Adult Entertainment Antes Up In DRM War

At the recent adult entertainment awards, host Greg Fitzsimmons highlighted the deep relationship between the internet and pornography stating "'The Internet was completely funded by porn,' he said [...] And if it wasn't for the Internet, he added, 'you guys would be completely out of business.' The audience, packed with porn actors and adult entertainment moguls like Jenna Jameson and Larry Flynt, roared with laughter." Now it appears that the adult entertainment industry has chosen to ante up in the DRM battle as well. Some companies have chosen to take sides, like Digital Playground who will be supporting Sony's Blu-Ray. Others, like Vivid Entertainment, seem to think that the answer is diversity and will be supporting both Blu-Ray and HD-DVD.

What!

[poppageek (115260)]

There is porn on the internet? :-O

That emoticon is just so wrong for this discussion

[mindaktiviti (630001)]

Here's why...

B====D~ ~ ~ O-:

Re:That emoticon is just so wrong for this discuss

[by Anonymous Coward]

It's a big cock ejaculating into someone's mouth.

God forbid I get modded Informative for this.

Re:What!

[networkBoy (774728)]

Ironically this is what will get joe sixpack interested in DRM.
You see, joe doesn't want jane to know about the digital stash, but if the DRM forces him "out of the closet" so to speak he will be quite upset (as well as possibly single).

-nB

Re:What!

[networkBoy (774728)]

I was meaning more from the aspect of:
You can not play this pr0n on your computer because it does not support the following rights management hardware/software/firmware:
Foo, Bar, and Baz.

Joe: Honey, we need a new monitor and video card.
Jane: Why dear?
Joe: So I can play . . . um . . . my new games.
Jane: What you have already works fine dear, you play too many games already.
Joe (to self): I'm gonna kill whoever invented this DRM crap!

-nB

I do agree that the common folk will not be given access ot the DRM systems. Mostly because whatever they are will be flawed and rely on the DMCA to prevent tampering.
-nB

Re:What!

[PastAustin (941464)]

It's time for the "sex is evil" meme to die.

Wait... Are you suggesting we allow sex to be acceptable?
That would make us European. And they are all communists. Looks like you need to do some serious re-thinking. Terrorist.


Sex needs to stay taboo so that Americans can have something else to hide.

Re:What!

[Hogwash McFly (678207)]

Porn or no, both of them should be on the same page about it.

Best. Metaphor. Ever.

Re:What!

[CDMA_Demo (841347)]

Don't you remember? I think George W. was the first to discover this...

Another ploy to undermine poor Gore's "invention" of the web

Just Like VHS or Beta

[eldavojohn (898314)]

Once a friend of mine commented that VHS was superior in quality to Betamax but that the only reason VHS won was because Sony refused to license porn on their format. Whether this is true or not [hyperthink.net] is probably debatable. But now we see the industry vying for licenses to the porn industry for their new formats. Why? Perhaps Sony learned their lesson with Betamax ...

Ironically, I'm going to wager that Spongebob and Pikachu have more clout than Jenna Jameson and Larry Flynt in the format war. Because every child needs a babysitter and that babysitter always comes in the newest format.

Re:Just Like VHS or Beta

[hotdiggitydawg (881316)]

I disagree. Without porn, there would presumably be more children...

Re:Just Like VHS or Beta

[guaigean (867316)]

So basically, porn is the solution to overpopulation.

Not VHS/Beta again, and Porn not deciding factor.

[amcdiarmid (856796)]

This is not VHS vs BETA all over again, and porn is not the deciding factor.

1. The Key Difference between Blu-Ray/HDVD & VHS/Beta: Home Video Exists.
2. Porn is not the deciding factor, because content exists. In the Home Video industry infancy, none did - except for porn.
3. Blue-Ray will probably win due to computing convergence. (assuming relatively equal prices on a recording capacity basis)

          When the Home Video Player war came out, there was no home video standard - and no home video content. Pornography drove the industry because there was no existing content, and people would (will) pay for porn videos. Since the movie industry was reluctant to make any move - the only content was porn. Perhaps VHS won because it was cheaper (lower cost for content providers), or becuase Sony really refused to license Betamax to Porn. In any case, at that time Porn was the content provider for the early home video industry. (Side note, I remember seeing Record size Video Disks of non-porn-Movies before ever seeing tapes. (I also remember that piracy was going to distroy the motion picutre industry.)

