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Tactics in the Porn Industry's Fight Against Piracy
An anonymous reader writes "A C|Net article discusses the technological innovations being used by the porn industry to ensure they stay relevant (like streaming HD-quality feeds and remote interaction), as well as profitable. Live performances and cutting-edge technology combine to ensure a steady stream of revenue in the age of free downloads. 'Now Kink.com is on the cutting edge of the fight against video piracy. While mainstream entertainment outlets like Viacom and NBC complain noisily about YouTube, Kink.com, with neither the resources nor the mainstream appeal of its giant counterparts, is in an even tougher fight: Protecting the content it produces that's continually copied and reposted on the dozens of Web sites that traffic in poached adult material.'"
The idea of "remote interaction" sounds very promising. :D
Yes, first ensure your now dead cat is cooked though-out and start with the head.
Unless you are interested in the business story of a porn outlet, there is almost nothing in TFA about copyright. They move to live streams (although at higher resolution than most non-porn streams seem to offer), to make it more difficult and less interesting to copy content. Editors: Why was this omitted from the summary?
At the beginning was at.
Corrupt: Remaking Modern Society
Live performances and cutting-edge technology combine to ensure a steady stream of revenue
Oh, so that's what they're calling it these days.
The theory of relativity doesn't work right in Arkansas.
Seriously. I got pissed off trying to get laid with girls who didn't even give me a second look. Don't go out and find some dirty street hooker though, get yourself a high-class escort. It'll cost, but it's worth it. In the long run it'll probably cost less than a girlfriend or wife would, plus there's no commitment, no birthdays, anniversaries or valentine's days to worry about and certainly no inevitable costly divorce ;-) Plus if you're a regular client you'll probably get a discount. Think about it, all the sex without the nagging wife. I've been doing this for some years now and my life is great, sure my friends who have girlfriends or wives get sex more often than I do, but I get anal, a completely shaved pussy and no hassle. Plus my mates can come over for sports / film nights whenever I want.
That's one idea, and a good one. However not all porn can be live, it's simply not feasible for certain types. I would say the best way to prevent piracy and ensure that SOMEBODY finances the production of the stuff would be to slap it with invisible, personally identifying watermarks. If they are spotted on pictures and images found in the wild, so to speak, your subscription is cancelled and you don't get a refund.
Although that might make people want to give them all away the day before their subscription ends, so that part I'm not sure about yet.
audioLibre - freedom of music
an give an insightful answer, i'll have to do a bit of.... reasearch on this one.
Gotta go now
funny pics
So the message is not, "hey you dirty immoral pirates take a lesson from us porn starts", the message is "hey you silly family entertainers, if a bunch of us porn stars can turn a profit with the help of modern technology, why can't you?"
weirdest thing I ever saw: scientology advertising on slashdot.
For example if you move to BluRay production, the "total quality" media will be 50 GB and the pirates using P2P (which as I tipped, they sometimes leak their own) will know there is a 1080p version out there.
That is why Sony and Toshiba (Bluray vs HD-DVD) are speaking with that industry now, I believe lots of HD-Camera/Equipment vendors too.
That the last 3 articles I have read on Slashdot about porn industry technology challenges and advances have all referenced kink.com. As many porn sites as there are, this seems like an odd coincidence. Sounds like a subtle advertising campaign to me.
"Would you, could you, with a goat?" Dr Seuss
It's not that ironic, the porn industry tends to be a missionary when it comes to new technology. Remember how everyone was saying sony was going to take it doggystyle because there was a blurb about the porn industry shifting to HD-DVD? As of yet, I don't see a dirty sanchez appearing on the Sony name, at least not from that "war".
/. It's really too bad, because it seems like their trying to play a rusty trombone, but they're felching it up. The profits they could receive from the menage-a-trois of dvds/online distribution/set-top sales(vod) would provide a real shocker if they could do so in a non-intrusive manner. I'd much rather be dry-humped then have to use the provided glory hole and hope there's not a pitbull on the other side.
