NEW YORK—Senior Correspondent Charlie Gasparino is an entertaining and often enlightened presence on the Fox Business Network, but watching him try to make sense out of Manwin and online porn over the past few days has been kind of like watching a moth circle a flame. Seemingly obsessed with the story, Gasparino’s undeveloped knowledge of the subject threatened at any moment to engulf him. But it never did, and in a sense it doesn’t matter what he's gotten wrong. The fact that FBN has as of Monday produced two lengthy video segments on the subject of Manwin, porn, piracy and its intersection with Wall Street, with more surely to come, is news enough. The train has left the station.
Friday, in his initial stab at the story, Gasparino essentially broke for the mainstream what he referred to as “actually a serious story.”
Tipped to it by market insiders who thought he would be interested in Wall Street’s financial support of Manwin, Gasparino attempted a boilerplate description of the company’s business model, explaining, “Fabian Thylmann’s Manwin Enterprises, a huge porn conglomerate—he’s like the new Larry Flynt, this guy, there’s lot [that’s] been written about him, New York Magazine—what’s interesting and controversial about this guy is not only does he offer the sort of pay-for-porn stuff, but he also does this stuff that’s known as pirating. They create these hubs, like a YouTube of porn, and he takes stuff—some would say steals stuff that’s copyrighted—from Hustler and other places—and you can watch it for free. He sells advertising with it. It’s extremely controversial in the porn industry. His company, Manwin, apparently makes a lot of money.”
The Wall Street connection came next. “What’s fascinating is that Wall Street is involved with this company. Here’s what we know; we have lots of calls out today, and these aren’t minor players. A company called Colbeck Capital, founded by two former Goldman Sachs executives…they came in with $167 million in financing in the last year for Manwin. Then, the loan got syndicated out, where companies like Fortress Investments bought a piece of this. So Wall Street is clearly involved…and that’s what we have right now. Wall Street involved in this Manwin Enterprises, which like I said is really interesting not just because they do porn, but it’s the pirated aspect of porn.”
The conversation between Gasparino and the two anchors overseeing the segment devolved from there, with Gasparino not quite up to speed on current trends in copyright enforcement, arguing that “the Justice Department, or the authorities that generally look at pirated stuff, generally do not crack down on this stuff; there is no enforcement of the copyright laws when it comes to porn because it is porn. So that’s what we have right now. If there ever is a crackdown, companies like Manwin would have a problem, and companies that finance Manwin—Colbeck and Fortress to some extent—I can tell you, I talked to some people at Fortress. They said they bought a piece of the syndicated loan, and sold it.”
Buttoning his first video segment on Manwin and Wall Street, Gasparino repeated the story’s money shot: “I am not passing judgment on [porn]. It is the stealing of it that’s kind of interesting here.”
Over the weekend, Gasparino tweeted a few updates on the story, saying that Manwin had confirmed the Wall Street connection and that Colbeck had NOT denied it. Monday, after apparently being “bombarded” throughout the weekend with tweets and emails from people, he once again took to the airwaves for another crack at explaining what exactly is going on.
"Manwin might be the most controversial company in the pornography industry," he began. "How did I get involved in this? Well, a Wall Street trader told me about this, told me about how Wall Street firms are funding Manwin’s operations…the problem with I think Manwin is that they have been cited for pirating porn. They operate something called YouPorn, these sort of aggregator sites that allegedly pirate quote, unquote legitimate content from other users and get it on their sites illegally. At least that’s the charge.
“We should point out," he continued, "that Manwin called Fox News last week after we did our story denying that they do anything illegal, saying that what they use they’ve gotten through fair and honest and licensed agreements.”
Gasparino then said he spoke with Mike South over the weekend, adding, “Mike tells me that it’s not necessarily that [Manwin] just steal it. They steal some of it, and then you complain about it, and because it’s hard to police this sort of stuff they kind of force the end user to agree to some sort of cheapo licensing term. So they kind of force the players to deal with them and essentially lend their videos at a cut rate fee.”
He then stated, “I will tell you this. Anyway you put it, this Fabian Thylmann is the head of Manwin. Apparently he’s under house arrest right now for tax evasion. This is a very controversial company.”
Halfway though his four and a half minute segment, Gasparino spent the remaining time once again explaining why the story is being reported in the first place, stating that even though Manwin had insisted it is above board, “I was bombarded over the weekend from emails and Twitter messages about what people believe is their very, some would say illegal, at least cutthroat business practices. If they do stuff legally, that’s great. If they don’t, these Wall Street firms…should know that they are financing something that’s not above board.”
That said, Gasparino may have spent the weekend researching this story and hearing from multitudes of people, but he was still unable to discover the multi-pronged lengths the industry has gone to over the past few years to address online piracy. His current understanding is that “NBC has tons of lawyers to look at these aggregator sites; some of these independent porn proprietors, they don’t. It’s just them. How would they know to search every site?”
You know; the small, ignorant porn proprietors who haven’t a clue how to protect their content? Look, it’s not Gasparino's fault; it’s a big subject that has developed over several years. But it's for that very reason one hopes that Gasparino and others like him will stick with the piracy story and continue to educate themselves and their viewers about the subject. After all, no matter what Gasparino may think at the moment, what’s happening in porn is hardly relegated to porn. As far as digital piracy goes, we’re all in this together.
