The adult entertainment industry took a stronger, more unified approach to taking on the companies and website illegally selling their movies and photos with the formation of a new for-profit corporation. The PAK Group has the twofold mission of filing lawsuits against suspected pirates, and educating producers of adult content how to protect their work. A month after its incorporation, the PAK Group has 17 companies on board with more to follow, said Jason Tucker, president and co-owner of Falcon Foto, a Sylmar-based photo and video library. “A thief is a thief and a scumbag’s a scumbag,” Tucker said during a discussion about piracy at the Xbiz conference in Hollywood on Feb. 6. “If you steal my stuff and have money to take, I’m taking it.” The PAK Group is an offshoot of efforts that Tucker, Shane’s World in Chatsworth and other adult companies have done individually to fight the theft of their protected work. Not until a meeting in September, however, had multiple companies joined together to discuss the overall impact of piracy to the industry and how to combat it collectively. The new corporation will combine financial resources to minimize the expense of building and documenting cases and pursuing litigation against wrongdoers. Working with the Canoga Park-based Free Speech Coalition and Global Anti-Piracy Agency, companies can learn about filing copyrights on all their material to better enforce their ownership. The PAK Group was formed as a for-profit because regulations governing a non-profit would have required disclosure of its tactics and strategies. “If thieves can make money for stealing our content, we should be make money from taking it back,” Tucker said.
