolerated. I am planning on fighting these allegations to keep our freedoms alive and heard!
My site is a PRIVATE site that I set up for my FRIENDS to Chat…Share and exchange information with one another, nobody is profiting from these sites, they are simply building a community where we all can get together to share our days![/INDENT]
It goes on and on… I contacted him and broke the news that what he was doing was illegal. A few days later he shut up and got a lawyer.
Have no one tried to setup some sort of affiliation of adult sites who can represent all members in cases like this, i mean if people would work together and toghether share the costs of a laywer / laywsuits etc surly it would be both cheaper and easier to deal with these things.
It can take that many to join in such a network for it to make fincial sense and be of benefit to all members.
That social network is now gone. Funny the person who posted my companies stolen content tried to add me as a friend first but now the whole network has been taken down.
From what I’ve seen with other ning sites - that’s pretty typical. I know a blogger who was using their embed codes pretty heavily and then poof - they all disappeared and a lot of his blog posts were all dead…
I had embedded some stuff, but learned my lesson - these days I won’t embed anything from ning and usually steer pretty clear of XTube as well since they’re a bit notorious for going bad as well.
That’s the thing about this site that drives me crazy, sure they’ll pull the video if you’re lucky enough to find it on some blog somewhere but if you know a Ning site has a bunch of your stuff but can’t gain access to the site by the moderator the Ning people will protect it! It’s like having the police chase a criminal from a bank heist carrying bags of stolen money into a building and having the owner of the building saying “you can’t come in here without a warrant, there are no criminals here”.
For those of you who aren’t familiar with Ning, it’s like a cross between MySpace and Yahoo Groups. Ning sites can be a lot of fun for people who use it for the correct purpose, connecting with others who share your interests. They are open to more adult types of clubs than Yahoo is so you’ll find a lot of fetish oriented lifestyle sites here. When the content is user driven (people sending in their own pics and profiles) then it works well. However, the big problem is that they know a lot of Ning sites are just being used to share stolen adult content and they willingly protect these people. That was always the problem with Yahoo groups as well. They put such a burden on the Copyright holders to prove the content is theirs when anyone can upload as much stolen content as they like when it really should go the other way.
I actually wrote to them asking for some sort of Master Password just so I could check their sites for our Pirated content and they basically said to buzz off. Hey, it was worth a try.
[QUOTE=gaydemon;11503]Have no one tried to setup some sort of affiliation of adult sites who can represent all members in cases like this, i mean if people would work together and toghether share the costs of a laywer / laywsuits etc surly it would be both cheaper and easier to deal with these things.
It can take that many to join in such a network for it to make fincial sense and be of benefit to all members.[/QUOTE]
You know, I’m really surprised that someone never tried to do this before. Some lawyer who sets up a site where you can just join as a collective, pay a monthly fee, and have your company info protected. Then that company could spend all the time, effort and resources on sending out DMCA notices and contacting billing companies.
Although I must say, look at how the file sharing sites work. They know full well that they are engaging in illegal activities and do the absolute minimum to fly just under the radar of the law. Sure they’ll pull your links but they’ll take a day or more to do it. There are a lot of script and filters they could use to stop piracy but they don’t because they know they’ll lose traffic and memberships. It’s like they are telling their clients, if I don’t hear it, you’re not in trouble, so be careful. So I wonder if we wouldn’t run into the same issue. If our legal mechagodzilla went after all these different companies, what kind of legal loopdeloops are they going to do to make all this effort worthless?
What would it cost a bunch of us to get together and sue this group? It kills me how the ‘file sharing is illegal’ even shows up in the thumbs for the stolen material in many cases.
