News Lawyer

It had to happen sooner or later, but the ease of content distribution has impacted the pornography industry.

Pornographic movies are presumably easy to produce and write, so the porno industry is now being hit from both ends – battling a growing army of free content providers while simultaneously fending off the standard piracy threat so pervasive with other forms of online content.  Presumably, consumers of smut will want to pay for “quality” branding as a means of wading through unappealing amateur content.  If porn actors are like rock stars, the branding could include live appearances or, more likely, increased emphasis on endorsements for the stars.  In this case (as is the case in music labels and newspapers), it is the middle-man in the content production chain who faces the most pressure from internet market forces.

(Hat Tip: Drudge)

From Wired.com, a story about a blacklisted Russian hosting firm with alleged criminal ties threatening a lawsuit to be removed from the blacklist. In the past, organizations like Spamhaus would place companies who spammed and engaged in other disagreeable activity on a blacklist. Online service providers rely on these blacklists to help configure their spam filters, which then weed out e-mails that contain IP addresses of blacklisted companies. Unfortunately, these companies would then quickly find another IP address and begin their activities anew. Blacklist organizations quickly tired of this “whack-a-mole” game. Now, blacklist organizations will collect the IP addresses of hosting firms who don’t do enough to police their networks from spammers, and blacklist the entire hosting firm, which could hurt the innocent. With marketing e-mails caught in spam filters rather than proceeding to inboxes, placement on any blacklist is thus a big deal to both the marketers and their hosts. MAPS, a predecessor of Spamhaus, got into trouble for allegedly abusing this power. Russia apparently has a different way of dealing with spam.