You can't expect the *IAA to do a reverse cowgirl on their stand either, to do so would be to open themselves up to ridicule across the media band, not just in sixty-nine articles on
Sure porn piracy runs rampant, has for decades. But, umm, how much do they sell in a year? If you want to try fellatio on my conscious, it's not going to happen. I'll never pay for porn.
Don't worry if you're a kleptomaniac, you can always take something for it.
Porn as a product is an interesting one. As a commodity, it's marketplace is almost unsaturateable. So the only real downside for a porn company having paying subscribers reposting material is the potential loss of an individual subscription. I say potential because there is no guarantee that they would have paid you in the first place, and like the other guy said, if they like what they see they might drop by and actually sign up ('probly not but a few will). But, by actually cancelling a subscription they ARE losing a paying customer. In a marketplace that can't be saturated, all you need to do is spit as much product out as possible because the market will always be there. Your customers will not pay for something they have previously viewed anyway, so your inventory is not really worth as much as one might imagine. In this light, there is absolutely no upside to cancelling a subscription, it can only cost money; either in tech investment, or employee time to actually remove the client.
If there is any Irony, it's not so much the porn industry's actions, but the anti-piracy fight from the rest of the industry. The RIAA and MPAA started pushing terms like theft and piracy to influence the mainstream consumers, and a lot of their advertizing is aimed at 'wholesome family values' types. (Like the movie adds that say "You wouldn't steal a purse..." - last time I saw it, I looked around the theatre and realized a couple of the people in there probably paid for the ticket that way). What's ironic is that this puts middle america on the side of protecting all industral IP, including porn. It's like the drug laws - Individual dope dealers may not like the drug laws, but organized crime has figured out how to exploit the existing drug laws so well that they actually like them, and so supporting the existing situation puts 'the forces of goodness and niceness' on the same side as the Mob.
Who is John Cabal?
Nice -- at first, I thought the use of the word "missionary" was unintentional, then I read on. Well-done!
I too have felt the cold finger of injustice.
O....k, I agree with most of what you're saying, but what is this bit about $5 account? I've done a little research of my own (ahem), and I don't see a difference at all between the motivation for someone to get a paid slashdot account (a little money to make the ads go bysies) and for someone to get a paid empornium account (a little money to make the dirty pictures that I want to see in a non-ad format go bysies). If you've lived in a western culture and have more than half a brain (which I'm guessing is most of the people here) then you'll learn to just screen 99% of ads out (the only ones that seem to have any effect are the ones with catchy jingles). Hell, I've had a gmail account for about a year and a half or so now, and I only noticed the ads about 3 months ago..
Commodore64_love: I don't comprehend people who're so frightened of death that they'll bankrupt themselves to stay alive
so how does someone writing a book do this then? "live readings" may not exactly be as profitable.
And how does this apply to people making software, movies or games?
With all other situations where people break the law, efforts are made to enforce it better. With copyright infringement, the call goes out to "change your broken business model". why?
All business models will fail if people are allowed to break the law. No shop can employ enough security to prevent everyone shoplifting at once. Show me a business model that is not dependent on the law being adhered to.
The games industry is adapting to mass piracy by abandoing the open platform that is the PC, in favour of online games and consoles. For the singleplayer RPG or flight sim fan, the way piracy has forced a 're-evaluation of the business model' is just to wipe out the entire industry. Not exactly the optimal solution for consumers.
DRM-free indie games for the PC and Mac: Positech Games
And how does this apply to people making software, movies or games?
Books are a false parallel since technology is not threatening their existing business model: print books are still much more popular than e-books an will remain that way for a very long time. I suppose you could argue that people are reading less due to alternative activities (such as TV and the slashdot), but in that case authors are just losing out because nobody wants their product. Besides, the greatest literature or the english language (Shakespeare) was produced at a time when plagiarism was common, accepted practice. Seemed to work well enough to keep him writing for his entire lifetime.
As for software, most people who write Linux get paid for their efforts. I am sure that whoever owns WoW does not really mind if people pirate their game since most of their revenue is from subscriptions to their servers. For things that people want, ways to get paid for producing them exist without needing to hobble technology.
