September 11, 2002 12:00pm
ASM PNN & PythonVideo Copyrighting Stolen Content for Sale to Pay Sites
Source: Adult Industry News
by: Susan S. Weiss
Adult Stars Magazine's PornoNewsNetwork.com and PythonVideo.com have been selling stolen content, infringing on copyrights and claiming to copyright previously copyrighted material since December, 2000. Talking to these people gets no action. Sue them? Let's see if a news item works first:
"When I discovered Python has a page advertising the sale of PNN content (which included Adult Industry News content) I was outraged!" said Steve Nelson, the Editor-In-Chief here at Adult Industry News, "Every time I tried to contact someone at Python I could only get as far as a secretary or receptionist, and within a day would get a call back from Jeff Cartwright of Adult Stars Magazine".
Empty Promises
Nelson goes on to say, "The last phone call was the same as the first call I got from him [Cartwright] in February this year when I first discovered they were stealing content - promises that never got more than a token gesture."
It appears from the dates of the stories that they had been stealing material from as early as December of 2000 and continuing up to the present. All pages had a copyright notice at the bottom, most of which have been removed now, saying "Contents Copyright 2001 Porno News Network". Searches of their database pull up material from about a dozen other Websites!
Breach of Good Faith
Initially in February fair use was discussed. (Legally news can be re-printed as long as certain guidelines are followed.) Generally this is with links to the stories as long as credit is given. The links provided by PNN never link to the stories they were taken from and are nearly word for word as they appear elsewhere including typos. Many exclusive pictures were stolen too, some with the AINews.com watermark in tact.
Screen captures of PNN's search pages and Python's ad page can be found linked in the box to the right. [Including an updated page captured 9/20/2002 - over 2 weeks after the promise for removal of all unauthorized material.] The items were still live when this news item was being written as the date and time stamps verify.
Many thanks to those behind the scenes with names numbers and letters who helped us try and resolve these issues before reaching this point. Please follow the link in the box to the right to The Liberty Network for more on this at the bottom of their re-printing of this story.
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