Profile of Dan Purcell, founder of Ceartas, a company that helps adult content creators stop piracy when their content gets stolen from sites like OnlyFans
Dan Purcell's transformation into a content protection vigilante began several years ago, with a moment of personal reckoning.
Context & Ripple Effects
Adult content has been fighting piracy since the tube-site era, when tech entrepreneurs first organized to take back an industry gutted by free streaming. VICE later traced the modern version: an organized supply chain that scrapes OnlyFans en masse before reposting on other adult sites and Discord. Ceartas, Dan Purcell's company, sits at the enforcement end of that pipeline — turning what was once a studio-scale legal problem into a service individual creators can buy.
The profile lands amid two competing enforcement models. Strike 3 monetizes infringement through mass copyright lawsuits, while Civitai's recent purge of likeness content shows how payment processors and new laws are forcing platforms to self-police. Purcell's pitch — protection as a product, not a lawsuit — matters because subscription platforms like OnlyFans sell exclusivity, so leaked content directly erodes the asset creators are selling.
First-order effects
- Individual creators gain a takedown option they previously lacked: instead of absorbing leaks or hiring lawyers per case, they can route removal requests through a dedicated firm watching sites like OnlyFans for stolen uploads.
- Repost sites and Discord channels feeding off the mass-scraping supply chain face faster, more systematic removal pressure than ad-hoc DMCA notices produced.
Second-order effects
- Ceartas's takedown-as-a-service model competes with Strike 3's litigation-driven approach, pushing the market toward prevention over post-hoc lawsuits — a shift that favors recurring software revenue over settlement windfalls.
- OnlyFans has a stake it rarely states: if leaks go unchecked, subscription exclusivity weakens, so effective third-party enforcement quietly protects the platform's own pricing power even though it isn't the paying customer.
Third-order effects
- If enforcement becomes a standard line item for creators the way hosting and payments are, content protection consolidates into infrastructure — a trust layer sold alongside distribution rather than fought case by case.
- The same forces pressing Civitai — payment processors, likeness laws — point toward platforms being held accountable upstream, making external enforcement firms both a complement and, eventually, a compliance check on where stolen content travels.
The trend: Content protection in the creator economy is shifting from studio litigation toward enforcement-as-a-service, with payment-processor pressure accelerating who gets policed and how fast.