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Dealing With Copyright Online: Porn v. Music
zzled writes "The New York Times (registration required, etc.) has an article on the porn industry's take on filesharing / copyright infringement. 'Many companies that distribute X-rated material say they do not worry too much about consumers sharing among themselves; they often unleash their lawyers only when someone is trying to profit by copying their goods and trying to sell them.' ... The article isn't particularly brilliant or insightful, but was an interesting read, especially with the explicit comparison to the approach taken by the music and movie industries."
What most people seem unwilling to recognize is that there's a lot more factors to consider.
without piracy:
- Normal customer base (x)
Most people think:
with piracy:
- Paying customers (x')
- Pirates (y)
The equation created is x' = x-y meaning piracy has cost you y sales. It's just not that simple. It's more like this:
with piracy:
- Paying customers (x')
Pirates:
- Those who would have payed if no crack was avaliable - (a)
- Those who won't pay, but heard of it through piracy - (b)
- "Try before you buy" who then buy - (c)
- "Try before you buy" who decide it's not worth it - (d)
- collectors who pirate, but don't use - (e)
- New people refered/introduced to by pirates other than (a) - (y)
- Those who won't/can't buy your program, but donate in other ways - (z)
I'm not saying anything about anyone's morals, right or wrong, simply how their actions affect the developer.
The equation now looks like this: x' = x - a + c + y + z*(whatever ratio you consider these donations to be worth)
Note that b, d and e won't pay no matter what, and so are simply free advertising, and not a lost sale.
So the only thing those people could cost you is an injury to your pride. Not such a bad thing in my books, perhaps even a good thing. Pride can be quite a detriment.
Also note, every group except x and d can bring more members to every group.
The question is: Is a > c+y?
(Ignoring z, since in most cases it can only be 0: How do you "donate" back to MS? Note this isn't a piracy problem, but rather companies refusing to accept the reality of the world: that these people exist.)
In my experience, b, c and y are huge factors, while a is very minor, especially in the "shareware" arena where freeware competition is often abundant.
Sounds like the porn industry is aware of their most successful marketing tool (Yeah, I said "tool"). I would not be suprised if Larry Flint is a major telecom stock holder. Few things drive the demand for bandwidth like a 30 nothing with an erection.
Content companies, whatever kind they are, have to give away some of their content for free in order to be able to profit on their premium content.
Consumers are not going to turn over money for content when they can't look inside the box to see what they're getting. If a content pusher doesn't have some free samples floating somewhere, there's no way they're going to be able to convince consumers that they've got the goods inside their sealed box. There has to be a free preview of some kind.
You're never going to buy a CD from an artist you've never heard sing, therefore some form of advanced sampling has to exist. I guess the porn industry realizes that the same rules apply to them, and since they don't quite yet have the ability to broadcast on the radio, they're letting filesharing do the job for them.
I suppose you could argue that porn is a vice and that if they get a little for free then they'll get hooked and soon start paying for it.
Though they seem to be giving it away - tons of web sites bill free porn for me, I just need to give them my credit card number to verify my age....yeah...
says it tracks down people who violate its copyright and, as an alternative to a lawsuit, offers amnesty if the infringer becomes a subscriber.
These guys are smart, aren't they?
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Of course, what really matters is whether they want piracy at all. They can ignore the potential earnings from piracy if they want. Hell, they could stop selling the product altogether, and still legitimately go after copyright infringers.
But besides, your formula is far too complex and with too many variables that are impossible to even guess. It's a safe bet that there are some people out there who illegally download files to save money, and who would buy the product if they couldn't download it for free. It's not necessarily a safe bet that, by allowing piracy, you'll end up with more overall sales.
I really think the music companies deserve what they get eventhough right now they are complaining about a loss of 5% when unemployment is at an all time high. I think in the future when more and more bad music comes out and good music is less frequent and MTV decides that Reality TV killed the video star that they will start giving away free music everywhere (note: already started to happen, putting mini-cds on Pepsi lids at fast food joints). I may be overly uptopian but am I the only one who thinks that music shouldnt be an industry? I swear it was a fine art. I also believe in the future when Porn gets less taboo (in america where showing a breast on TV will get you killed, meanwhile the only thing you cant say on the BBC is the CU word)and is more freely accepted they will have to give away less free porn. Music Industry here is a message for you, how about letting us choose between more than the same 10 songs you play on all your radio stations 24/7 it might suprises you but we like variety. The Porn Industry have known this for year, one just has to look at all the different websites out there from Big Booty MaMas to Lactating Grannies.
Trix are for kids!
I don't think that music/movies vs. porn can be compared... porn has a slightly (or not-so-slightly to some) addictive quality to it that music and Hollywood type movies just don't have. The porn industry benefits by wider distribution because exposing people to more porn only increases their appetite. Why do you think the usenet is flooded with free porn? It's not coming from Joe "Porn Wants to be Free" Smith, it's from the industry.
I would expect that the porn industry would have a much more difficult time if they did want to take the same stance as the music business. Can you imagine US politicians standing up and proudly supporting them in the same way as they do for the music distributors?
