How the Porn Industry Fights Piracy
An interview with Reba Rocket, co-owner, COO & CMO of Takedown Piracy
When you’re a porn star and your content gets pirated, who you gonna call? Takedown Piracy. Founded 17 years ago by Nate Glass, the anti-piracy company helps porn stars and adult content producers get their stolen content that’s been uploaded by pirates taken down. If you think watching pirated porn doesn’t hurt anyone, you’re wrong. For OnlyFans creators, adult performers, and X-rated video producers, piracy is a profit killer.
In this interview, Takedown Piracy co-owner, COO, and CMO Reba Rocket explains why porn consumers should care about where their porn comes from, what the scale of pirated porn really is, and what AI, revenge porn, and deepfakes have to do with it.
Susannah Breslin: How big of a problem is content piracy in the adult space, who does it impact, and why does it matter?
Reba Rocket: It’s impossible to quantify, either in numbers of infringements or monetary metrics. The short answer is, it’s a huge problem, especially with technological advancements that allow pirates to steal and post faster and more broadly than ever before. The impact depends upon the content creator and how much their specific content is pirated.
Think of it like this. If you have a brick-and-mortar store and you leave the doors wide open, popular products are more likely to “walk” out the door, where less popular items might remain on the shelves. Similarly, stores where safety measures and loss-prevention tactics are employed will likely suffer less from theft. It’s the same with digital content. If one does nothing to prevent or protect from losses, others are likely to steal and monetize that content with impunity.
Breslin: Who steals adult content, what do they do with it, and how big is the market?
Based on Google’s recent reporting for just their platform, they’ve removed 11.4 billion infringements from 5.5 million domains, for 655,200 copyright owners, at the request of 714,000 reporting sources, as of this writing.
Rocket: Again, there’s no specific metric with which to quantify how big the market is. It’s astronomically enormous. Based on Google’s recent reporting for just their platform, they’ve removed 11.4 billion infringements from 5.5 million domains, for 655,200 copyright owners, at the request of 714,000 reporting sources, as of this writing. If you factor that each and every one of those infringements represents a link on a pirate site and does not include all infringements, you can see how counting grains of sand at the beach seems easier.
Those who steal adult content are quite simply thieves. They steal content for a litany of reasons: to harass, to create catfish accounts on social media, but mostly to monetize others’ content without license or consent. They profit from the work of others. The marketplace for free content is worldwide.
Breslin: You have several different tools you use to track down adult content that has been stolen. What are they and how do they work? How much pirated adult content have you had removed?
Rocket: We have a multitude of tools at our disposal, most of which are proprietary or exclusive to our company. An example is our Digital Fingerprinting, which is a technology that our tech partner provides to only our company. Others use that term, but ours captures thousands of tiny bits of visual data points across copyrighted video and creates a “file” that’s only visible with that software. We’ve also digitally fingerprinted over half a billion tube videos, and the system plays the “match game,” 24/7/365. This way, we are able to detect infringements, even when there is no meta data: names of brands, performers, scenes, etc. The system deanonymizes the infringements. In other words, without this technology, one would likely miss about 100 percent of any infringements without such meta data.
We now also digitally fingerprint images, and that search covers the entire Internet. We find some of the strangest places utilizing our clients’ images.
As of this writing, we’ve removed—not just reported, but actually removed—over 202 million infringements—103,923,630, from Google alone. Most copyright services brag about how many they’ve reported, but we know that it’s the removals that really matter. It’s a number we are truly proud of.
Breslin: How is AI reshaping adult content piracy and how you fight it?
Rocket: AI is definitely on the radar, but regrettably there is almost no legal precedent to define what is or is not allowed.
As for us employing AI as a method with which we do our job? We do not. One of the biggest ways in which we set ourselves apart from so-called competitors is the personal verification of infringements.
Breslin: How do revenge porn and deepfakes factor into what you do?
Rocket: As for actual revenge porn, we have a product, Operation Minerva, by which we provide detection and removal services, and do not charge the victim. Deepfakes are handled like any other piracy: If the lion’s share of the content belongs to a client, or copyrighted image or video is being used to create the fake, we issue a takedown notice.
Breslin: Why should I care if the porn I watch is pirated or not? Can’t consumers just watch porn in peace without having to worry if it’s pirated?
In our opinion, people who knowingly watch pirated content are as bad as the pirates themselves.
Rocket: Caring about pirated porn is the same as caring whether your outfit was sewn by forced child labor or being okay with any purchased product which was stolen. If you knew your neighbor’s bike was stolen, and you wanted the same bike, and you found your neighbor’s bike for sale online, would you be okay with profiting from your neighbor’s stolen product? It’s the same with adult content. The production is work. It costs money, time, energy.
If someone is the kind of person who wants to watch their porn “in peace without having to worry if it’s pirated,” they’re simply the kind of person that is okay with theft, as long as it benefits them. Our company doesn’t think favorably of thieves of any kind, even if it’s just their active complacency with theft. In our opinion, people who knowingly watch pirated content are as bad as the pirates themselves. No one can really call themselves a fan or supporter of adult content if they’re okay with piracy.
The damage is to content creators who bear the expense of producing the content, their families, their crew, their staff, their co-creators. As for who cares—we care. Copyright enforcement is not just a business to us. It’s a passion project, and we think anything done without the consent of the content creator is just that: an issue of consent.
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Susannah Breslin is a freelance journalist; the author of a memoir, Data Baby: My Life in a Psychological Experiment, and a short story collection, You’re a Bad Man, Aren’t You?; and the founder of The Fixer, a strategic communications consultancy. Follow her online on X, Instagram, Facebook, Bluesky, and Threads. Contact her here. She lives in Los Angeles.