op/ed by Jake Harris
As you sit there reading this one of the largest efforts to stop porn piracy to date is taking place. Pink Visual is staging the Content Protection Retreat at an undisclosed location somewhere near Tucson, Arizona October 17th-19th. The stated goal of the retreat is simple: “To significantly reduce digital piracy of adult content and to effectively drive those who engage in adult content piracy completely underground by January 2012.” By bringing together up to 30 of the industries top production companies Pink Visual is hoping to create a united front that will be able to effectively combat digital piracy.
While many of the details of the event are being held in secrecy a few things are known. Two days of educational programming will be offered with representatives from the Free Speech Coalition in attendance as well as Gill Sperlein, general counsel for Titan Media. According to the CPR website (www.contentprotectionretreat.com) a number of industry leaders will be attending the retreat including Pink Visual, Hustler, and Evil Angel.
While they do have a pretty, nicely designed website…what is there to make of this and will any of it work?
First off, Pink Visual isn’t disclosing any real information about the event, including what the specific topics of discussion will be or what the educational programming will consist of. This tends to make me believe that more than anything else this retreat is simply a meeting of 30 production companies who want to brainstorm and see if the collective can come up with a new way to attack an old problem.
While not trying to beat a dead horse it’s imperative to look at the problem of piracy as objectively as possible. Piracy has been around for as long as original content has been able to be copied and it will not go away regardless of the laws or the efforts to thwart the pirates. No matter what steps are taken to combat piracy you will always have people in unregulated locales that want to provide the content for free. Additionally, as long as the responsibility to police piracy remains with the copyright holder it will be an uphill battle on a very slippery hill.
The way I see it there are a few options moving forward, and who knows, maybe these are currently being discussed in Tucson.
One: Live and let live. Recognize that people will continually attempt to pirate copyrighted material and many will do so knowing full well that it is against the laws. A lot of people out there believe very strongly in personal freedoms and deregulation and will take any attempt to stop them as a personal attack. To get a sense of this just visit some of the more popular forums and you will find a near-militant group of people who will pirate ridiculously obscure movies, music, and magazines just because they believe in their right to be able to do so. If this option is selected the studios need to adjust and realize what their customers will be willing to pay for and just how much they might spend. Hopefully this way they can maximize profits while still adjusting their margins to “allow” for some piracy.
Two: Attack individual users so strongly that a lot of the pirates will stop out of fear of either embarrassment or monetary suffering. This strategy is currently being applied by Larry Flynt Publications as just last month they sued 635 people in a Texas court. The individuals being sued are being targeted for pirating titles that fall into one of two categories: Shemale or 18 year-old girls. The thinking behind these two categories is that the potential embarrassment of being “outed” as a fan of either shemale or 18 year-old girl porn in a lawsuit will have the defendants settle immediately and halt future piracy. We have yet to see if the embarrassment factor will work but judging by past failures in other industries I don’t see the monetary suffering as being too great a hindrance. A simple Google search reveals anything and everything you could ever want to pirate, whether it be a torrent or hosted at a site such as Rapidshare.
Three: Create new, and innovative, streams of income. As we all know the adult film industry traditionally leads the pack into new technologies and revenue streams before some of the other, more mainstream, industries. It might just be the time to do that again and take the next step. 3-D porn, interactive sex toys, online interactive porn, and who knows what else might be viable ways to make money before the technology exists for the pirates to copy it and distribute it effectively.
I believe that the best course of action would be to take a combination of options one and three; accept that piracy will happen and do your best to develop new sources of revenue. Piracy is going to happen and profitability will follow those who progress in spite of it.
Sources–
http://www.contentprotectionretreat.com/index.html
http://www.contentprotectionretreat.com/agenda.html
http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/films/porn-titans-come-together-to-expose-pirates-2090786.html
The problem that the industry alongside with mainstream hollywood etc has failed to realize is that most customers are indeed willing to pay for original material, Theres plenty of money to be made with that.
Their failure consists in not being able to produce very much original material combined with treating their customers like idiots.
Seriously, what sane customer is actually willing to spend 29.99$ on “bla bla huge dicks bla bla young girls nr43”.
Or for that matter 97% of the drivel mainstream hollywood have produced in the last 15 years.
that’s pretty much why I wrote the last article https://www.lukeisback.com/?p=14217
the price has to compete with free. higher quality than what’s being offered for free at a price that is justifiable. we saw the music industry’s response by selling songs individually as opposed to requiring people to purchase an entire cd for the 1 or 2 songs they like. We as an industry have to lower our prices to compete and until we do people will still seek out free content and sacrifice the quality.
Individual users? Think about this Sean Connery quote from The Untouchables:
“You don’t get an apple off the ground. You get it from the tree.”
