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."
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.
Sharing porn? Just as long as the pages don't stick together.....
[ ]
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...
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.
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?
Free XBox, PS2
The Pornography Industry vs. Digital Pirates By JOHN SCHWARTZ
Published: February 8, 2004
HOUSANDS of Web sites are putting Playboy magazine's pictures on the Internet - free. And Randy Nicolau, the president of Playboy.com, is loving it. "It's direct marketing at its finest," he said.
Let the music industry sue those who share files, and let Hollywood push for tough laws and regulations to curb movie copying. Playboy, like many companies that provide access to virtual flesh and naughtiness, is turning online freeloaders into subscribers by giving away pictures to other sites that, in turn, drive visitors right back to Playboy.com.
When Mr. Nicolau is asked whether he thinks that the entertainment industry is making a mistake by taking a different approach, he replies: "I haven't spent much time thinking about it. It's like asking Henry Ford, 'What were the buggy-whip guys doing wrong?' ''
The copyright rumble is playing out a little differently in the red-light districts of cyberspace. That neighborhood is increasingly difficult to confine, what with a fetishwear-clad Janet Jackson flashing a Super Bowl audience of millions, and Paris Hilton making her own version of a "Girls Gone Wild" video. Professional peddlers say they are hard pressed to compete.
Still, the business of being bad is very good, especially for the biggest players. Though the industry has felt a financial squeeze during the economic slowdown, it nonetheless has sales of as much as $2 billion each year, said Tom Hymes, the editor of AVNOnline, a business magazine for the industry.
And the pornography industry, which has always been among the first to exploit new technologies, including the VCR, the World Wide Web and online payment systems, is finding novel ways to deal with the threat of online piracy as well. The mainstream entertainment industry, some experts say, would do well to pay attention.
Music executives say their campaign of lawsuits has been successful. They say they have spread the word that downloading free music infringes on copyrights and that there could be consequences for large-scale file sharers.
But the pornography industry has been dealing with Internet copyright issues since the 1980's. By comparison, the movie and music businesses are relative newcomers. Mr. Hymes said companies in his industry had come to realize that suing consumers and promoting "draconian laws" were not the answer. "No law written can stem the tide," he said. And so, he said, companies are seeking ways to live with the technologies that threaten them and are trying to turn them to their advantage.
That is not to say that the companies have not been harmed by free copying and distribution of copyrighted material online. Mr. Hymes's magazine warned recently that such companies were "losing incalculable amounts of cash" to peer-to-peer file-sharing networks like Kazaa, LimeWire, Grokster and Bit Torrent.
"As the networks continue to grow and even more sophisticated programs are created, the P2P networks might prove a bigger threat to the revenue stream of the porn world than all the censorious right-wingers in the country put together," the article stated.
Maybe. But 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.
When people in the industry talk of copyright, there is none of the grand speechifying about revering artists and rewarding creativity, and the near-tearful paeans to the yeoman key grips and stunt men, as is favored by movie and record executives. Instead, there is just this: We spent a lot of money to get this stuff out to the market. Somebody else is making money off of it. We want the money.
"We haven't gone after Joe Citizen who's sharing something he printed off something from the Hustler Web site with another guy," said Paul Cambria, a lawyer wh
Music labels should learn from the porn industry and start spamming everyone's e-mail inboxes with free music.
I can listen to a song more than once.
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.
...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.
I think the real lesson that the MPAA and RIAA should take from the Porn Industry is to replicate their highly marketable content...
;)
Oh, yeah. Too late.
"What do you think?" "I think 'What, do you think?!'"
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.
Why can't the movie and music industries act as ethically as the porno industry!?!
I stole this Sig
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?
"corruption of minds" market,
Corruption of minds? You obviously haven't seen some of the porn I've seen. More like comedy, with the wooden acting and unbelievable plots.
If it's not an "honest job or enterprise", how does it make money? Obviously, there's a demand, and they fill it..... (ba-dum-dum!)
Karnal
I have over 11 GB of pr0n on my hd right now, I never paid a cent for any of it.
I have over 4 GB of music on my HD righ now, I bought most of the CDs that it came from.
IMO it's also far more likely for people to buy music than pr0n. Someone could be in the mall and happen to see an old CD from an artist that they like and pick it up.
Nobody is going to see ideepthroat.com's greatest hits on the rack at Best Buy and impulse buy a copy.
Besides, the pr0n industry has already mastered online content distribution. The music industry has a LOOOOOOONG way to go.
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
Porn was over 1/3rd of all traffic on the net, last time I checked. The amount of money they generate because they have embraced openness has made even Microsoft envious.