I think that people in some facets of the entertainment industry are going to have to accept that nobody is willing to pay them for what they do any more and they need to find a better way of making a living. Movies are probably a good example of an entertainment medium on the way out the door: why pay to go to a Lord of the Rings movie when you can be the Lord of the Rings in an on-line world?
With all other situations where people break the law, efforts are made to enforce it better. With copyright infringement, the call goes out to "change your broken business model". why? No, that is not true. If it were then alcohol would still be illegal in the US. People break the law to get it changed all the time. It is called civil disobedience. In the US it is the only way to challenge an unjust law in court. The call for the music industry to change their business model is not based on copyright infringement, it is based on the fact that media companies base their business model on content distribution methods that are obsolete. Rather than adapting to the new methods, they are trying to hobble the methods. If we as a society allow this kind of thing to happen, you would have laws protecting steam-engine manufactures from rouge internal combustion engines.All business models will fail if people are allowed to break the law. No shop can employ enough security to prevent everyone shoplifting at once. Show me a business model that is not dependent on the law being adhered to.
mercenaries? The games industry is adapting to mass piracy by abandoing the open platform that is the PC, in favour of online games and consoles. For the singleplayer RPG or flight sim fan, the way piracy has forced a 're-evaluation of the business model' is just to wipe out the entire industry. Not exactly the optimal solution for consumers. BS. I can copy a console game easily. The game industry is moving to consoles because with dedicated hardware you can get performance on a $500 console that you need a $3,000 dollar computer to replicate.
weirdest thing I ever saw: scientology advertising on slashdot.
The game makers avoid the PC because the profit margins are too low. Not because the consoles have better hardware. Or so my friends in that business tells me.
Piracy is surely keeping the prices down, but the fix is obvious: Move much of the content online. Games where big parts are served over the net are much, much harder to pirate in the big scale.
Religion is regarded by the common people as true, by the wise as false, and by rulers as useful.
Yes, first ensure your now dead cat is cooked though-out and start with the head.
Kittens are best of course, far more tender and less stringy. But for the REAL thing, you should try puppy.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
If you and a friend buy the same thing, you'll get a stream S mixed with watermarks X and Y (S+X, S+Y). XOR them together; Make zero anything in both files that's 1 in the XOR: The data is the same, and is zero when XORed with itself, whereas a watermark will be ~50% 1 and 50% 0. So, S+X + (random) AND (S+X XNOR S+Y) will destroy a mean of half the watermark bits in X's file.
Disclaimer: IANACryptologist.
Well, another reason is that porn is a damn saturated market with low production costs. I think I recall reading that porn DVDs were coming out at such a rate that you could run it 24/7/365 with no reruns and still only build a backlog. Pretty much no matter what your preference is, there are plenty to choose from.
Compare that to your movie habits, it's pretty few and far between big releases. Also they're not very good substitutes, you're not going to take Star Wars and claim it's exactly like Star Trek and it doesn't matter which one you see, whereas "Blonde teens #13" probably isn't too far from "Young and blonde #11".
So what's this mostly about? It's about differentiating themselves from their competitors, to give their customers something they're not getting from every porn producer with a video cam. Movies don't have that problem, it's not like there a dozen competing movies of Spiderman. Also, it doesn't lend itself well to being broadcast live and/or interactive. That's why I think the analogy is getting rather thin...
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
The "remote interaction" technology will be used to reach out and grab your testicles until you can produce a valid credit card number.
Give a man a fish and you have fed him for today. Teach a man to fish, and he'll say "WHERE'S MY FISH, YOU IDIOT?"
"absolutely ridiculous to focus on the 'tech side' like you are doing. absolutely dumb."
Slashdhot is about tech. Try Jerry Springer.
"what about the piracy that porn producers use against the actors?"
What about you support your assertions?
"Emotionally distraut" eH? This sounds more like Fundie anti-porn industry propaganda.
"This post is an artistic work of fiction and falsehood. Only a fool would take anything posted here as fact."
