Hey, so I make adult comic books.... and not adult comics sense that, say, Chris Ware or Daniel Clowes make comics for adults. I'm using adult in the more euphemistic sense.
Porn. I make porn. And like a lot of porn artists, I've been having a lot of problems recently with porn pirates!
I sell my comics online, in PDF form. I have a dual release model where I first release things to Patreon (which, like a lot of similar artists, I use as a de facto subscription site.) Then, anywhere between a few weeks and a month after things are released on Patreon, I'll go ahead and sell them individually on another site, Gumroad.
Lately, though, the old piracy problem has started to get a lot worse. Instead of having my comics pirated after their Gumroad release, which doesn't usually seem to impact my sales too much, they've been coming out shortly after their initial release on Patreon... and it's happened for a few months in a row now. That's really crippled my Gumroad sales, and the problem seems to be getting worse as a bigger part of my fanbase is figuring out they can easily pirate my comics. I'm under no illusions about being able to stop all piracy, but recently it's gone from being a minor nuisance to something that's eating up a bit percentage of my income, and I need to figure out some way to get it under control. I send out DMCA's, but by the time the sites (most of which are almost primarily porn piracy sites) get around to responding, thousands of people have already downloaded the comic, so it's too little too late.
So I'm thinking I'll need to try something I haven't bothered with in a long while... pirate hunting!
The basic tactic is this: send every user a unique PDF for the comic with some subtle personalization to it. It could be a unique watermark somewhere, or a code hidden somewhere so that I could cross-reference it with a spreadsheet and find out who uploaded it. I wouldn't be able to stop them from uploading whatever comics they used that month, but after they do pirate the comics I'd be able to find out who did it and ban them. That would stop them from from uploading comics in the future... at least, until they make a new burner account.
The problem is, with hundreds of subscribers that would be a very time-consuming process to do manually, and I haven't been able to find any software or websites that specializes in automatically making unique PDF versions. Gumroad, like a lot of modern sites, has tools to automate PDF stamping, so everyone gets an individualized PDF with their personal information. Patreon has absolutely nothing like this. So that's the first problem.
The second problem is finding a way to send out a different PDF to each person. Now the most obvious way is just sending out a different version to each person manually, but the Patreon Relationship Manager and the site's messaging system are glitchy, clunky, and slow, and it would be prohibitively time-consuming to do it this way every month. But Patreon also allows you to download a spreadsheet of user names and associated emails; I'm wondering if there are some tools that would allow me to automatically email each user a corresponding unique PDF version. If I could find a way to automate it I could just do that every month, and hopefully make it inconvenient enough for repeat pirates that they don't bother most of the time.
I know fighting piracy is like playing whack-a-mole at the best of times, so if I'm going to have a chance I'm going to need some dynamite. Any advice would be greatly appreciated! |
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