Australia’s Adult Industry Copyright Organisation has won a $50,000 judgment against a company that pirated 18 titles from Vivid Entertainment, Wicked Pictures, Red Light District and others.
“This is a great victory for us and the studios and people that work so hard to produce these movies,” said David Newnham, AICO board member and general manager for Calvista Australia.
The non-profit AICO represents the interests of Vivid, Evil Angel, Wicked and a number of other studios doing business in Australia.
Among the titles pirated in the case were Vivid’s Jenna’s Built for Speed andWicked’s The Wicked One and Flashpoint.
A Federal Magistrates Court judge awarded the damages on Jan. 27 after ruling last March that Kaos Shop, Platinum Interactive and local businessman Theo Armenis had violated the country’s copyright laws, causing financial damage to the production companies and their distributors.
The ruling marked the first time a judge sided with adult film producers in a copyright infringement case, Newnham said.
“Before we came along, if you were an adult filmmaker, you couldn’t win a piracy case in Australia,” he said.
“Pornography is mostly illegal in Australia so the pirates’ defense was always that they did nothing wrong since adult films weren’t legal anyway.”
Sale of adult films is illegal in the country’s two biggest cities, Sydney and Melbourne, and in all but two of the country’s five states and two territories. But they are sold anyway, Newnham said.
It was just last July that the group celebrated another victory against video pirates when a judge ruled against Venus Adult Shops and Tropher Installations. The companies were ordered to pay $150,000 in damages and about $100,000 additional costs and damages over the illegal copying and distribution of adult films produced by Private Media Group.
The judge ruled that Venus, which operates eight video stores, had illegally copied several Private titles for distribution to its stores.
“Australia was like the Wild West, where pirates could do anything, but things are starting to change,” Newnham said.
Private, with the help of AICO, also won a $200,000 settlement with another firm which allegedly pirated copies of several Private titles. Details of that case were not available due to the settlement’s confidentiality clause, Newnham said.
Established three years ago by the adult industry when video piracy was at its worst in Australia, AICO began making headway through the courts against suspected pirates. Although it didn’t win its cases, the group began making inroads politically.
“Judges began to see that the adult industry was hurt by piracy,” Newnham said.
“We got the best attorneys to go out there until we finally won a case.”
Todd Blatt, head of Antigua Pictures, which overseas licensing agreements for Vivid, VCA and others, said he’s pleased by the work AICO has done.
“It’s amazing what they’ve been able to do with so much piracy that was going on,” he said.
Besides hiring attorneys and even conducting surveillance and investigative work, the organization has also begun issuing a holographic sticker for all adult titles to help thwart counterfeiting and alert consumers.
“We have to be aggressive to fight piracy,” Newnham said. “We have to protect ourselves or no one else will.”
According to AICO, Australians spend about $150 million a year on adult films and account for the sale of 10 million VHS tapes and DVDs.