A typical $10k porn movie can generate tens of millions in sale. Just need to slip some clips into a common p2p network with some taglines, and people go out to buy the whole thing. A friend of mine runs several porn sites, makes a comfortable living off of them, providing original content. (5-figure takehome salary, not too shabby) He points out how the movies he has clips of invariably end up his top sellers. And those clips are traded freely on P2P networks. He releases a new clip, putting it on KaZaa himself, sales for it boom in less than 14 days.
The net is a wonderful technology, if you let it be.
Karma Whoring for Fun and Profit.
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.
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 $3k/month in bandwidth overages. This was just for one day of password leaking.
Sometimes sharing porn is good press. That's why all of SW's images are watermarked, as well as all their videos. That's partly how the word is spread. Of course, making the news on roughly 10 different shows and being contravercial doesn't hurt either :)
I know of some companies that deliberately leak passwords out onto lists for short periods of time just to drive people to the site. That works quite well. Too bad the music industry couldn't learn from something like that.
But then, the problem with the music industry is that people only want to pirate well known artists. With porn, sex is sex. No matter whose ass is involved, as long as it's a fine one, people will watch.
And people will pay. Simple as that.
/^[A-Z0-9._%+-]+@[A-Z0-9.-]+\.[A-Z]{2,4}$/i
Doesn't look that way to me... rather it looks like music is becoming porn. Apart from the obvious recent incident with Janet Jackson, we get the ever so slutty Christina Aguilera, and the increasingly less innocent Britney Spears. Perhaps the singers are just trying to get a foot in both markets ;-)
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.
I was busted a few months ago for downloading porn. The scary thing was I had only downloaded a few megabytes worth over the course of a few hours! My cable modem was shut off and I was sent a registered letter. I was able to settle out of court for $75. How embarrassing! Getting busted by the porn industry was the last thing on my mind! So, just to let you know, some porn companies are getting serious about copyright infringement.
The good thing however is I ordered a premium cable package where they uncapped my modem. When the cable company reactivated my account, my cable modem was still uncapped but I am paying for the basic cable price! That $75 will have paid itself off in 2 months!
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...
You need a FREE iPod Nano
I have little to add to your excellent post, except another fun category that serves to confuse the matter.
When it comes to buying games, I belong to both the buyer and the pirate group. I'll buy the game, discover that anti-piracy measures in it serve to inhibit gameplay, and have to go searching for a no-CD crack. Most recent example: KOTOR. I bought the game, I have the nice spiral-bound manual, etc. However, frequently while the game was loading, it would "fail" the original CD check. Sometimes it took upwards of five minutes just to start. Finally got frustrated, found a crack (took a few seconds), patched, and stored the CD elsewhere.
You know that you have a failure when your copy-protection fails to stop pirates, and inhibits the paying customer. Just in case anyone thought that the **IA was the only group of people who needed a reality check.
Auto-reply to ACs: "Truly, you have a dizzying intellect."
The two examples I always pull out are the Grateful Dead and x-rated material. Both had 100% "piracy rates" and both made a lot of money. By the logic of the MPAA and RIAA, both should have been decimated. But that was not the case.
"How perfectly Goddamn delightful it all is, to be sure" Charles Crumb
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.
its on the tip of my tongue... that word for when someone is tricked into believing in something and paying money to see it, but its all a setup. Like P.T.Barnum or 'Ripleys believe it or not'.
:-/
The acts performed in a lot of porno are not necessarily acts which it is a great pleasure to perform.
They are not intended to feel good for the participants (who get paid to do it); they are intended to make money. Sex is essentially a tactile thing, not primarily visual.
To make money it has to look good. We don't have 'feelies' yet.
The sort of sex act that feels good may well not look good on camera. Duh.
What happens if its presented in such a way that a *LOT* of people wind up thinking that this is what sex really is?
Unwittingly, they join the Voluntary Human Extinction Project since these 'sex acts' are almost always non-reproductive; semen is usually deposited on some external surface. Think of it as a 'Catholic' guide to birth control.
Pro-wrestling is similar. Except with less bodily fluids. How many pro wrestling fans draw on what they see in 'the ring' as a benchmark for their internal model of physics? Their estimate of what happens to a person when a chair is broken across their back, for example? Maybe people arn't that dumb.
However, in both cases, I think theres an underlying dishonesty.
I could have got human stupidity all wrong, of course.
In the free world the media isn't government run; the government is media run.
It just goes to show. When you put porn and music together, bow chicka-bow-bow...
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.
You have a problem.
No I don't. I still have over 22 GB free.
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano