Just as the music industry was extremely myopic before iTunes, the porn industry is struggling with decreased sales per title and file sharing.

The answer to the porn industry's woes is to increase people's consumption of porn. If more people are consuming porn, even through file sharing, they will eventually make more purchases through legitimate channels.

For example, why would you monkey around with a Bitorrent file that takes days to download when you can have instant streaming on our site for $9.95 a month unlimited?

Right now Apple is contemplating ditching DRM. The true cheapskates are smart enough to work around it anyway. And for the real customers, it just pisses them off.

At American Vice, we subscribe to the Grateful Dead theory. That band became the largest grossing live performer, all because they didn't get hung up on people bootlegging their stuff. In fact, they encouraged it.

Right now on our site, we give away Five Free Movies to anyone who tries it. So, anyone with an array of email addresses can simply keep registering for Five Free Movies. We've talked about putting in IP blockers, but for the small percentage of people that actually use multiple email addresses, it's not worth it. Further, if someone digs our site that much to keep signing up, then that can't be such a bad thing.

We have a major studio that has awesome content but won't license it to us because we don't use DRM. If someone wants to fill a hard drive full of porn and give it to their buddy, who cares? In fact, it's good advertising. As I said, extremely myopic.

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It's a Catch 22, for American Vice to market themselves the way they do is quite simple, and selfish to those who make the product possible. As I read it, they aren't the producers of any product, just the middle man whose exploitive brand of business practice is going to harm/kill the industry. The mere fact that the mods/admins allow them to plug their product here surprises me.

If I were the producer, I want to make my money. As a consumer, I don't mind paying. It's the freeloading scum who leach everything (and YES, those who share it, too) that make DRM a necessity. Like I said, Catch 22.

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DRM is not an ideal solution, but for now it's the only one producers like Zero Tolerance have.

Nothing is free, it's the nature of universe.

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We'll see how many of those sites are still up and running in five years time.
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The sites who produce quality porn will survive. If you give the customers good porn and the download options are great as well, people will come back for more.

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Jacco

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In a world where people are asking on public forums for passwords to break into sites to obtain the same material that I PAID FOR, I'm totally against DRM, because I know their intentions. On the other hand, DRM is useful to me, because I'm not one of the scum sharing it with peers (read: freeloaders) who haven't bothered to pay. This is like buying a jug of Gatorade: the first drinks half, the 2nd guy drinks half of the remainder, and so on. The half-life never ends, and chances are the only guy who invested a penny in it was numero uno. He got his worth out of it, then passed it on.

This not only affects the producers, mind you, I heard MANY girls at Erotica LA last June discussing how degrading it was to see videos that featured them being pawned on the show floor for $1-2 each come Sunday evening. The basic point, like a yard sale, is the producers didn't want to take the merch home. It was meant to be sold, and even on that note, they weren't giving it away. No DRM in the hands of irresponsible users is just giving them the OK to pass it on to the next guy.

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I do not have much interest in pay websites, because I don't want to watch porn on my computer (particularly if I'm interested in spanking to it), and porn from the Internet, although watchable, is just not the same quality as what you can get on a DVD.

As long as DRM schemes are used on the Internet by various pay sites, I will never pay for content that I can't download to my own computer and watch at my convenience (including burning to a DVD so I could watch it on my TV and spank to it if I so desired).

I have zero interest in uploading content to the Internet so that others can steal the content and spread it around for "free."

Any site who is serious about stealing content from others, so that they can profit from it, can already rip whatever they want from DVDs and other media.

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These files can be burned onto a CD or DVD-R and played on most commercial DVD players. I think the resolution is comparable to the pressed DVD, although I will admit that Windows Media tends to give a slight matte appearance.

Anyway, we have 608 movies for only $9.95 per month unlimited.

I'm not trying to spam. So please don't be offended. You raised a point as to why you wouldn't use a paysite. Hopefully, I've shown that there are sites that may be worth your consideration.

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You may very well have "the latest and greatest technology." However, the latest and greatest video over the Internet does not approach the video quality of what a DVD provides.

I'm not trying to offend you either.
In fact, it sounds like you are offering a high-quality Internet service. I like your "You paid for it. It's yours." approach.
It is my belief that DRM and other protection schemes only serve to vex and annoy the legitimate consumer. Those bent on stealing and circulating content will always find a way to do it.

