News date: 06/29/2000

Suze with one of her many models.

LOS ANGELES - Suze Randall probably prefers having won the award for Best Photography Site at the AVN Adult Internet Awards to the more dubious distinction of being estimated (by the Association for the Protection of Internet Copyright) as the single most pirated erotic photographer in cyberspace. But she's gunning for the cyberthieves and planning to turn over any and all recovered royalties to the Adult Industry Medical Healthcare Foundation.

Randall has teamed up with BayTSP to use their spidering technology to hunt the pirates down and force them to pay up or walk the plank. AIM founder/director Sharon Mitchell was unavailable for comment as this story went to cyberpress, but BayTSP cofounding CEO Mark Ishikawa said they were thrilled Randall had chosen them to protect her deep and valuable erotic library.

"It is our goal," he said in a formal statement, "to get the estimated five thousand sites illegally profiting from (Randall's) work to comply with federal copyright laws and assist Ms. Randall in removing her images from Websites that are easily accessible to underage viewers."

Randall says copyright infringement through unauthorized Website or newsgroup downloading costs her millions a year, but she's not concerned by the financial question alone - she doesn't want underage Web surfers getting her images.

"I'm going after pirates and hackers mainly because they are posting my pictures in unprotected areas where anyone can download them," she said in the same statement. "This undoes all the work we put into ensuring that my images are available to adults only."

Randall and her husband/business manager, Humphry Knipe, say they picked BayTSP because their spidering program has wide range and can track not only prior stolen images but those that have been altered as well.

"By extracting the DNA from each image," Knipe said in the same statement, "they can identify a picture even if only a fragment is used, in artwork, for example." He said BayTSP spidering technology has already taken over twelve thousand Randall-owned images from newsgroup databases, "and this is just the beginning."

--- Humphrey Pennyworth  

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