Chasing Pirates? Hire a Vigilante

A scrappy company is helping creators get stolen erotic images off the internet

- By Anne VanderMey

Dan Purcell’s transformation into a content protection vigilante began several years ago, with a moment of personal reckoning. The Irish computer programmer was living in California when his girlfriend at the time persuaded him to perform live on Chaturbate, a site that hosts adult web shows. He did several webcasts with her before deciding it wasn’t for him. He moved on, went back to Ireland, and never thought about it again—until 2018 when his new girlfriend angrily presented him with the videos. “It was very embarrassing,” he says, “very, very, very humiliating.”

Purcell had thought the videos would be streamed live, then disappear, but people had built programs to automatically record the webcam footage. He started a weeks-long hunt for the culprits. Because he’d used his social media handle on Chaturbate—“I still want to beat myself upside the head for this”—he just searched for his own username, along with some obvious keywords. What he discovered was a sprawling online ecosystem of groups dedicated to reselling stolen adult content. And, eventually, a business opportunity.

At first alone, then with a handful of part-time employees, Purcell began hiring himself out as a sleuth and enforcer, helping adult content creators find illegal copies of their photos and videos and get them taken down. Borrowing the Irish word for justice, he named his infant company Ceartas DMCA Ltd., with DMCA referring to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.