When you operate at the fringes of your country's moral and legal tolerance, surely the last thing you want to do is attract attention or get involved in legal battles? Of course many will argue (correctly IMNSHO) that the music distribution also pushes the boundaries of morality and legality, but the key difference is that their core business is not directly about sex. Janet Jackson gave us a clear demonstration last week of just how hung up a good proportion of the USA is. In many other nations, this incident would have barely raised any eyebrows, but in the US it's apparently world war three.
Like it or not, the RIAA's campaigning has won over much public support or acceptance - for every slashdotter who sees them as a menace, there's probably a large number of other people who see them as perfectly reasonable. But pornographers wouldn't get that kind of response and they know it. They're more likely to get themselves shut down than anything else if they raise a stink. As much as I'd like to think their attitude is because the porn business is more enlightened, I think their real motive is more likely just self-protection.
Au contraire, mon frere.
Adult entertainment is a well established film genre. Why isn't it an honest job? You wake up, drive to work, clock in, bust your hump (or hump your bust) all day, then go home, and cash your cheques.
True, there is a seedier side to some of the fly by night operations, but that's also true of import electronics, major label clothing, accounting and the stock market, as we've seen in the last few years.
Corrupting minds? Nobody is forcing anybody to watch porn. Actually, it's almost always segregated into its own section / room in a store to keep people from having to peruse it unwillingly. You have to willingly pay for it on TV.
Take your religious fundamentalist dogma elsewhere.
As for the illegality of piracy, go talk to the vice-president about halliburton. He wouldn't be doing all that if it were illegal, right?
so any exposure (pun not intended) is good for them. Plus you can't exactly advertise on prime time tv (superbowl not withstanding). There's a lot less competition in music ( between record labels that is, not artists), and they have plenty of avenues for advertisement. Obviously the RIAA isn't going to be interested in using unauthorised downloads as an advertisment medium.
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And you know what happened after the crackdown? Average ordinary convenience stores took up the slack. You'd go to buy your six-pack of beer, but not after walking down an aisle lined with porno magazines and sometimes even tapes and DVD's.
And as this is New York City, there's no need for plain brown paper wrappers to conceal what these magazines are all about. We're not talking about Penthouse or Playboy, but covers that show closeups of ass-to-mouth and animal sex action.
And this is where kids go to get their candy, soda-pop, and ring-dings. I don't know about you, but I was spared the image of a woman going down on a dog until I was well into adulthood. I happen to think that this was a good thing. But today, we're talking about kids of all ages being exposed to this kind of shit.
Fucking hilarious! Instead of having all the city's porn concentrated in well-defined areas like Times Square, Guiliani succeeded in accelerating its spread throughout all of the city's neighborhoods.
Then again, what would you expect? These are the same wizards who brought us the war on drugs.
Is this truly the only Earth I can live on?
It's not so much the sharing of material that the companies I do work for care about, but the leaking of passwords onto online sites.
When a site gets released onto a list, and several hundred people end up downloading 100meg+ movies, that's essentially a slashdot effect for you. Before I ended up implementing a protection system for one company, they spent upwards of $3k/month in bandwidth overages. This was just for one day of password leaking.
Sometimes sharing porn is good press. That's why all of SW's images are watermarked, as well as all their videos. That's partly how the word is spread. Of course, making the news on roughly 10 different shows and being contravercial doesn't hurt either :)
I know of some companies that deliberately leak passwords out onto lists for short periods of time just to drive people to the site. That works quite well. Too bad the music industry couldn't learn from something like that.
But then, the problem with the music industry is that people only want to pirate well known artists. With porn, sex is sex. No matter whose ass is involved, as long as it's a fine one, people will watch.
And people will pay. Simple as that.
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Does a 15-year-old get ostracized by their peers if they don't view the same porn as their buddies?
Music has a powerful network effect, a fashion effect. With porn, you get what you want (if you want any). With music, it's important to listen to what your social class listens to, or you aren't cool.
In that sense I think that popular music has a much more powerful hook than porn, because popular music hooks into the near-universal desire to be accepted by one's peer group.
As far as movie addiction goes, I don't see people camping for two weeks at the porn shop for the next blockbuster to come out, the way they do for Star Wars.
> "Making pornography isn't like it's an honest job or enterprise."
No, you're quite right, they should quit, join the military and kill people instead.
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Your comment really doesn't make much sense, Bangbus is a commercial site (sounds like you get your porn off of p2p heheh...) Anyways.. The thing is, today, theres a very fine line between homegrown and the big guys. There are alot of new millionaires today who started from scratch. Fuck that, the big guys barely even exist anymore. Just look at how the sales of the major magazines such as Playboy and Penthouse have collapsed in recent year. Alot of mags have had to fold. We have *alot* to learn from the porn industry today other than "they have been a driving force behind technology." If the Record and major media industries lacked the obscene amount of power they have today -- they'd already be gone, just like the big players in the porn industry. But guess what, suprise! Porn isn't dead, in fact its more alive and well than its ever been before in human history! Yes, those lobbyists who say "give us protection or such and such industry is going to die" are completely full of bullshit.
