CHATSWORTH, Calif.—The critically acclaimed film Nomadland starring Frances McDormand and a community of real people who spend their lives driving around the country living out of their RVs seems destined to clean up at the Academy Awards. But Nate Glass probably doesn’t need to see the movie. He lived it. And the adult industry is better because he did.
So, what’s the connection between Glass’s nomadic life on the road, and his solution to one of the most important problems facing the adult industry? The story goes like this. He was working in the sales and marketing department for Hush Hush Entertainment, then part of Shane’s World Studios.
“They had this great idea, which was to basically put me on the road to build a list of stores that they could directly market to,” Glass recalls in an interview with AVN.com. “To make sure those stores knew how to order our DVDs, how to display them, and all that stuff. They put me in an RV for three years. I traveled all over the country. And I can unequivocally say it was the worst three years of my life.”
Nonetheless, he met with hundreds of retailers, in small, out of the way shops, eventually building a massive database of adult stores and merchants across America. He learned many things about what the adult business is like out in the heartland, but the one tune the retailers sang over and over again, was a lament for the business they were losing to free online content.
This was in 2007 and 2008, when online piracy of professionally produced, commercial porn was the norm on the internet. And it was also a time when Glass found himself with large amounts of otherwise idle time.
“There wasn’t a lot to do in the RV parks of the world when everyone there was at least twice my age,” he recalls. The constant complaints he heard about free—that is, pirated—online content cutting into retail business not only bothered him, he realized they were directly affecting his bank account. Working partly on a sales commission, every DVD not ordered by a retailer due to its illegal availability on the internet was cash lifted straight out of Glass’s pocket.
And not only Glass himself—he saw friends lose their jobs as companies throughout the industry were forced to downsize due to the lost income from rampant piracy. He began using his many hours sitting around in RV parks to research the problem. He read the Digital Millennium Copyright Act “start to finish.” That’s the 1998 federal law governing how copyright is implemented and enforced on the internet. He also consumed numerous articles about the DMCA.
“I went to people in the industry that I looked up to, and i said, ‘Hey, people are getting our stuff for free, and it doesn’t seem like we’re doing anything about it. Why is that?’” And what he heard was a series of rationalizations for why the industry took no action to enforce its own copyrights—to protect its own most valuable assets.
So he started sending out DMCA “takedown” notices—and they worked. When he saw someone in an online piracy forum calling him out by name for getting content removed from the web, “I knew we were on to something.”
He soon found others in the industry contacting him, asking how much he’d charge to get their own pirated content removed. “That’s when light bulbs started to go off. There’s something here. People are willing to pay for this! Eventually it snowballed to where we had so many people paying my boss to have me do this service for them, that I went to my boss and said, ‘The amount of money people are paying for this service is kind of equivalent to the amount of money I’m making in this job.’”
With that, Glass decided to fulfill his “lifelong dream” of starting his own business, and Takedown Piracy was born. Just over a decade later, his company has been responsible for taking down 130 million pieces of copyright-infringing content. That' represents a stunning success rate of about 90 percent of all takedown notices they have issued.
Where does a relatively small company find the time and energy to find 130 million examples of porn piracy, much less send out notices demanding a takedown for each and every one?
“We’ve made a choice that we’re committed to doing this,” says Reba Rocket, Takedown Piracy’s hardworking Vice President of Marketing and Communications, who joined the company two years ago. “When I tell you we’re passionate about what we do—you know how sometimes you see people who are in the gym morning noon and night because they’re that passionate about weightlifting? We get up in the morning and we go straight to our offices and start working. If we go for a walk, or go to lunch, we’re talking about our work. We truly have a genuine passion for what we do. We love what we do.”
Even working long hours and weekends would not be enough to track every piece of pirated adult content on the internet, however. Takedown Piracy partners with tech firm AV Registry, which provides proprietary digital fingerprinting technology—technology that Takedown Piracy uses to “fingerprint” millions of online videos, and which does not require the cooperation of sites that may be hosting pirated content, such as tube sites and digital storage lockers.
After the fingerprinting process, the company’s software continually scans the web playing what Glass and Rocket call the “match game,” quickly identifying copyright-infringing content by the thousands by matching the database of fingerprints to videos online.
“Piracy is so rampant. It’s all over the world and it doesn’t take days off,” Glass says. “The methods I used to use when I first started this company, of taking a studio and typing the name of their movie into a search bar and seeing what comes up—that worked when I had, like, one client. They won’t work in today’s day and age. You need automation with a human element. You have to be able to go at what I call the speed of piracy.”
As the ongoing COVID pandemic pushed porn performers to take more independent control of their careers, creating original content for clip sites rather than relying only on studio productions, Takedown Piracy has created a service for that sector of the adult marketplace as well. In March, the company launched a new service, ClipSentry, allowing any content creator using a simple drag and drop process, to enter their clips into the database and protect them, with the same level of security as any major studio.
In addition to its core business of enforcing copyrights and combating pirates, Takedown Piracy has also joined the fight against nonconsenual porn, becoming, Rocket says, “a valued asset to some attorneys who very prominently are involved with protecting people from revenge porn or child pornography. We are able to digitally fingerprint that content and find it in a much more rapid manner than these people could do in their offices.”
Glass says that one of his first ideas for using the digital fingerprinting technology was to track down unauthorized postings of private sex tapes and similar content. But he quickly realized that the typical person or people who make their own sex tape aren’t likely to send it to a stranger to be fingerprinted. Nor should they. But working through attorneys has enabled the company to have access to nonconsensually produced or distributed material, with the aim of eliminating it from the internet.
At the same time, their technology has led them to be skeptical of anti-porn crusaders attack sites such as Pornhub for allegedly hosting illegal content. “If they actually cared about chld pornography, we could easily—easily!—find any actual child pornography, or any actual revenge porn if they used our service,” Rocket says. “And for the record, we’re not in the habit of charging for that, because we don’t think victims should be victimized. We offer that pro bono service.”
And yet, despite publicizing the service and expecting an influx of requests for the service from groups leading the charge against illegal content, “What we got was crickets,” Glass says. “So you all don’t want to police just that. You want to cut down legitimate content production using child pornography as your megaphone. I always say, we’ve taken down more porn than any of those groups!”
