Originally Posted by Quentin

The short answer is that we're not doing it "for nothing;" we're doing it to help reestablish some value to the product we all sell. It's also true that not all of DMCAForce's services are free, so we're counting on some percentage of clients who come to us for the free fingerprinting seeing some value in our paid services, and retaining us for those services, as well.

To answer some other questions about the DMCAForce services:

- You do not have to be a member of the FSC in order to make use of DMCAForce's services, or to receive the fingerprinting for free.

- If you choose to use the monetization option, the revenue generated by that option is divided between you, DMCAForce, vobile, any ad brokers that might be involved in the equation, and the site(s) where the content that replaces your filtered-out content is displayed. The content that gets swapped in might be an ad, or just a shorter promotional clip of yours, or what have you; as the content owner, that is your decision to make.

- If you choose to use the monetization option (and there's no requirement to do so), then as the content owner, you get 30% of that revenue, DMCAForce gets 5%, and the rest is divided between Vobile, the FSC, and the site where the swapped-in content is displayed.

- If you do not choose to implement the monetization aspect, DMCAForce will still fingerprint your content for free.

As to why we're willing to do the fingerprinting for free, even if the client never chooses to implement the monetization option, we look at all the content that is currently readily available to pirates as a market, and we see digital fingerprint filtering as a means of denying the pirates market share. So perhaps the real question is: Why would any of us NOT want to deny pirates market share?

We don't mind competing with other pornographers who have to face the same sorts of risks, costs and market fluctuations that we do; that's just business, and how it is done.

We do mind, quite a bit, competing with pirates who get all the benefits of distributing porn for profit, but who don't have to deal with the same costs that we do.

The way we see it, if we remain one of a small handful of companies actively fingerprinting content, then we'll have a minimal impact on pirates via fingerprint filtering. On the other hand, if lots of studios and producers join in with us, we can further limit the pirates' content options, and force them to rely on a smaller and smaller content pool to draw from. Gradually, surfers will tire of seeing the same content, over and over again, everywhere they turn in terms of pirated sources, and they will (again, gradually) go back to obtaining content from legitimate sources in greater numbers.

In other words, we're hoping to "do well by doing good" as the saying goes.

The benefit of doing the free fingerprinting is not going to come to us overnight, it's not going to come easily, and it is not guaranteed to come at all -- but we think the risk is worth it, and we think that making the fingerprinting free will bring about the eventual benefit to us more assuredly than charging for that component of the service would.

Yes, the old cliche is correct: There really is no such thing as a free lunch. On occasion, however, the guy buying lunch has his eye on the long term, and as such isn't particularly bothered by picking up your BLT, fries and iced tea on his tab, if doing so gets you on board with a plan that benefits both of you in the long run.

I hope this helps to clarify things a bit. If you have any additional questions, I'll be happy to answer them to the best of my ability.