CZECH REPUBLIC — Imagine this scenario: You are a young man in his early 20s who spends quite a bit of time surfing porn on the Web. When you find something you really like — say, a video featuring a minor European celebrity en flagrant — you download it from the site, rip it, and begin posting links to the resulting file on several popular file-sharing networks.Next thing you know, someone calls you on your home phone telephone, addresses you by name, claims to have your home address, accuses you of copyright infringement, and vows not to let you get away with it. You are so busted.
If the tale sounds far-fetched to you, you haven’t been paying attention. Big Sister Media pulled exactly that trick on an unsuspecting porn pirate earlier this month.
The facts are these, as recounted by Big Sister’s Carlos the Gaucho: After obtaining a signed model release and agreeing to provide him with free sex (as it has done with more than 26,000 people since 2005), Big Sister Media taped Dominik Santholzer having sex with one of the working girls at its Prague brothel. Santholzer later became a contestant on a European version of the reality show Vyvoleni (meaning “desirable,” or “selected”). Big Sister subsequently released the tape at a website dedicated to the now-famous reality star’s Prague sexcapade, and within 24 hours someone began circulating a pirated copy on torrent sites across the Web.
Big Sister was able to get the pirated videos removed from the torrent sites, and in the process, it also discovered the identity of the poster. That’s when things turned sinister for a guy who evidently thought he had gotten away with something pretty spectacular.
“The ironic shit is that his name, if translated, is something like ‘George Bastard,’” Carl Borowitz posted to a popular webmaster forum, along with a picture of the perpetrator.
During his telephone conversation with the people at Big Sister — which the company had the foresight to record — Mr. Bastard admitted his guilt and offered to pay the company if it would agree not to take him to court.
“It was way easy to get his confession,” Borowitz said. “If only this could work all the time.”
Why didn’t Big Sister sue the pirate in court, as a content owner in the U.S. might have done given the identical circumstances?
“The advantage of the U.S. legal system is that actually you can get to a result quite soon,” Borowitz explained. “Here, that is not possible. It could easily take years, so [we] always prefer the out-of-court settlement.”
Big Sister plans to use the miscreant’s reimbursement to fund “proper publicity in media so that this will serve as a role case to make other jerks aware not to fuck with anyone’s copyrighted content,” Carlos said.
