Following article, Pornhub pays up

[UPDATE NOVEMBER 2010: I wrote the following article, originally published October 22, in an attempt to collect a debt Pornhub owed me. Pornhub has repaid that debt.]

Sometimes, like a series of Russian dolls, the dilemma of pornography contains within it several smaller dilemmas.

Like tube sites. If nine out of ten professional pornographers claim the stolen and free content hosted on tube sites is killing the adult industry, why do studios continue to do business with them, and why do performers and directors work for places like Brazzers, which is owned by the same lawsuit magnet that owns the tube site Pornhub?

I can only speak for myself. When representatives of Pornhub called and asked me to edit the blog they hoped would whitewash the stains of constant litigation from the company’s tube site, the first thing I thought was not “Working for these people would be wrong,” but “If they pay me enough, I’ll do it.”

But when you lie down with dogs…

For months a site called Peeperz, a tiny little division of the Pornhub/Brazzers conglomerate, has been refusing to pay me for my articles that it has published on its site. Why I should be surprised by this, considering its very business model is copyright infringement, is explained only by the fact that for several months this year, they actually did pay me.

[UPDATE NOVEMBER 2010:

Pornhub paid me. Claiming department reshuffles and lost e-mails, Manwin (Pornhub/Peeperz’ parent company) representatives paid my invoice plus a late fee, asking that I amend this story as a condition of payment. I agreed, and volunteered to change the header graphic from the original image, below:

I also changed the excerpt which appears under the headline on archives pages from “Pornhub doesn’t pay its bills and steals people’s work” to “Pornhub paid me once I wrote this article” and changed the headline from “Post-lawsuits, Pornhub Joins Deadbeat Club.”

/UPDATE]

Yes, I might be the only American pornographer to have ever been paid for my work that appeared on Pornhub. It’s a dubious achievement, like being the one family whose Seder Hitler attended.

Not that the money was easy to come by.

Peeperz was launched in February, 2010 but I had been asked to edit it during the summer of 2009. During my phone call with Pornhub’s Montreal-based reps, my ethical reservations took a distant back seat to what is really on my mind in just about every Porn Valley business interaction.

“Do you pay on time?” I said. “I really hate chasing down checks.”

“Oui,” they assured me, but in English.

They asked me to draw up a budget and I said I’d get back to them within two days, which I did, and then I didn’t hear back from them for months. I found out they thought my price was too high. It wasn’t. It was just on the low edge of fair.

But I was relieved I didn’t get the gig, because I had tiny, scurrying reservations about working for thieves that conflicted with a New Year’s resolution to never turn down work.

Well, around January Pornhub called me back and said they were going ahead with the blog, which would be called Peeperz, but they had a Quebec-based editor who, growing fat on socialised healthcare, didn’t have my overhead. Would I consider contributing a few pieces a month for 500 bucks? they asked. I said sure, as long as they were American dollars, God Damn It.

Peeperz, I soon found out, was to be a ripoff of Fleshbot, for whom I have been employed for five years. That said, it wasn’t a bad ripoff; it just didn’t have its own voice. My contributions were mostly small videos and on-the-set pieces, and I had a good working relationship with the former editor.

The blog was set to launch with much fanfare: a $10,000 amateur video contest for which I wrote and sent out press releases at no extra charge. Nothing came of it. I was told they didn’t get enough submissions.

Like I said, I wasn’t exactly flexing my ethical muscles, but it made sense that, even if there had been just one submission, that guy should have won 10 grand. But they kept the money.

They might have needed it.

Mansef, the company that owns Pornhub, was in the process of being sued at that time, and my contacts at Pornhub were very reticent to explain any further. I won’t say they were secretive about the number of tube sites they owned (pornhub.com, keezmovies.com, tube8.com, and extremetube.com), or their connections with other pirate sites, but they didn’t offer any information.

For example, as a contributor to a number of websites and magazines, I am always kept in the loop by editors when financial troubles or management shakeups threaten the timely arrival of my money; I was never informed by Pornhub personnel of staff layoffs or lawsuits. I had to read about them elsewhere.

Yet I was still surprised when my first check didn’t arrive on time in March, and for the next five months I was only paid on time once. Because of its legal difficulties, Mansef was sometimes known as Manwin, shifted its payment processor and, by the time Pink Visual sued Pornhub for multiple copyright infringements in April, I was invoicing a concern called D.C.I. Daily Capital Limited in Cyprus rather than a company called Interhub in Montreal.

But I’ve learned to put up with worse, and my job at Peeperz was simple: provide original content in my signature delightful style.

But it all unraveled with my August invoice.

That month I had submitted five pieces to Peeperz, three of which had never been published in any form before, and two which were old set-visit stories from my site that I updated with new information when the movies came out.

I sent the invoice along with a new story in early September. I got a note back reading, “I’m confused. I found this story on your site from August, 2008.”

Then I got a very interesting e-mail by mistake from the guy I’d sent the invoice to.

“He’s getting nervous,” he wrote the editor, but also me. “He just sent his invoice. Find out how many stories he screwed us on.”

Sending e-mails by mistake is not like ass-dialing your phone. It is unbelievably stupid. And I was offended that I would be painted with the same brush as my employer.

But what did I expect? A thief is quick to distrust others.

I called the accountant on his e-mail gaffe and he later offered to pay me half for the stories I’d updated. I had agreed to supply “original” content, he said.

I had supplied original stories. No one else had written them. I hadn’t copied and pasted from AVN, for example. Plus, the first versions of the articles were months or years old. They had conveniently confused “original” with “exclusive.”

But I had reservations enough to open the discussion with my writer friends. I explained the situation and received several replies.

1. Do you want to continue getting a paycheck from them? Then take the lesser amount and don’t excerpt your stories again.
2. They’re your stories. Writers refer back to their own work all the time. But take the hit this month.
3. Accept the compromise this month but make sure you can excerpt your stories in the future if the need arises.

Note that they all said “take less money.”

I thought these were all excellent suggestions, but I couldn’t imagine having a good relationship with a company that I thought had conveniently screwed me out of money. I thought they’d just find new ways of saving money at my expense in the future.

(Note to any freelancer: when an employer volunteers the information that you are the best paid of any of your peers, and you know you are making shit, he has demonstrated a willingness to throw your colleagues under the bus in hope you will feel better.)

So a month ago I sent a letter saying that either Pornhub (or its parent company) could either pay me for my invoice amount (plus a few extra bucks to cover what Paypal takes from the payee on international transactions—you know you’re working for a classy outfit when they make you eat the bank cost) or they needed to take down the stories they didn’t pay for. One or the other needed to happen by end of that weekend, I said.

I never heard anything back, and never got paid. Neither for the stories I had written for my site and rewrote with specific material for Pornhub, or for the both original and exclusive stories Pornhub got first, and which they continue to display on their site as of this writing.

Today I sent another invoice, with a substantial late fee added. Their argument about original vs. exclusive meant nothing if they continued to host the stories in question (and list me as a contributor) without paying. Pornhub is screwing the content providers, plain and simple.

But it serves me right, and I’ve learned my lesson, and if I ever get the money owed to me I’ll be amazed. I might have to join the pending class action suit to get any relief at all.

Just so this is in writing, I will never knowingly work for a copyright-infringing company again.

[UPDATE NOVEMBER 2010. I don’t know what this turn of events suggests for the thousands of other people who have copyright disputes with Manwin/Pornhub, but I was paid within three weeks of writing this article.]

See also: Take Down Piracy: Connecting the Dots