In 2006, Colette Pelissier was selling houses in Southern California, and her boyfriend, Brigham Field, was working as a photographer of nude models. Colette wanted to leave the real-estate business, so she convinced her boyfriend to start making adult films. “I had this idea, when the real-estate market was cooling—you know, maybe we could make beautiful erotic movies,” she said.
By 2009, they had started shooting adult films in places like Madrid and Prague, and launched a Web site, X-art.com. The site promises erotica featuring “gorgeous fashion models” from “the USA, Europe, South America and Beyond.” For forty dollars a month, subscribers have unlimited access to a growing collection of short films. The site attracted a few hundred subscribers in its first year, then a couple thousand the next; it became profitable by 2010. The couple married in 2011; Pelissier changed her last name to Pelissier Field. That year, she noticed a change at X-art.com: the number of subscribers—the site had about fifty thousand by then—had stopped growing. The Fields hired an outside company to investigate whether people were watching their films without paying. They concluded that, each month, three hundred thousand people were watching pirated versions of their movies—including eighty thousand in the U.S. “We felt like we had to do something,” she said. “I don’t want to wake up in five years and have everything be free.”
Adult-film companies are not the only ones that face piracy made possible by Internet file-sharing, and the Fields weren’t the first to consider legal action. In 2003, the Recording Industry Association of America started suing thousands of people suspected of illegally sharing music, stopping only after piracy declined and legitimate sales rose. In a lawsuit in 2011, the production company Voltage Pictures accused about twenty-five thousand defendants of stealing its movie “The Hurt Locker”; after announcing that it had reached a series of settlements with accused thieves, it dropped the vast majority of cases.
A handful of adult-film companies had also filed copyright-infringement lawsuits against suspected online thieves, and the Fields decided to try it themselves. To identify thieves, the Fields hired outside computer investigators who tracked I.P. addresses where their movies were being illicitly shared via BitTorrent, a file-sharing program. (Using BitTorrent is different from visiting a video-streaming site like YouTube. A BitTorrent user not only downloads a movie but his or her computer automatically uploads a tiny piece of that movie for other file sharers—a process that makes BitTorrent users who view pirated movies liable for copyright infringement.) In February, 2012, the Fields filed their first suits against suspected pirates.
By 2013, subscriptions had declined to below fifty thousand. The Fields ramped up their annual production budget to around two million dollars, hoping to lure more subscribers with fresher material. They started to post new films on X-art.com nearly every day. Their investment in high-quality production paid off when “Farewell”—a narrative-driven film about two lovers on the run in the California desert —attracted a glowing review: Adam Baidawi wrote in British GQ that year that “the mom-and-pop American start-up has grown into a global production team,” making “perhaps the world’s most sophisticated cinema erotica.” In 2013, the Fields purchased a sixteen-million-dollar coastal mansion in Malibu. Having found a niche in the crowded world of online pornography, X-art.com still had tens of thousands of fans shelling out money for its movies. Quietly, the Fields were also making some extra money in another way: by becoming the biggest filer of copyright-infringement lawsuits in the nation. In the past year, their company Malibu Media LLC has filed more than thirteen hundred copyright-infringement lawsuits—more of these cases than anyone else, accounting for a third of all U.S. copyright litigation during that time, according to the federal-litigation database Pacer—against people that they accuse of stealing their films on the Internet.
Today, they average more than three suits a day, and defendants have included elderly women, a former lieutenant governor, and countless others. “Please be advised that I am ninety years old and have no idea how to download anything,” one defendant wrote in a letter, filed in a Florida court. Nearly every case settles on confidential terms, according to a review of dozens of court records. Malibu Media’s attorney, Keith Lipscomb, said that most defendants settle by paying between about two thousand and thirty thousand dollars. The income earned by all the suits represents less than five per cent of Malibu Media’s profits, Lipscomb said.
By 2009, they had started shooting adult films in places like Madrid and Prague, and launched a Web site, X-art.com. The site promises erotica featuring “gorgeous fashion models” from “the USA, Europe, South America and Beyond.” For forty dollars a month, subscribers have unlimited access to a growing collection of short films. The site attracted a few hundred subscribers in its first year, then a couple thousand the next; it became profitable by 2010. The couple married in 2011; Pelissier changed her last name to Pelissier Field. That year, she noticed a change at X-art.com: the number of subscribers—the site had about fifty thousand by then—had stopped growing. The Fields hired an outside company to investigate whether people were watching their films without paying. They concluded that, each month, three hundred thousand people were watching pirated versions of their movies—including eighty thousand in the U.S. “We felt like we had to do something,” she said. “I don’t want to wake up in five years and have everything be free.”Adult-film companies are not the only ones that face piracy made possible by Internet file-sharing, and the Fields weren’t the first to consider legal action. In 2003, the Recording Industry Association of America started suing thousands of people suspected of illegally sharing music, stopping only after piracy declined and legitimate sales rose. In a lawsuit in 2011, the production company Voltage Pictures accused about twenty-five thousand defendants of stealing its movie “The Hurt Locker”; after announcing that it had reached a series of settlements with accused thieves, it dropped the vast majority of cases.
A handful of adult-film companies had also filed copyright-infringement lawsuits against suspected online thieves, and the Fields decided to try it themselves. To identify thieves, the Fields hired outside computer investigators who tracked I.P. addresses where their movies were being illicitly shared via BitTorrent, a file-sharing program. (Using BitTorrent is different from visiting a video-streaming site like YouTube. A BitTorrent user not only downloads a movie but his or her computer automatically uploads a tiny piece of that movie for other file sharers—a process that makes BitTorrent users who view pirated movies liable for copyright infringement.) In February, 2012, the Fields filed their first suits against suspected pirates.
By 2013, subscriptions had declined to below fifty thousand. The Fields ramped up their annual production budget to around two million dollars, hoping to lure more subscribers with fresher material. They started to post new films on X-art.com nearly every day. Their investment in high-quality production paid off when “Farewell”—a narrative-driven film about two lovers on the run in the California desert —attracted a glowing review: Adam Baidawi wrote in British GQ that year that “the mom-and-pop American start-up has grown into a global production team,” making “perhaps the world’s most sophisticated cinema erotica.” In 2013, the Fields purchased a sixteen-million-dollar coastal mansion in Malibu. Having found a niche in the crowded world of online pornography, X-art.com still had tens of thousands of fans shelling out money for its movies. Quietly, the Fields were also making some extra money in another way: by becoming the biggest filer of copyright-infringement lawsuits in the nation. In the past year, their company Malibu Media LLC has filed more than thirteen hundred copyright-infringement lawsuits—more of these cases than anyone else, accounting for a third of all U.S. copyright litigation during that time, according to the federal-litigation database Pacer—against people that they accuse of stealing their films on the Internet.
Today, they average more than three suits a day, and defendants have included elderly women, a former lieutenant governor, and countless others. “Please be advised that I am ninety years old and have no idea how to download anything,” one defendant wrote in a letter, filed in a Florida court. Nearly every case settles on confidential terms, according to a review of dozens of court records. Malibu Media’s attorney, Keith Lipscomb, said that most defendants settle by paying between about two thousand and thirty thousand dollars. The income earned by all the suits represents less than five per cent of Malibu Media’s profits, Lipscomb said.
by Gabe Friedman, New Yorker | Read more:
Image: X-Art
