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."
Porno (Score:5, Interesting)
-Just my 2 cents.
the good old days (Score:3, Interesting)
I would have to agree that some were filthy, just think about dudes doing the do, and leaving a booth here for a second...
Anyway as for the sharing, I look at the RIAA in political terms, they're the Neocons pushing for war via WMD intelligence... Shoddy intelligence, whereas on the porn industry side, they wouldn't mind being that they make tons of money, and perhaps they see that people do buy their movies after a sampling via P2P.
American Airlines flight 11 converation while hijacked [politrix.org]
Pornographers are criminals already anyway (Score:-1, Interesting)
Raving slashdot p2p trolls aside, we all know that pirating is not acceptable. That is why people believe so much in the GPL: *that* is sharing and you are not hurting anyone when doing it. But copying windows and office and such, *that* is an illegal act (and you encourage Microsoft too!).
People have double standards around here...
They built THIS city.... (Score:5, Interesting)
I don't pay for porno (Score:5, Interesting)
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
Just what everyone needed (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:The real math of filesharing (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
"Unleashing the lawyers" not necessarily uncommon (Score:4, Interesting)
Parts of the porn industry take "piracy" just as seriously as the RIAA and MPAA; a lack of publicizing of the lawsuits, etc. that have resulting might be more of an issue with the underground nature of the subject.
Re:Got Porn? (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:Pornographers are criminals already anyway (Score:3, Interesting)
Not true. Believe it or not, some of us have real, moral contentions with the notion of "intellectual property." Some of us actually believe that while you can claim credit for creating art, you cannot morally exert control over what happens to that art after it is offered to the public. Some of us see a distinction between unallowed taking (theft) and unallowed distribution. Some of us actually believe that market value ought to be determined by real scarcity, not statute. Believe it or not, there's a deep schism of philosophy that goes far beyond the presumption that "p2p trolls" as you call us are simply children who want something for nothing.
It's more that we want nothing for nothing.
Re:The real math of filesharing (Score:5, Interesting)
As an aside, I would NEVER pay a cent for porn - with or without p2p. I do have a shitload of it now though. I would buy music, and since p2p, my buying has increased.
Re:Of Dollars and Dildos (Score:3, Interesting)
The porn industry knows well how to make a buck on the internet, while the music industry is just learning how to tie it's shoes.
Besides, the average career of a pop star is no match for a veteran in the porn industry
Two irrefutable examples... (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:the good old days (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:the good old days (Score:3, Interesting)
LOL
Yes, there are beastiality pics for sale in the bodegas of New York City. I've seen it with my own eyes. And yes, I've lived most of my life in the area, and just moved out of Brooklyn a matter of months ago.
So if anybody is full of shit, baby, it is you!
Or are you going to stand there and tell me what I did and didn't see, in any number of stores in Brooklyn or Manhattan? Been to them all, have you? 86th Street and 4th Ave. in Bay Ridge I can count at least three off the top of my head that all carried hard code porn. No brown paper wrapper. Not on a high shelf out of kids reach or view.
And yes, Guiliani did make the problem worse. Was their porn before Rudy? Of course. But shutting down the XXX-shoppes made the problem worse. And it shouldn't be surprising to anyone that it turned out this way. It follows the basic laws of supply and demand.
Re:the good old days (Score:3, Interesting)
In any case, what has to be made clear here is that we're talking about pictures of animal sex acts, not the act itself. It's legal for instance to photograph many criminal acts, and to then distribute those photos, but the act itself remains illegal, yes?
And as the other AC points out, hehe, just because something is illegal doesn't mean it doesn't happen. Some of those very same bodegas sell drugs and front for prostitution, and anybody who has lived in the city for any period of time knows this shit goes on.
porn ISP (Score:3, Interesting)
I get tired of shitty half assed copies of music and select screener/movies I download - and actually BUY THE STUFF I LIKE. Fuck anyone that tries to mess with my choice - take a clue from the porn industry - generate a little INTEREST with GOOD CONTENT not DISinterest from lawsuits and antagonistic behaviour.
Porn makes money. Bandwidth costs money - the porn industry saves by relaxing their damn lawyer some of the time. Take a hint, RIAA (or I'm going to charge you for advertising your music next time I turn up my radio, or reccomend a song to someone).
Re:Pornographers are criminals already anyway (Score:3, Interesting)
Just because people draw incorrect conclusions based on your actions doesn't make you dishonest - it just makes them gullible (or simply misled). Have you ever seen a movie? Chances are, it's all fake. Hollywood and reality don't often agree - romance, fights, etc. just don't work the same way. According to your statements, every actor is dishonest.
Re:Missing Poll Option (Score:3, Interesting)
It's enough that I've started looking into the No-CD cracks (or figure out how to mount the CD in a virtual drive).
Is it just me... (Score:2, Interesting)
P2p is good for porn (Score:2, Interesting)