Recently, BBC documentary maker Louis Theroux did a follow up to his now classic documentary Porn. The sequal is called Twilight of the Porn Stars, which shows how the internet has destroyed stable incomes of people within the porn industry.
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The original documentary is available on Youtube. This is BBC, so it’s all in a good taste.
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What Louis Theroux unearthed in this documentary not only affects the porn industry, but also the wider digital copyrights and in general intellectual property rights field. The internet has provided us all with the means of production, which has nearly a zero entry cost. Back in June, 5th 2012, the Guardian wrote a brilliant article about Louis Theroux documentary, entitled ‘How the Internet killed Porn‘.
However, intellectual property rights are not dead within the porn industry, they are heatedly contested in courts. The founder of production company GGW Marketing, which is responsible for “Girls Gone Wild”, has been accused of offshore intellectual rights fraud. After, R. Todd Neilson filed an emergency motion requesting access to GGW’s computer files, saying that the founder Joe Francis had fraudulently transferred the bankrupt company’s trademarks to an offshore company he owns. Joe Francis is in general an interesting character, in 2011 he was accused of assault, there is a report by ‘The Young Turks’.
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Mr Francis might seem as a rich bad boy that some girls just absolutely adore. But, the real bad boys in the intellectual property right industry are patent trolls, and porn industry is no exception. A California Federal Judge Otis Wright presided over the firm Prenda Law notorious for its porn-copyright trolling. He called the organisations litigation operation as a fraud that deserved criminal prosecution under federal racketeering laws.
Renumeration for the intellectual property rights royalty, especially in the current digital age has often been mysterious. Kim Dotcom has stated numerous times that the intellectual property rights business model is outdated.
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Speaking of Hollywood, a Universal City Studio and the copyright owner of the best-selling “Fifty Shades” book series asked a California Federal court to bar adult film studio Smash Pictures from marketing and selling pornographic adaptations of the trilogy, claiming that the “cheaply produced” knockoffs are likely to taint public perception of the trilogy and the forthcoming Universal films.
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Even the mighty Hulk Hogan has not escaped the intellectual property rights and porn trouble. The mighty Hogans sex tapes were leaked on the internet, and to add further to the embarrassment Florida appeals court granted Gawker Media LLC an emergency stay of a lower court’s order that the website take down a 1,400-word narrative detailing Hogan’s sex tape. It might only be a text narrative, but still a loss for a wrestling champion.
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