A service-based model has been shown to work very well for both games (e.g. World of Warcraft) and software (e.g. Red Hat Enterprise Linux, anything Google sells, etc.). I don't know how movies can adapt in a similar method, but that's not my problem. If anything, I'd suggest that the DVD for each movie be sold at the theatre after each showing for a decent price (e.g. $8 or so), and perhaps to stop making shitty movies as well. For music, CDs should be used a promotional items for bands' concerts and other performances. The big record labels could either just record and produce the CDs for the bands, or they could even be a marketing help for bands in order to get their promotional material (i.e. CDs and MP3s) out there to many people.
Oh yeah, and if these companies would stop wasting so much money on lawsuits against their customers and lobbying Congress for more draconian copyright laws, they might, just might, be able to remain insanely profitable.
'Yes, firefox is indeed greater than women. Can women block pops up for you? No. Can Firefox show you naked women? Yes.'
This may be the first post in the history of /. that manages to be both informative and erotic.
-Arthur
Cave ne ante ullas catapultas ambules
Actually, I think it just reflects the tastes of the average slashdotter... we tend to be more discerning and have more sophisticated interests.
"All great wisdom is contained in .signature files"
so all games become online games, all single player games become multiplayer. great.
kiss goodbye to flight sims
kiss goodbye to civilisation as a singleplayer game
kiss goodbye to RPGs.
cool now I can only ever enjoy video games playing against jackasses online. Somehow, I dont think this is a bright future, and we have the people who pirate games to thank for it. Cheers guys.
DRM-free indie games for the PC and Mac: Positech Games
Parent message isn't a troll, you morons, it's a joke. And it's hilarious, if you'd quit being quite so hypersensitive.
What I wouldn't give for a mod point right now. Mod parent up.
StoneCypher is Full of BS
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
I see, so it works for google and linux, so lets scrap the 99.9% of established businesses that aren't on your list?
When I buy adobe photoshop, i dont need support for it, and I dont need updates. You still think they should give it to me for free?
How exactly does that work, if the income is preuly from supprot, wheres my incentive to ship a bug free product?
Stop trying to dream up a rosy business model that lets people take everything for free, it's not vaguely sustainable, at least not with the huge effort and costs put into producing software/movies at the current standard.
DRM-free indie games for the PC and Mac: Positech Games
Just make sure you get checked regularly for STDs. Condoms are very effective but nothing is foolproof.
Slashdot - where whining about luck is the new way to make the world you want.
Rather than cancel their subscription, embed personally identifying information and/or their credit card # in the watermark. Then release a program that will scan the video and recover the information.
The main fight a few years ago was burying free content in the endless link maze of search pages. They paid each other for the traffic so in the search lottery, The less you paid to get people to your sight and the more you set along the better you did. Having any real content to keep people at your site was just a waste of bandwidth, so there was seldom any content. The gravy was if you got anybody into your paid site. You could spend all night going from link to link to link to link and not finding any free content.
The old tech was to wear you out until you settled on a pay site.
Other than the lawsuit campaign buy the RIAA it's the same thing Media Sentry does seeding P-P sites with dead content to the point where finding free content is a waste of time. They hope you give up and just use a pay site because that is where the content is located. A bunch of sited trying to make a buck on links or content is trying to find out how to compete against free and pirated content which keeps growing anyway.
Notice how in spite of the death of the old Naptser, that new music content keeps poping up that isn't pirated? Free content that isn't illegal is nice. Keep it up.
Any new tech for pay content, I would'n know about.. Haven't been there if it involves any DRM.
The truth shall set you free!
weird that a critique of my games is meant to serve as explanation for my point that you are unlikely to see a CIV 5.
And actually, my games sell quite well, despite the fact that you personally would dismiss them because of the screenshots. That's fine, but like it or not, games made by indies like me are all you will have to look forward to as single player games on the PC, as more and more big names (id, funcom...) depart the platform for good due to widespread illegal copying.
I'm not sure how you can tell a games quality just by looking at a screenshot anyway. Lets be honest, bejewlled, zuma, tetris and chess, all look pretty shit in screenshots. If I want to look at pretty things, I watch a star wars movie. I play games to interact and have fun.
