A brief look at the published numbers shows that in the Azov Films case, the police made a mountain out of a molehill. If a one-man, $800,000 per year operation is so big that 30 policemen come from around the world for the press conference, then maybe there just aren't enough international porn rings, for the number of police departments that need to justify their budgets. The police may need to throw the net wider, beyond pornographers to naturists. If they didn't indeed do just that with the Azov arrests.
Financial reality
Azov Films was operated openly from a warehouse in Toronto, by a Brian Way. According to the Toronto Star, the company billed $1.6 million over its last two years, and a total of $4 million since being founded in 2005. That's $500k to $800k per year, and that's gross, not profit.
What is that in sales?
A look at the Internet Archive mirror of the Azov catalog for the films that appear to be the core of the police case, Azov's own productions, starts with films at "List Price: $49.95 Price: $36.95". CTV News says, "For approximately $40, customers could buy about an hour of video, and receive photos at a discount, delivered online or by mail, police say." We don't know the mix of physical DVDs that would require postage vs downloads.
But we just need a ballpark figure, so let's assume Azov's sales was films which with postage cost a round $50 each. That gives 10,000 to 16,000 DVDs per year, or for a work year of 50 weeks, 40-64 DVDs a day - in line with Azov apparently being a one-man operation, as there's no news of any employees beyond Mr. Way, and perhaps his mother.
Azov sold some 600 films, including mainstream titles. How many were produced by Azov isn't clear from the news coverage. On average that's 16-27 copies of each title per year - remembering that "average sales" is a nearly useless measure in movies or books. Supposedly the man who filmed the boys in the Ukraine got $1000 per film, so Azov must have needed to sell at least 50 copies of each title to break even.
45 Terabytes
According to CTV News,More than 45 terabytes of data were seized.
“This is equivalent to a stack of paper as tall as 1,500 CN Towers,” Beaven-Desjardins said.
Neither informative, nor true. Mr. Way wasn't selling paper, he was selling DVDs. A common DVD holds from 4.7 to 8.7 GB. At the lowest capacity, 45 TB would be 9,600 DVDs; at the higher, 5,200. Four months' stock. To use Inspector Beaven-Desjardins's method of calculation, given the 1.2mm thickness of a DVD, 5,200 DVDs would form a stack 6.2 meters high; 9,600 DVDs would be 11.5 meters. Or, 1/50th the 553.33 height of the CN Tower.
Do I smell someone inflating numbers?
Even if Inspector Beaven-Desjardins's comparison were apt, her arithmetic is wrong. A page holds about 2KB of text; paper is about .1 mm thick; the CN tower is 553.33 meters high. The CN tower is the height of about 5.5 million sheets of paper, or 11 gigabytes of text. 1,500 CN towers would be equivalent to 16.6 terabytes, not 45 TB. Or perhaps Azov didn't really have 45 TB of data. We know she's telling fibs, we just don't know which number is a crock.
"Giant paedophile ring"
The Independent describes the case as
A giant paedophile ring with a worldwide reach was broken apart during a three-year inquiry which led to the arrests of hundreds of individuals, including clergymen and teachers, and the rescue of nearly 400 children who were at risk, Canadian police have revealed.
In one of the biggest such operations ever seen, investigators uncovered an octopus-like child-porn network centred on a now-shuttered sex-film business in Toronto.
Part of the mythology of child pornography is that it's a "multi-billion dollar business." But if that's true, how can a company with gross revenue of $500,000 (from which it paid rent, postage, DVD blanks, servers, etc.) be one of the largest operations ever?
Something doesn't add up. As in the false accusations of pedophilia in the notorious Colina do Sol case, or the Catanduva witch hunt, the vast numbers tossed around by law enforcement and the press seem to have little basis in reality.
Naturists may feel that the Azov Films prosecution has nothing to do with them. After all, there's U.S. and other court precedent that simple nudity in the context of naturism is protected under the First Amendment, and under other constitutional protections in other countries.
However, Azov's customers thought the same. And quite a few films that were sold by Azov were also sold by "mainstream" naturist sites, including some sites based here in Brazil.
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