Porn Valley- www.xbiz.com reports on the Piracy Panel which was conducted during Xbiz’s annual Hollywood Conference this week.
Notably, there was a confrontation between Sean Christian of AdultFriendFinder.com and Jason Tucker of Falcon Foto. Tucker was on the panel, and Christian was speaking from the audience.
Xbiz reports thusly:
“…Christian… pointedly asked Tucker to address the issue of companies that advertise on sites that carry copyrighted material, effectively inviting Tucker to voice his criticisms of AFF.
“Tucker responded that while he was not going to engage in ‘AFF-bashing,’ it was his belief that knowingly advertising on sites that carry pirated content was wrong, and he had closed his affiliate program with AFF because he felt the company was putting money in the pockets of content thieves.
“I’m not going to tell anybody how to run their company, or who they can or can’t buy traffic from,” Tucker said. “But I’m not going to do business with people that I believe are supporting piracy, and maybe other people in the industry feel the same way.”
While that exchange of remarks largely remained cordial, some back-and-forth between Christian and Stoddard, and later, Christian and DJ Airek of Shane’s World, took a decidedly harsher tone.
Stoddard asked Christian “How do you sleep at night knowing you’re supporting people who take money out of my pocket?”
Christian’s response was that while he wished that all high-traffic sites respected copyright, the reality is that currently the highest-traffic sites in the space are largely tube and torrent sites, and in order to be competitive, AFF has to advertise where the traffic is.
“If I don’t buy that traffic, my competitor will,” Christian said.
Stoddard dismissed Christian’s explanation as “bullshit” adding that “everybody’s doing it” is not an excuse that he is receptive to.
Christian later asserted that members of the panel, Shane’s World and XBIZ itself were engaging in outright hypocrisy, and referred back to the XBIZ Summer Forum to make his point.
Christian noted that at the XBIZ Summer Forum, “There was a DJ spinning mash-ups at an XBIZ event at the Hard Rock Hotel, and that DJ was an employee of one of the companies on this panel,” insinuating that copyright violations had taken place as a result of the DJ’s performance.
DJ Airek rose from the crowd to directly respond to Christian’s criticism, saying “I’m the guy you’re talking about, and I think you’ve put your foot in your mouth here.”
Airek observed that his entire record collection was purchased legally, that the Hard Rock pays a massive amount of licensing fees to ASCAP (the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers) and BMI (Broadcast Music Incorporated), and that he had not been compensated for his performance at the show.
“Everything about that was 100 percent legal,” Airek said.