Raise your hand if Googled your name and the first search result was your recorded show, posted on some shady, pseudo-porn website. Sadly, the number of cam girls who should raise their hand is increasing year by year. Camming has been the magical wonderland where lonely men meet mind-blowing entertainers since forever, but thanks to the fast-paced technology, now it is easier than ever to get your lady parts posted in the darkest corners of the vast internet. It is no secret that protecting your content as a camgirl is no easy feat, but it is not impossible either.
Piracy has always been rampant, and more recently tube sites (most of which are owned by a single company) offer all-you-can-watch porn for absolutely free. Sometimes, the main star of those videos might be you, since anybody can record your show out of your knowledge and put it online, without having to ask for your consent. After all, the online world is full of pirate sites that feed their mouths and pockets through monetizing someone else’s hard work.
Live shows also partially sidestep the problem of piracy. Show recordings are prevalent, otherwise, we can’t fully explain the plethora of cam girls’ online shows on platforms such as camwhores.com. But viewers miss out on a crucial portion of the show by not watching it live, similar to how watching a recorded football doesn’t beat the real thing.
And by developing personal relationships with customers over time, camgirls also benefit from an idiosyncratic economic truth – the people most likely to have the largest cache of their material are also the ones least likely to want to harm them by dispersing it for free. But that doesn’t stop the hundreds of users wandering in your chatroom daily from doing the complete opposite.
Your guide to DMCA complains
Translated into Digital Millennium Copyright Act, this law puts content creators and their intellectual property on a pedestal. Thus, whatever you’ve created, be it photos, video or text, you have full ownership of it – and therefore, have the right to complain to have it removed. Have you ever wondered why your chatroom traffic is similar to a graveyard? Maybe an online pirate uploaded your content on other websites – so why would a user pay for what’s on the internet already?
The most common way of complaining about it is to file a DMCA complaint. You can either send it yourself to the infringing website or go through Google, your camming site, or a DMCA agency. You can even complain to the web host, affiliate program, or traffic network the pirate is using.
The fight for stolen content
The DMCA complaint is the most powerful weapon that a camgirl can have in her arsenal. Put in some cases, it might not be enough. That is why you have to take a PR approach and sense the peril before it actually happens, so you can minimise or completely eliminate the not-so-great consequences. Watermarking is an example of a path to follow when you want to prevent your content from being stolen – or worse, misused.
Trademarks can incur a harsher fine according to the law. As such, they provide you with added protection in case someone does try to steal your content. Not to mention that watermarks can prove to be a useful marketing tool to make yourself easily recognizable among your current and potential customers.
Social media is an excellent soil to plant your piracy, so pay attention to hashtags and try to take them over. Make your Twitter and Instagram accounts private and accept only the people you know. Turn off location information, use a separate e-mail for camming, and overall, pay attention to the personal information you share online. And, of course, report any infringing accounts; just be careful not to share your personal information when submitting a request.
Protecting your content is beyond crucial
In short, camming is to traditional pornography what Bane was to Batman: one merely adopted the internet, the other was born in it, molded by it. But with modern technology comes modern problems: swatting, doxxing, and the fact that on most sites piracy is treated more like a trivial matter than a massive problem. Just remember not to make yourself the prey of blackmail-hungry pirates. Consider when, how, and if you should share your private information.