Ok, a few quick questions-- What's the average budget of making an 'adult' movie? What's the average salary of a pornstar? How much are these movies/VCDs/DVDs sold for? Less than your average record deal, less than your average pop idol and less than your average CD. I haven't done any hard research or dug that deep (ahem), but I'm guessing that even the super star of porn makes dirt compared to your average syndicated recording artist.
All in all, it's really simple-- The recording industry has a larger power base and more money t protect than triple-AAA porn company. of course, the same can't be said about Playboy or Penthouse, which will rabidly go after infringers. It's not surprising that the companies behaviors reflects the size of their empires...
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if they can get under age people to get porn over the internet. When they're of age they'll be more likely to purchase porn. Just a thought.
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My partner is involved in still and streaming porn production, and according to him porn producers generally want the widest distribution of their content as possible. The deal with porn is that many of the images and videos produced are watermarked with the site name or other source identifier. Since people who consume porn have an effectively infinite appetite, they will continue looking for new porn after consuming their previous download. Whether the content was obtained legally or illegally, it probably has a watermark. If they liked the content, they are more likely, though not guaranteed, to look for additional content with the same source. For those who keep up to date with the latest porn, this will drive customers to their sites. The reason this works for online porn is that they have a well-established web presence and content which is easy to obtain relatively inexpensively. With the sheer volume of newsgroups and other media distributing legal and illegal copies of their content, they have a free and massive marketing apparatus. And again, given the near infinite appetite of the consumer base, even if a large percentage of their content is eventually pirated, there is always more being produced and consumers hungry for the newest stuff they haven't seen.
... Porn was over 1/3rd of all traffic on the net, last time I checked
Another poster also observed that the parent comment is a bit on the absurd side. Not necessarily that the fact is wrong even; but it's not like my personal Apache log shows "traffic on the net." Unless downix works for the NSA, and is leaking some classified information, there's really no way to verify what everyone on the net does.
BTW, I "5-figure takehome salary" could be $10,000... which I would actually call rather shabby (though if it's for part time work, it might still be good). Claiming something like "high 5-figure" would sound a lot more impressive (i.e. meaning >$50k).
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Fifteen years ago there were three major producers of Porn and very few distribution companies and they made all the money. Then came video, the 'net, open distribution, and now there are hundreds of Porn companies, most of which make decent money, but no single company makes more than 15% of the whole market. The big three are still rich, but nowhere near as rich or dominant. And there is better porn (also worse porn, sicker porn, more boring porn, every kind of porn).
This is exactly what will/should happen with music. Just imagine: hundreds of different record companies, all with more or less equal access to the market. You'd have lots of new music--some great, some lousy, some that only you and a hundred others would love. And as much as I love Springsteen, it would be fine with me if he only made $5 million a year and several thousand other bands each made $100,000 a year.
The problem for the big five record companies (soon to be only three, through mergers) is that they're on such a scale that they simply wouldn't work on a smaller scale. The big 3 porn cos were small enough and nimble enough to adjust down. The big five are terrified. I spoke with a high-ranking executive at one of the big 5 and he said it's about 50/50 they'll be in business in five years. He said he's kind of looking forward to early retirement. But who cares? Get rid of them. In ten years or fifty, there will still be money to be made in music and there will be companies making it. It would be great if there are many small companies instead of a handful of big ones.
...has figured things out. Trading images that contain their copyright has been allowed by a lot of sites as they consider it free advertising and they know it works.
So the RIAA should recognize that most people don't have the time/patience to download 10 or more songs for an album, but hearing one or two might make them go out and by it.
Just my 2 cents from a pr0n freak. LOL.
--- There is a man in a smiling bag.
I think there are other relevant factors:
* Prescedent. This is a biggie, or has at least been cited as a big worry by the industry. What happens if people get *comfortable* pirating media over P2P? It's a social move that would be very, very difficult to reverse (view cigarettes -- extremely difficult to excise from society after having been introduced).
* The elimination of certain forms of marketing-driven sales. One of the largest United States macroeconomic benefits is the world's best marketing system. Yes, engineers like to insult marketers, but when it comes down to it, the fact that we can sell Elvis in Mongolia is why Western-produced products are valued so highly, and why so much wealth has been brought into the United States. In the past, it has been possible to sell relatively poor content very well with effective marketing, because one is able to ensure that people are unfamiliar with the product that they are buying until after they buy it. Furthermore, (for movie companies in particular) controlling the format in which viewers see content for the first time can be very important in shaping impressions and building word-of-mouth. If they see it in a darkened movie theater on a big screen with surround sound, they may weight it more favorably than the things they see on their old Zenith on VHS at home. If someone sees a poor-quality rip of The Matrix and doesn't pick up on all the fine CG detail, they may have a significantly lower opinion of the movie. First impressions translate into word-of-mouth, which translate into sales.
* Control is a big deal. The ability to produce a few higher-priced limited edition releases can be lucrative.
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