Free Passwords: The Bumpy Guide to Porn Sharing

What does it mean to purchase and own a password to an Internet

pornography web site? Why would anybody want to purchase access
to Internet pornography in this day and age when it is increasingly
available for free? A large majority of netporn sites are free, offering
free samples, or they act as “feeder” sites. They are used as bait for
pay sites and make money by successfully guiding viewers to
premium services and a unique password. These sites are still
growing in size and number and their spam engines have to some
extent ruined the idea of a “real” netporn experience.

The premium membership is an imagined or idealized commodity,

and spam is what ordinary browsers live with--the endless banal and
slimy messengers that latch onto our nervous system. Steven
Shaviro writes about those messengers as the indispensable vermin
of the network society: “When such insect messengers come calling,
you cannot choose not to respond. You may swat or shoo away a
single fly, but more of them will always show up.” iPorn spam is now
part of the “ecology” of the network and has also determined the
manner in which societies value or ban it. A good sign of devaluation
is disregard for the porn password as a key to products. It is a string
of randomly combined letters and numbers that we can barely
remember. And the price of this password is currently too high to
simply make it worth purchasing.

The generous offer of free porn as the key to premium products has
made way for free passwords. There are endless sites like
http://www.rarepasses.com or http://www.silverpasswords.com that
have a list of pornsites and supply passwords to access them.
http://www.passwordguide.com is a site where can leave your email
address so they will email you daily passes;
http://www.passwordsearch.org is a search engine to look for
i
Steven Shaviro, Connected, Or What it Means to Live in the Network Society, University of
Minnesota Press 2003, p. 23.
passwords. On http://vikingpasses.com/?tid=127 you can even see a
picture of the webmaster who distributes the passwords. It looks
more personal, like there is an actual and identifiable someone in
charge. But it does not take too long before the cat comes out of the
bag: the passwords don’t work, or only for a very limited time and
never for more than five minutes. The jolly webmaster who gives out
the passwords is fake. He just creates a bit of a free trail to excite us.
Is he hoping that we will indeed finally get horny out of boredom or so
sick of him that we will pay for a proper password?

We may then purchase the password to have the certainty of getting

better value for our money, and finally, the real porn experience. It is
not only the porn pig who wants this certainty, but also the research
pig who is afraid that maybe s/he will have written entire book
volumes on “netporn” and totally missed out on the actual product.
The netporn biz was hoping that the adolescent male would get their
first jobs and then be in a position to buy their first premium
memberships. They would get tired of illegal cyber activities and
cumbersome download times, walking around with leather briefcases,
blueberries and a small golden chain around the neck with an
engraved password: Y6rrCS. But apart from a small percentage of
Premium Pass owners, the at large adolescent generation has grown
up with different Internet habits. They are impatient and have
integrated the freely available porn clips into social networking habits
and they have also started sharing their own home-made content.

The porn pig now prefers to watch clips and write comments directly
on videosharing sites such xtube.com and yuvutu.com. Or they still
take the time and energy to share full-length movies via p2p software
on sites like Epornium, Empornium or Puretna. In October 2007
Janko Roetgers wrote an article about 65 LA porn industry
companies getting together in order to sue p2p porn traders. ii A few
of the studios decided to go forward and create an industry
association to sue file sharers. The p2p sites Epornium and Poretna
have more than a million registered users. Members have a
ii
The article can be found at http://newteevee.com/2007/10/07/porn-biz-ready-to-go-after-p2p-pirates
password that they get for free and they collaborate in trading
individual scenes, full DVD rips or DVD image files to burn their own
discs, complete with menus and extras.

For the Spanish-speaking population there is the site Poringa, the

pornographic sister site of Taringa. Both sites belong to the same
owner and company group and are based on the concept of web 2.0,
as members keep the site alive by posting and adding new
information. It’s slogan is “placer colectivo” (collective pleasure). At
Poringa people (read: men) post pictures, videos, links and “real”
passwords that lead to hacked and home-made adult content. The
site has an average of 200.000 visits a day. People are not only
accessing it to get quick and easy access to content, they are also
there to create porn identities and become significant members, to
hang out, share and brag about their collections and upgrade to the
next level. When you get a membership and a password you
immediately start getting ratings from the community depending on
the frequency of your posts, which are then also nicely assembled
into a blog.

But are those p2p sites a more authentic open-source environment

for the netporn experience? The website has an extensive terms of
service that actually looks like an example of a rushed top-down
government. It is a work of net art by itself in its esoteric qualities. It is
full of contradictions and it is clear that nobody reads them and
nobody takes them seriously. Members can report on objectionable
posts to administrators including posters who break copyright. Site
administrators investigate all complaints. The Terms of Service
supports the idea that sharing porn collections is a serious activity
and that there should be no distractions. Two of the things not
allowed on the site are “Jokes and Riddles” and “Posts containing
just one image, the ideal is to have the full set.”

One member, Champagne, posts a video clip made by himself

penetrating a woman and the letters “PI” painted on her back with his
sperm. He dedicates the video to a long list of friends: they all have
fake names but his jizz looks mighty real. And yes,the bulk of p2p
porn trading puts the female body on display. Traders show off
collections of favourite porn stars or photos of female lovers and
make no effort at actually attracting female members. As a matter of
fact, all softer content produced by female or queer producers would
probably be banned as a “riddle.” Empornium has a dogmatic idea of
what kind of porn can be posted and for instance excludes movies
with adult content.“ No mainstream movies, clips or music, even if
they have adult content. Stick to porn.”iii

Porn has always had a low status among those genres conventionally
regarded by audiences as belonging to “substantial” popular
entertainment--like movies, magazines, live performances, or books.
Netporn became the benchmark of a trend towards totally hollow or
unsubstantial entertainment content. I have interviewed quite a
number of people about their netporn habits, and they can barely
remember the names of the companies or the movies they are
watching. They can only remember the names of their favorite porn
stars. The counter-wave netporn biz might increasingly be owned by
autonomous porn stars or sex workers who create their own brands
and networks. In China there is a large underground industry of
companies and sex workers who have direct webcam sessions with
paying clients which send video recordings of the sessions after they
are concluded.

Feminist pornographer Erika Lust made an intervention in the male

netporn landscape by releasing one of her shortfilms "The Good Girl”
under the terms of a Creative Commons license, so that it could be
downloaded for free from her website. But not knowing that a
Creative Commons license cannot be revoked, she recently withdrew
her special gift to the web community and included it in the feature
film “Five Hot Stories For Her”iv Here, Lust casts the free gift as a
special appearance that may garner value and desire around her
special collection. This model is generally being tested by the Euro-
iii
Empornium Forbidden Contents http://empornium.us/doc.php?show=prohibited
iv
Information about Erika Lust’s action http://www.p2p-blog.com/item-10.html
American “alt” movement. Feminist porn stars like Audacia Ray and
Johanna Angel are creating websites to materialize the dual role of
sex model and creative entrepreneurs. One could say that they put
their own sexual bodies on the line and have a more authentic and
female-controlled bond with the client. In relation to this, Florian
Cramer has argued that the alt porn idea immediately lost its obscene
edge. A web site for “authentic” porn stars like Suicidegirls.com
copied genres directly from conventional porn genres such as “Gothic
porn.” The altporn sexperts are educated but some of their movies
are dull, their lectures are as slimy as the worst spam in the way they
try to sell a “radical-erotic” outlook. Again this strategy may have
been carelessly copied from commercial netporn, such as the
endlessly spamming of audiences with non-substantial content in
tours and media appearances. Finally we may open our wallets and
hope the actual product will provide relief.