It seems implausible, but an anti-piracy service is trying to do just that.

We all do it—we all watch free porn online. And I’m not talking about perusing a trailer before you decide what to buy. I’m talking about going to a piracy-based tube site and consuming (read: stealing) an entire scene.

What’s a piracy-based tube site? Possibly all of them.

Sites like YouPorn, PornHub, XVideos, and xHamster are just hosting content—some of it loaned out from production companies as promotional videos, but the vast majority of it uploaded by users.

“If a site allows user uploads, then 99.9999% of the time those users are going to upload pirated materials,” says Nate Glass, owner and founder of anti-piracy service Takedown Piracy.

A site like PornHub, for example, is not legally responsible for its content, or for the fact that some of it may be pirated. The onus of responsibility for correcting copyright infringement is on the copyright holder. Which costs both time and money, and consequently doesn’t always happen.

Long story short, if you’ve visited a tube site, you’ve viewed pirated material.

But what would happen if all this free stuff just disappeared? What if porn on the Internet was… no longer free?

It may seem laughable, but there’s a program out there working to do just that.

It’s the brainchild of Takedown Piracy (TDP). Since 2009, the service has been working to protect all sorts of copyrighted content, but they specialize in porn. And to date, they’ve removed over 56 million masturbation-opportunities from the Internet.

Recently, Takedown Piracy announced that their Nemesis program, a special digital fingerprinting process that makes it impossible to hide pirated content online, had taken down over 140,000 videos in five months.

I tried to do the math—the number of existing videos plus the number of new videos uploaded daily minus TDP’s ordinary takedown rate times Nemesis’ exponential increase in takedown capability—but it made my head hurt. So I asked TDP’s Glass to explain what it all means.

How likely is it really that we’ll all be paying for our porn someday soon?

“Well, there will always be ‘free porn,’ it’s just going to be that shitty mid-2000s crap that nobody’s ever interested in,” Glass told me. “If people wanna jerk off to that stuff, that’s like the equivalent of the guy who jerked it to the Sears catalog. He was never gonna spend money on porn anyway.”

Some people are ok with free, but you often get what you pay for. And “free” is generally just about as high end as it sounds.

According to Glass, Nemesis is focused on removing premiumtube videos. This particular porn, in conjunction with TDP’s mid-range content takedowns, is of a markedly different caliber than the dregs leftover.

The $64,000 question then, according to Glass, is this: When people can’t get premium content for free on tube sites anymore, will they become paying customers?

“I honestly don’t know,” Glass mused. “I doubt seriously that the kinda person who previously watched Evil Angel videos on [a piracy-based tube site] is going to start dealing with torrent sites, since you have to wait for a download to complete. There isn’t the instant gratification of tube porn with torrents.”

Will people go with convenience and pay for content instead of free-but-time-consuming? “I hope so,” he says. “This is why iTunes is largely successful. Why pirate a song when you can buy it for $0.99 and listen immediately?”

While Glass is working with companies banking on consumers whose boners value higher-end content, a handful of other producers are taking an entirely different approach.

Lee Roy Myers of WoodRocket.com—the purveyors of parody titles like Game of Bones and Doctor Whore—actively gives their content away for free.

“There is a market that now expects to get its porn content for free,” Myers says. “We had to see if there was a way for our company to earn revenue without charging viewers.”

But how? Myers explained that they’ve tried things like product placement, advertising, licensing, merchandising, and viral marketing campaign deals. “We constantly have to work to discover new progressive methods for our content to drive revenues rather than relying on traditional memberships and sales.”

But what do porn consumers think? I went to social media to find out.

I put the call out looking for average dudes to weigh in. I asked: “As more and more pirated high-end porn gets removed from the Internet via takedown services, how will this impact your viewing? Will you be more inclined to pay for porn in order to access higher end stuff, or is ‘good enough’ good enough?”

I received a tidal wave of perspectives. Here’s just a sampling:

Chris (a guy in his 20s from Maryland who’s been watching porn for about seven years)

“Personally, it really won’t affect me at all. Porn is like alcohol. There is high-end, expensive alcohol, and low-end, non-expensive alcohol. But at the end of the day, $1000 bottle of alcohol will get the same amount of drunk as a $10 bottle.  HD porn will activate the same reward centers in your brain as low quality porn will. And if someone is really horny, I don’t think they would care if the porn they’re watching is shot in 1080p or 280p.”

Stiff Nites (a guy who’s soon-to-be 30)

“I think porn is constantly moving and shifting on the Internet. A popular clip may be taken down by a service, but it will always be put back up via a different channel/streaming service. People who enjoy high-end porn know where to find it.”

JM (a 44 year-old male who’s been watching porn online pretty much since it’s been online)

“Overall, it will not greatly impact my online viewing for a number of reasons. First, I’m sympathetic to the anti-piracy campaign and do not visit [piracy based tube sites]. When I do view porn online, it is through a production company’s site directly.”

David (a man in his mid/late 30s who’s been downloading pornographic gifs from the Internet since 1993)

“It probably won’t affect my viewing habits all that much. Back in my day, we were forced to download gifs with 2800 baud modems. (Sometimes I still get an erection when I hear a fax come thru!) So I still feel lucky to have the resources we do. The fact that I can sit down at lunch and watch April O’Neil do her thing on my phone, for free, is a miracle.”

The opinions were all over the place—some were anti-piracy, and some were devil-may-care. It remains to be seen if the anti-piracy movement will succeed in getting high-end porn off the tube sites, but at least for now, the viewers don’t seem all that concerned. Most were downright incredulous about a world where they can’t get a quick porn fix for free.

(no free porn apparently causes you pain, image via Men’s Health)

Reprinted from MensHealth.com (6/24/15)

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