The embarrassment angle isn’t going to work. If porn is going so mainstream these days, who’s going to blush over downloading something in this new era of permissiveness?
first the idea that you cant get quality for free is incorrect dvd and blu ray rips are an identical copy of the source disk, there isnt even any generation loss like you used to see in VHS copies.
technology will prevent the theft of streaming video eventually, not to mention illegal copies.
Dont believe that? Ever try to rip a netflix streaming movie? or play an illegal copy of GTA on your PS3?
A friend of mine downloaded a free program from the internet that converted his entire porn DVD collection into mp4 files. Files that he saved on a massive external hard drive. He can then download a batch of those files into his ipod and watch them anytime he wanted.
Funny thing is, he couldn’t convert any mainstream movies because they were copy protected. Sure he could have found a way to break it, but he didn’t bother with it.
What he doesn’t understand is that if the porn industry is so up in arms with piracy, why didn’t they copy protect their DVDs?
plain old DVDs cant really be copy protected…attempts to do so are easily defeated. BluRay on the other hand CAN.
And new videos are still being released on DVD every week.
According to my friend, those DVD’s still don’t have copy protect.
As for BluRay, I’ve stopped watching mainstream movies on DVD. I will never go back to DVD mainstream movies ever again.
Porn on the other hand has been very slow to embrace BluRay, from what I’ve seen at my rental stores. The BluRay porn that is out there isn’t worth a rental. I still rent DVD porn because the companies that releases my favorite series aren’t doing blu-ray.
I’ll gladly rent or buy blu-ray porn if a lot more video companies release them.
they will dvd is going the way of VHS
but the real future is streaming right to your TV
And none of the big players are offering porn nor are they even considering it….
DVD will still be around for several more years.
well the file sharing sites have file size limits of around 200mb which makes a true HD file split into sometimes more than ten files that have to be downloaded individually and then joined with HJ split. to get access to multiple daily downloads through a file sharing site you have to pay a monthly fee of around $10.
this is true for hotfiles, rapidshare, mega and others. so if sites offered their content for the same price as a file sharing account…wouldn’t it be much more competitive?
i have gone through thousands of pages on file sharing forums finding my content and many of the files of videos are smaller screen sizes to accomodate the file size restrictions. like an 856×480 movie becomes 520×300 or something and bandwidth is reduced…causing loss of quality.
while rapidshare and hotfiles are problems there are far worse ones…bit torrents being one and then you get to the grandaddy of em all…usenet, which isn’t a site at all and predates the www by more than ten years.
I can honestly say, without fear of contradiction, that Usenet is NOT the big bad boogeyman it used to be, Mike. It’s been flooded with so much spam, fakes and viruses over the years that coupled with the comparative difficulty involved in setting it up, that it’s no longer a viable option for casual downloaders.
you obviously do not know how to use usenet…I can find any movie, mainstream or porn in less than 5 mins a day after it releases…sometimes even before release.
sony vegas 10 released monday for example it was on usenet monday at 8PM edt
usenet is a problem because unlike torrent sites, theres no site needed, there arent seeders or shit like that if you understand how usenet works….its the tough one to stop, fortunatly most people have no idea how to use it.
…..
…right.
The porn business experienced double digit growth almost every year for THREE decades. However, it seemed to jump to the EXPLODE around 2003 when porn DVD’s seemed to be available everywhere for rent or purchase. It was great to see VHS finally end it’s run, DVD’s were so much better in quality and of course, so much smaller to handle.
Then, before you knew it it all came crashing down via dvd copying and internet piracy. It got worse with the murders, lockups and suicides. It all grew too much, too fast and too long. It was a porn bubble that like all bubbles, had to pop.
I don’t know what the next step is, my gut feeling is that the old guard won’t collapse completely but someone/something new will come down the pipe. I’m not too worried about it, most of the porn really, really sucks and the people involved are mostly dregs of society and/or assholes. I like my porn though, it’s still out there everywhere. Maybe that’s the biggest problem.
Usenet is not as popular as it used to be but its still a goldmine for uberhackers like Mike South.
Don’t be a douche to Mike South now…
XNXX was attacked last week and the server is still down.
Is this the work of POPS? (Pissed Off Production Studios)
Hey Im simply pointing out what i know because I police my content vigilantly and I am always looking for ways to make it even more difficult to pirate.
Call me uberhacker or whatever you like but I have been a UNIX sysadmin since 1979, I knew usenet inside out way before it was used for piracy
Dont be a douchebag who thinks he knows something about me when all he is doing is talking outta his ass
Just to be clear, I was defending you Mike…
LOL sorry misunderstood…I do that sometimes cuz I get a lot of BS about I must be a pirate to know so much about how to steal it yada yada…..
I humbly seek your forgiveness and understanding, I am but a simple man LOL