DRM-free indie games for the PC and Mac: Positech Games
Best. Post. Ever. Please send as a certified letter to all corporate partners of the *IAA, members of Congress, and the White House just for kicks.
I have never even seen debian, let alone cloned whatever freeware it ships with.
DRM-free indie games for the PC and Mac: Positech Games
At least these girls typically get tested on a regular basis, which is more than can be said for the general public. And they always (okay, some very rare exceptions) require the use of a condom.
Besides, women sleep around, too. Because of the stigma, they don't brag about it the way guys do. So you're no safer with the girl you've just hooked up with, or got in the sack on the third or fourth date. Probably less.
You want safety? Don't screw anybody. Then you're home-free, you know, provided some drunk doesn't kill you in a car crash or something. I say, take precautions, but go out and LIVE while you can. Use your equipment while it doesn't need Pfizer's little blue pills to work properly.
goodbye to flight sims in an online multiplayer world? how silly. The flight sim WarBirds was a massively multiplayer online game before it was an acronym! I was playing that a lot ~10 years ago. It really changed what a combat flight sim was about. It's one thing to shoot down a cheesy AI flown plane... gets old pretty quick. But in WarBirds you knew that when you shot down a plane, somewhere on the planet there was a real live person cursing and throwing his joystick across the room (smile). -Rob
...are reserved for huffing. Don't they teach anything in school anymore?
The view was horrible and the smell was even worse; Julie severely regretted becoming a proctologist.
Just to clarify, there is nothing to prevent companies to make single-player games served over the internet. Civ5 could easily be made as a server-client based game.
Religion is regarded by the common people as true, by the wise as false, and by rulers as useful.
as long as there are enough opponents online when you want to play, that they want to fly the planes you want to fight against, on a map you agree on, where you have suitably matching skill levels, zero lag, and he doesnt behave like a jerk..... great!
DRM-free indie games for the PC and Mac: Positech Games
True, or just reencode the video. Slight quality loss, but likely not enough to make people complain if the original was hidef and clean.
Pain lasts, kid. Its how you know you're alive. Sometimes I think this growing up thing is just pain management-TheMaxx
Just trying to think of the numbers here. But I'm guessing that your average prostitute's number of unique sex partners far exceeds that of your ordinary promiscuous woman. Also, I would think that the average risk factor of the average prostitute's client would be higher than the average risk factor of a typical libertine's partner. By risk factor, I mean having riskier sex and therefore more at risk to be infected with something.
Think about it. I read in the Post that they busted a brothel where the prostitutes work 10+ hour days, seven days a week, with a "session" lasting an hour. Let's assume a little slack time and guess that she is having sex with 7 different guys per day, 6 days per week. Sure, there will be some repeat clients in there, but your average promiscuous woman would generally not have 30 or 40 different sex partners per week. That is my assumption, anyhow.
So I'm guessing that a visit to your local brothel carries a higher STD infection risk than taking home some drunk chick from the bar.
They don't grade fathers, but if your daughter's a stripper, you fucked up. --Chris Rock
More companies that provide services for a free product and make a profit: Sun, IBM (more than just Linux), Novell (more than just Linux), Canonical (more than just Linux), MySQL AB, Yahoo! (most of their services are free (i.e. ad-supported), but paid support versions exist), Trolltech (Qt and other GUI toolkits), Oracle (more than just Linux), and SourceForge. There are even organisations like OpenBSD and the Free Software Foundation that make money selling their own free/libre and open source software on physical media. There's also something called "donations" where users of your software will attribute their own price for the software and will pay you that amount (usually on a regular basis as well).
Also, if you were alive back in the beginning UNIX days, you'd know that all software came with source code included so that you could compile it for your particular setup as well as modify it to meet your needs. In fact, BSD was started as a collection of patches for UNIX, and that eventually became its own operating system (see FreeBSD and derivatives). So not even can you make money on free software, you can also make money while also giving the source code to your customers as well!
'Yes, firefox is indeed greater than women. Can women block pops up for you? No. Can Firefox show you naked women? Yes.'