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We encode at 2000K which is the sweet spot. You can encode at higher rates but the difference isn't noticable, but the file size increases dramatically. In fact, there's not a big difference between our 2000K and 1000K encodes in terms of quality.

We encode not to fit on a CD. Our purpose is to convert the VOB to a computer platform, ie. Windows Media.

As I said, the only drawback with Windows Media is that the video is a little duller than the source. But I doubt most people would notice. I have a fairly sensitive eye for this.

I encourage you to take the Pepsi challenge. I have compared our 2000K encodes to the original VOB and they're pretty darn close.

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Now compress it even more so that it can practically be distributed over the Internet.
I can hear the difference between MP3s vs. Redbook standard CDs.
I can see the difference as more and more compression is used to reduce the file size of video files.

And, again, I am not being critical of your product.
It sounds to me that you are doing everything possible to provide the absolute finest quality video possible via Internet distribution.

I still want the factory-original DVD

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On the DVD issue, the compilations drive me nuts. We licensed a bunch of 4 hour compilations for our website. When I got the DVDs, I was appalled at the quality.

So, what we did was piece together all the original scene information and acquired the original pressed discs. We then ripped and encoded from the original source material for a much better result. Basically, our Internet version is a million times better than the actual pressed DVD compilation!!!

This was a pretty extreme length to go to, but I just couldn't allow an inferior product to go out to our customers.

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Jacco

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Jacco

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Speaking from the experience of a long computer career, I regret to say that the I.T. industry has sold you a pup. DRM will never do what they have promised you. The most it will do is annoy the hell out of your paying customers, and drive them away to your competitors.

I have never distributed illegal copies of music or movies, but when I rent or buy a legitimate DVD and find it will not work on my player because of some half-assed DRM scheme it really annoys me.

The use of things like region coding and the DMCA to support conspiracy in restraint of trade and deny fair use rights makes me literally bloody furious.

I can confidently say I would go without porn altogether before I would ever buy any DRM-crippled content.

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So DRM ends up being a money-making device for the content distributors. The customer has to keep paying month after month for continued access to the movies he paid for and downloaded. On the other hand, I've noticed some of the better sites that review porn sites are mentioning whether DRM is used, so it's easy to avoid these days.

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DRM is a bad solution to a real problem. It stops the very, very casual pirate. The determined pirate simply uses other measures and is perhaps slowed down by it. It doesn't stop piracy. It *does* annoy the 99% of legitimate customers. Some to the point that they stop using the service altogether, even if it is a VERY good service.

I won't join any porn site that uses DRM because it's too much of a pain in the ass to use and even if I'm "allowed" to save a copy, I can't easily move it anywhere else. I say no DRM == more business and happier customers == more profit.

Dr. P

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To start with, I'm not accusing Mike Quasar of living in a $20 million mansion. He deserves to get paid for the work he does. Most people will realize this and pay for the DVDs or downloads they buy.

The RIAA and the record labels are different, since the musicians are usually paid nothing whatever for the works they create, and make their income only from performing live. This option is not available to someone who produces and directs erotic movies.

My objections to DRM are based on the fact that it does much more harm than good, both to producer and consumer.

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On the subject of music, since the big four in music is the real horror example; I've downloaded my share of music troughout the years, mostly back in the days of the old Napster service. But when I find stuff I really like, I buy it anyway. And the stuff I don't like, I wouldn't have bought anyway. No-one loses. It's been an amazing means of exploration, discovering new artists, new genres. I'm sure I've bought three times as much music as I would have if I didn't download. Nowadays, music can be previewed through iTunes and various webstores, so I don't really bother with the downloading anymore. Now I can sample the songs with a click in iTunes and purchase it if I want to. Still on CD though, I don't want the DRM or the crappy MP3 sound quality. Anyway, I think what I'm trying to say is that the ability to download and share media should be seen as an amazing opportunity for artists and companies, they can get their music out, spread the word. It will hurt the conservative safe-bet chart material, but I can live with that. Artists, those with genuine affection for the craftswork, should embrace the opportunities, embrace the possibilities, not distance themselves from it. The big companies have been bleeding both the artists and the customers for way too long. I hear the chimes of "power to the people", and not only customers but artists too. I think it's great.

