[See the update below… I did finally hear from him.]

I know a lot of you like Bare Derek’s porn blog. Friday around 6am the blog went dead with the message “Sorry, the blog at barederek.blogspot.com has been removed.”. When I tried to e-mail him Friday night I got a message saying “This account has been disabled or discontinued”.

I’m hoping everything is OK with him, but no, I don’t know what happened. All I know is last time when he took the blog private for a couple days it was because he wanted to make sure there weren’t any videos that had copyright issues. The fact that his e-mail address isn’t working makes me think he’s decided to just end it all and move on. But the fact that the URL isn’t available for reuse makes me wonder if something more serious didn’t happen.

The issue previously was that he was pulling videos from a lot of Ning sites. Ning has structured their business in a way so they’re not liable for what’s on the sites they host – the person who runs the site and the people who upload the content are liable – even the people (like Bare Derek) who use the embed codes can be liable (if they know it’s not legal and still choose to embed it). It’s all very carefully crafted by Ning’s lawyers to push the liability to everyone else.

Ning and many of the “tube sites” are a major problem for porn companies ’cause many of them blatently rip off content and then make it easy for the videos to get embedded elsewhere. I get e-mails from some of the sites saying things like “here’s the latest DVD from ____” and each scene on the DVD will be a video on the Ning or tube site. I see the same things with videos from pay sites where the latest releases from pay sites are advertised as new content on the Ning or tube site. In other words, one guy buys the DVD or pay site membership and then redistributes the content for free on his Ning or tube site. That’s just clearly wrong.

I’m not saying Bare Derek was doing anything wrong – his videos might have all been within “fair use”. I very rarely watched the videos on his site, so I really don’t have an opinion of whether his site crossed the line or not. I’m guessing he thought it was just too risky since some of the porn companies have been pursuing a sue first, ask questions later approach.

So if any of you are thinking of doing what Bare Derek did, just realize it can be legally risky…

UPDATE:

I got an e-mail from Bare Derek. He decided running the blog wasn’t worth the risk, so he shut it down. It was not the result of any legal action or anything like that. He’s fine – just moving on to other things in his life.