Dealing With Copyright Online: Porn v. Music 340
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."
For those who aren't registered (Score:4, Informative)
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
Porn and the Internet (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Re:the good old days (Score:3, Informative)
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.
You, my man, are so full of shit.
Here, in NYC --that's even if you are really a resident-- won't find bestiality displayed, that's Federal crime we are talking about. You won't find that in a public bodega/shop. Even the most ignorant immigrant bodega store owner knows to keep his ponographic wares somewhat in hidden view. He knows that the majority of his customers are not regular purchasers of porn.
They make more money on loose cigs and Lotto than they do on porn.
I do live in the Bronx, and the majority of the porn is brown paper wrapped, and placed up high where kids can't see it, and that's also applies to some of the shittiest dump-of-a-bodega that I've seen in the South Bronx where I used to work.
This was way before Guiliani had anything to do with New York. And as far as your bestiality remarks, again your full of shit.
You really have to go out of your way to find that. Laws concerning animals and abuse are far too severe, sometime more so than the equivalent human infraction.
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Missing Poll Option (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Re:Thoughts on Porn and Sharing (Score:3, Informative)
But then, the problem with the music industry is that people only want to pirate well known artists.
I think this also happens (to a lesser degree, of course) with Porn. There are a few pornstars that are more famous than the rest, and so I guess people that download porn (ok, me among them ;-)) could also download more flicks or pictures from those stars than from the rest.
Say, Jenna Jameson or Asia Carrera, for example. They're quite famous, and there surely are a lot of p2p searches that go for these specific names (i.e., instead of "ass fuck" or "blowjob"). Or that awesome girl [mumblumbia.com] that Eric Raymond commented on his "Armed and Dangerous" weblog [ibiblio.org]. Let me google for it ... aha, here [blogspot.com].
Man, how I long for a girlfriend after writing about these things for a while :-)
Re:Of Dollars and Dildos (Score:3, Informative)
So you are correct in general but wrong about the prices of the CD/DVD.
They are however perfect for the method they've chosen to distribute.
Re:Of Dollars and Dildos (Score:2, Informative)
For female actors the porn business might sound a fairly good deal (the better ones do several movies per month), but since they usually are in it only for a few years, it won't make them rich. What most of them do, therefore, is being an escort girl on the side. Since they get a lot of men fantasizing over them because of their movies, this can make them quite rich.
After answering your question, getting back on topic: since a porn movie is so cheap to produce, file-sharing doesn't hurt that much: few sales are needed to make a profit. In the music business, things are different, of course. The production costs of a single new album are in the order of hundreds of thousands of dollars, if not millions.