butt pirates

Will Corbin Fisher’s Gay Porn Piracy Crackdown Inevitably Out Gay Teens?

Like movie studios and record companies before them, it’s hard to fault companies like Lucas Entertainment and Corbin Fisher for trying to fight online piracy. Both companies have launched legal battles against Internet users trading their porn flicks on BitTorrent without paying for them. (Corbin Fisher went so far as to offer a two-week amnesty period where users could come forward and pay a one-time $1,000 fee and lose any risk of a lawsuit.) But with lawyers preparing to go fishing for the names belonging to tens of thousands of IP addresses, are these gay smut companies also about to out gay teens? And adults?

With no access to a credit card, teenagers resort to tube sites like XTube and RedTube. Or illegal piracy. Sure, that’s no defense, but it is a reality. Which means when these firms’ lawyers come hunting for people illicitly sharing porn movies, inevitably they will turn up the names and addresses of gay kids still living a closeted life under their parents’ roof. Except those kids won’t be the ones getting served with a lawsuit; their parents, who pay for the Internet connection, will. Which means mom and dad are going to have one very awkward, possibly violent conversation with their youngsters. (NB: Closeted gay adults could also be outed by these lawsuits, of course, for they too might not want sketchy merchants showing up on their credit card statements.)

Meanwhile Corbin Fisher, which last month claims to have secured a possibly record-setting $250k settlement from a single defendant, couldn’t possibly expect a gay teen to have $1,000 in cash to apply for the company’s amnesty program, which already wrapped up three days ago.

So a reasonable business decision (to crack down on file sharers) will also, unarguably, have the effect of persecuting the very members of the LGBT community these businesses serve. This isn’t gonna go well.

[photo via CorbinFisher.com]

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