The porn business appears to have adapted a lot better than the music business from day one. But then again, porn has always been at bit at odds with the establishment. I'm much more confident that porn will find the right way out than that big record companies will. And that way, I'm pretty confident is not DRM.

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Edited by - Tinaka on 3/22/2007 10:20:40 AM

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My opinion is that the overwhelming majority of illegal activity is done by people who never would have bought anything anyway.
The Internet creates the opportunity and makes it relatively easy for tech-savvy wHaReZ types to engage in copyright theft. They are impacting every stealable form of copyright protected material out there. Video is just the latest rage now that larger files are able to be moved relatively easily. It wasn't much of a problem in the dial-up days, was it

In any event, I have personal experience here.
I once owned the largest printed-music store in Central Florida. The theft of printed copyrighted material became possible earlier than theft of recorded music, and now video, due to much smaller file sizes that were manageable even during the dial-up era.
Furthermore, most every school music teacher, choir director, music director, private music teacher, music student, etc. were active participants -- and promoters to their colleagues -- of the theft of printed copyrighted music.
This DWARFS the problems that the porn industry now faces.

The result has been the wholesale decimation of printed music catalogs (of items that had been in print for decades). Single sheet music (standard repertoire especially) has become virtually unsustainable. Basically, single sheets needed to be printed in lots of 5,000 pieces that would sell-thru within five years to be economically viable. So, poof... gone!

Now, you would think that my story would argue for strict copyright DRM technology. Not at all.
In the case of my printed-music example, you have a very small market where, basically, "everyone" who consumed the product now steals it. This started with the photo-copy machine, and the Internet has just finished the job.

In the case of porn, you have a MUCH larger overall market and a much larger consumer base.
The installed user base of perverts (like me) and stroke-shops and renters are, for the most part, legitimate consumers.
Joe married guy -- who currently goes to bricks-and-mortar stroke shops and pays $49.95, in cash, for XXX DVDs he could otherwise buy for $15-$20 online (because he needs to keep it secret from the wife/girlfriend) -- is not about to become a major source of copyright theft using the computer at home for obvious reasons :)

The way I see it, there are three true copyright-theft problems to the porn industry:

* Online sites who steal content to use on their own sites
* Organized boot-leggers "professionally" duplicating and distributing product through regular, trusted channels and largely unknown to the distrbutors and consumers who get duped
* Small-scale theft by individual stroke-shops -- that, lumped together, adds up to a huge loss of legitimate sales to the industry

The important point is, that NONE of these three examples of copyright theft to the porn industry are going to be stopped by the DRM!

Now, if the industry really thinks the Beavis & Butthead file-sharing crowd is costing them business, go ahead with DRM until you alienate and lose your faithful user base.

Or, I would suggest, focus your attention on the three examples I've mentioned

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It puts the impetus on the viewer, to sufficiently harvest enough content to merit the expenditure.
If members can't save the movies to watch at a later date, I suspect they're the breed of consumer, comfortable with viewing copious amounts of porn throughout the month, and connected with the kind of broadband, that allows them to watch premium content, whenever they care to.

Edited by - Endless Loop on 3/25/2007 6:14:54 PM

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That is the situation with DRM.

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There is a really obvious solution if you want to catch pirates, though, that doesn't hamper an honest customer's ability to enjoy his purchase: Simply tag every file with a unique identifier at the moment your customer downloads it. Then, if that file shows up on Kazaa, you know who to sue, and in the meantime, nobody's pissed off because they paid for a file that they can't watch or copy onto their other computers as they see fit (Perfectly legal, BTW, no matter what the RIAA claims).

Edited by - chaotic_23 on 3/26/2007 1:14:27 AM

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While on the subject of DRM, I was discussing this thread with my thieving nephew today and he made a very cogent comparison between stealing music and stealing porn "Even bad porn is good enough so I don't care where it comes from. It's not like it's a U2 album or something."

Also, I disagree with the car thief analogy. It's not that all of the thieves have the keys to your car, it's more like you bought a car that everyone else can drive whenever they want should you choose to leave the keys in the ignition.

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