Amnesty for Gay-Porn Thieves?
Amnesty for Gay-Porn Thieves?
Gay porn studio and distributor Corbin Fisher has taken an unusual approach to going after people for piracy. The company recently offered people who have illegally downloaded their videos a 14-day grace period to pay a onetime fee of $1,000 and avoid being sued.
That grace period ended on February 8, with the company focusing on people who have downloaded videos through the BitTorrent file-sharing program. Corbin Fisher's general counsel, Marc Randazza, tells The Advocatejust 20 people took the company up on its offer, which included a one-year membership to the websites AmateurCollegeMen.com and AmateurCollegeSex.com.
Now the company is planning to go after some 35,000 people for illegally downloading content through BitTorrent. Those people “will be liable for up to $150,000 in damages for each infringement,” XBiz reports.
Randazza says the company plans to file suit in the next couple of weeks.
The $1,000 offer "got around pretty good," Randazza says. "Most of the Torrent sites and some mainstream media covered it, so I think" people were aware.
Last year Corbin Fisher "won millions of dollars in court judgments ... including a recent $250,000 judgment against a single Torrent user," the company said in a statement last week.
The San Diego–based company is doing some good with the money it rakes in — the company just made a $60,000 donation to Equality Florida. It donated the same amount in 2010.