YNOT – On Feb. 6-7, a group of adult entertainment studios gathered in Los Angeles to discuss perhaps the single greatest threat to the future of the adult entertainment business: digital content piracy.

For the second time in five months, adult studio Pink Visual coordinated the Content Protection Retreat, an event that provides attendees with intensive workshops covering a range of piracy-related topics. Including were discussions debunking common misconceptions about the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, the copyright registration process, site-operator litigation, end-user litigation and the subtle legal and technical differences between the various content distribution platforms and mediums favored by pirates.

“I was completely blown away,” said Twistys.com owner Shap. “I’ve never come away from an industry event having learned as much as I did from the retreat. As a company, we’ve spent and continue to spend millions [of dollars] producing content. I was embarrassed how little I knew, how little I spend and how little I do to protect that content.

“I had no idea of the options and tools that are available to content owners to protect their content and monetize it more effectively,” he added. “I can’t emphasize how valuable the content retreat was for us. If all content producers attended the content retreat just once, we’d all benefit.”

CPR2 also gave attendees the opportunity to learn about the Free Speech Coalition’s Anti-Piracy Action Program initiative and provided an in-depth demo of the digital fingerprint filtering technology APAP employs to detect and prevent infringement at the moment of content upload. The software, which is already in use among mainstream site operators and content producers, normally is expensive, but FSC negotiated a deep discount for adult studios that sign on to APAP.

FSC also announced that takedown-and-watermarking service Porn Guardian has been incorporated into the APAP program to focus on cyberlockers and BitTorrent sites.

Content removal services also were well-represented at CPR2. Attendees were afforded the chance to discuss the services offered by Degban, BuyDRM, Take Down Piracy and Media-Protector.

“All of these services have evolved beyond what might come to mind when someone says ‘digital fingerprinting’ or ‘DRM’ or ‘take-down service,’” said Pink Visual President Allison Vivas. “Meeting directly with these companies and litigators really helps studios to craft a comprehensive anti-piracy strategy, because in order to know what’s right for your particular company, you have to reach an understanding of what your options are and how those options can be combined to better protect you and more effectively enforce your copyrights.”

As litigating against content pirates represents one of the primary means for rights-holders to enforce their intellectual property rights, it is no surprise that both the first and second CPRs included presentations by legal experts and attorneys with extensive knowledge of intellectual property law and experience in handling copyright lawsuits. Participating at CPR2 were attorneys from Jenner & Block LLP, a firm with years of experience representing mainstream entertainment rights-holders; One LLP, a Los Angeles-based intellectual property ‘boutique’ firm that has handled cases for both rights-holders and defendants accused of violating copyrights; attorney Gill Sperlein of the Law Offices of D. Gill Sperlein, who also runs the FSC APAP program and has represented Titan Media and other adult studios in copyright litigation; and UCLA law professor Douglas Lichtman, who also serves as an anti-piracy strategist for a number of Fortune 100 companies.

Vivas said more important than the quality of information that was made available to CPR participants is that studios who took part in the events are “actually following through on the action plan they made as a result of attending.

“It’s all well and good to go to a seminar and learn, but if you don’t put that knowledge to work for you, then the education won’t really help you that much,” she said. “Fortunately, we’ve seen that the CPR is producing results, both in the form of participating studios taking action and in the word reaching site operators that the time has come to clean up their act and to be more proactive in doing their part to reduce piracy. At the same time, we’re seeing a lot of action being taken by studios and companies that have not participated in the CPR directly, but who share in the goal of mitigating the impact of content piracy.”

While much of the adult industry’s effort to combat piracy takes place outside the public view, Vivas said proof of the effort can be found in some key metrics that are publicly available. Specifically, Vivas cited the increase in site-operator lawsuits, five additional tube sites committing to fingerprint filtering, and takedown service providers indicating an increase of more than 100 percent in the number of DMCA notices sent, all within the past five months. The FSC APAP program reported it now has more than 40,000 video fingerprints in its database. To date, the program has found 43,000 content matches on tube sites, representing 1.5 billion views of pirated content.

Vivas said she’s encouraged by the signs of progress, but the adult industry has “a long, long way to go where fighting piracy is concerned.”

“As an industry, we’re way behind the curve in terms of our anti-piracy efforts compared to the mainstream entertainment sector,” she said. “The good news is that we’ve built a lot of momentum on the issue, and if we can maintain that momentum and keep the pressure on the pirates, I believe we can eventually push piracy back down to a level where it is an annoyance and a nuisance, but no longer an existential threat for our industry.”