Slashdot Mirror
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."
Lots of porn is homegrown, as in, made by people with a video camera and a rental bus(Bangbus). When this spreads around, it's like increasing the group's ego and contributes to making more episodes.
-Just my 2 cents.
...not on rock and roll. The Net was built on porn. If it weren't for the porn industry the net would still back in early 90s. Think about it: Porn was the original ecommerce app. So many major internet developments have been in someway infuenced by the porn industry that everyone else making a buck on the net should pay royalties. The recording industry should pay attention.
The Drake Equation of FileSharing.
For those of you who aren't already in the know The Drake Equation defines the possibility of Extraterrestrial Intelligence in terms of a whole bunch of probabilities.
And just like the above equation, nobody has nailed down exactly what those probabilities are.
Still, it has officially turned it into something you can calculate, and scientists the world over like to talk of The Drake Equation.
Visit CryptoGnome in his home.
I'm not going to get into whether online piracy is right or not. I just think that the porn industry's situation seems different than that of Hollywood and the record industry, and that whatever works for the porn industry might not work for other media makers.
I'm going on hearsay now, but it seems that there are a ton of porn movies released all the time. Such a bulk of low quality limited distribution titles limits illegal trading. There's enough people out there interested in "Pirates of the Caribbean" that if you go online you're guaranteed to find a download at a decent connection speed. On the other hand, if you were looking for something like "Butt Knockers 2" I would bet my dog and fish you couldn't find it (especially since I made up the name...). The DVDs are released to such a limited audience, and there's just too many titles to be effectively traded online.
It is not only video technology that is driven by porn merchants. The quality and smartness of search engines - more specifically, their ranking algorithms - has been totally driven by the tricks employed by seedy online advertisers and money makers, who (almost) invariably focus on pornography in some way.
Recently, I spent a week at the University of Sydney, coding a search engine for a small chairty site, in Python. A lecturer/programmer who was holding lectures and tutorials for us, named Dr James, explained some of the more common tricks.
In the beginning it was rather quaint, with things like blocks of text at the bottom of a page that was the same colour as the page's background (and thus rendered unnoticed by most porn-hungry surfers) containing copius amounts of popular keywords, with actual relevancy taking a backseat to the ad-revenue-generating "hit words".
Then, Google came to the forefront with the Stanford-educated founders' special pafge ranking algorithms (which factored in links to and from the page into an "integrity" score of some sort). The porn folks started creating hundreds of near identical, yet slightly differently located pages (on different domains, and more importantly, different machines), all containing links to one another, resulting in one very confusing, un-trustworthy conglomerate askuing for your hard earned cash. This became the monster that is the experience of going around in circles in these pages, trying to actually get to the.... uh... honey (I recall someone writing an article about the same phenomenon within warez circles). To my knowledge, Google then began to look more thouroughly at content in order to discern what belonged to one "conglomerate" and what was legitemately a seperate entity; looking at headers and IPs was totally uneffective at this stage.
I was only truly impressed when I heard about this scam: porn merchants actually writing scripts that served dynamic content based on who visited. This ability is obviously legitimately useful and indispensable for many sites providing dynamic content (Slashdot being one of them), but these chaps set it up so that is it was one of Google, Altavista, Yahoo, whoever's machines pulling down a web page for indexing, they got a different page than any surfer who came along. One result was when people searched for Disney, one of the first results' descriptions in Google appeared as Disney's official site, and then when clicked on by anyone, was - surprise surprise - an eshop for a knock-off merchandiser's product-line. Eventually some angry Disney executive contacted the search engine and IIRC legal action was taken.
Suffice to say, the development of search engines' technology has been fueled by those out to make a quick, slimey buck. The result, however, is not simply better protection from the sleaze; there is a "side-effect" of search results picked even among all-legit sites being vastly superior in relevancy, and a general improvement in the state of computation linguistics which can be applied for other purposes.
What makes a man want to be a mouse? (Python's Flying Circus)