When I first got Internet access in the early nineties, if you wanted bondage pictures then your best bet was to go to USENET groups like alt.binaries.pictures.erotica.bondage and see what people had posted on there. Back then, with relatively few exceptions, most of the pictures you'd find were scans from kink magazines, and the scans were usually low-quality because most of the people who did the scanning didn't bother to color-correct their scans (and may not have even known what color-correcting was). Websites with bondage photos on them were few and far between, although as the decade went on, and digital photography became more affordable, more and more paysites sprung up as amateur producers and models tried their hand at selling their work online. (The initial wave of "alternative" bondage sites inspired by Suicide Girls, especially The Underground, were particularly wonderful.)
However, as file-sharing services took off to the point where Napster soon became a household word, erotica producers of all stripes soon found their hard work being passed around for free online, just like the photos from kink magazines that were so popular on USENET a decade earlier. Lots of people who wanted to get off to quality erotica, but didn't want to pay for it, could just jump on their sharing client of choice and download hundreds of dollars' worth of paysite content in a matter of minutes. This problem has never gone away, and if anything it's gotten worse with major streaming video sites for erotica making it easy for people to post pay videos for everyone to see. (This phenomenon is not unique to photos and videos; I find someone trying to pirate California Bondage Sorority Book One online at least once every week.)
The problem is that even with all this piracy going on, there are still amateurs who put their work out for free. Maybe they just don't want to go through the rigmarole of trying to set a paysite up, or maybe they just like the idea of lots of people seeing their photos and videos, but they do exist. Honestly, I often find myself preferring that kind of work because there's a rawness to it that reminds me of those old sites like The Underground. The problem is that these amateurs tend to use the same websites that are responsible for so much of the piracy of erotica that's going on right now, and since even these amateurs have high-quality video cameras on their cell phones, and can get professional-quality lighting for a good price at Amazon, it can be hard to tell at first glance whether a video on one of these sites is a genuine amateur production or a stolen paysite video.
I understand why a lot of my producer friends have taken to boycotting these sites, but it feels like there must be a better way to go about this. Back when there weren't so many bondage websites out there, sites like Red's Realm and Talon's Eyrie served as an excellent guide to both the free and the paid content out there. Maybe someone needs to make a website, or some other service, for those of us who enjoy true amateur erotica, so we can find the photos and videos that are being put out there by their producers for free without accidentally running into pirated content. That doesn't seem like it would be too difficult, and it would enable everyone to find and enjoy truly free content without accidentally watching stuff that they should have paid for first.
No comments:
Post a Comment