          Today, the home video industry is a large (booming) industry. Tapes have been supplanted by Digital Disks for content providers, and for recording. I suspect that the key difference in who wins the Blue-Ray/DVD battle is going to be price. People were willing to pay $$$$ for video decks when none existed, but are unlikely to pay $$$$ for video that is only of improved quality. (See the takeup rates for HDTV)

          The short version is that whomever can reach critical mass production & lower costs first wins. The key difference may be storage capacity for computers. Why, you ask, will computers be a key factor for a Home Video technology? Because the replacement of Computer Backup Tape drives may provide enough of a market to gain true Mass Production capacity first.

          One of the claims why Sony lost the Beta/VHS battle was that it took two tapes for many movies. That is, it cost 2x to produce a Beta Tape set relative to a VHS set. This is not going to be a problem, as both camps are stating that they will have the capacity to put movies in HD with extras on their disks. Since Sony, et. al., are claiming that they will have much higher capacity for Blu-Ray, they will probably be used for computer backups in business systems. (You know, the Autoloaders that currently cost $15,000 & $100/tape) This will help Sony get the cost down faster. In the end, price matters & we are only talking about imporoved video. No one really cares if Sponge-Bob is in High Defination or not anyhow.

Re:Just Like VHS or Beta

[LordSnooty (853791)]

Ah, them were t'days, when 12 titles seemed like a large porn collection...

Power of porn?

[timster (32400)]

This theory -- that porn was the "true" #1 force behind the VCR and the Internet -- has been repeated so many times that it's taken almost as a truism. But how true is it really? My personal experience suggests that people purchased Internet access for information and communication purposes, and that for the most part it was sites like Amazon that brought us e-commerce. Does anybody know of any research or science that backs up or refutes this claim?

Re:Power of porn?

[Shadow Wrought (586631)]

I think a lot of support for the the theory comes from the rankings of search terms. Since most of the top search terms revolve around pornography, it follows that a lot of people out there are trying to find it. That plus the pornographic sites were making large profits years before Amazon turned the corner.

Search terms...

[Spy der Mann (805235)]

does that mean porn is also the cause of all spyware and viruses on the net? Because I've heard most spyware and viruses come from "low reputation websites".

Just wondering.

Re:Power of porn?

[Trish21 (946656)]

Hi, I'm new to Slashdot. I've been enjoying reading some of the threads the past week or so. What about the flip side of the coin: how much the VCR & the internet have helped the porn industry. Not just financially, but by taking the porn industry out of the closet, if you will and making it more mainstream.

Re:Power of porn?

[Trish21 (946656)]

By mainstream, I mean that the porn audience is not just the proverbial dude in the trenchcoat at local porn theater anymore. It's our neighbors, ourselves. The VCR and the internet brought a level of privacy to porn consumption that increased and diversified the porn audience.

Re:Power of porn?

[Billosaur (927319)]

Porn is never the intial driving force behind these inventions but eventually the sex fanatics find a way to take the technology and use it for their purposes and make their presence felt. And so what? If they become a driving force in the HD-DVD/Blu-Ray fracas, that will just spice things up, because hey, the whole argument is pretty dull. Besides, can you imagine the advertising?!?

Boy you're late to the party - Usenet

[Colin Smith (2679)]

The web is a newcomer. The internet existed long before that. Usenet, email, gopher, ftp were the applications people were using and yes, distribution of porn was *very* popular.

 

Re:Power of porn?

[by Anonymous Coward]

Ancedotally, I pay for internet access to get information, play games and communicate with my friends.

I pay for a usenet feed to get porn.

What was the question again?

Re:Power of porn?

[Tackhead (54550)]

> My personal experience suggests that people purchased Internet access for information and communication purposes, and that for the most part it was sites like Amazon that brought us e-commerce. Does anybody know of any research or science that backs up or refutes this claim?

It goes back farther than that.

Instead of thinking "Amazon" and "e-commerce", think USENET and alt.sex.

Once upon a time, alt.sex was the main reason (well, if you were a college student) to do this USENET thing. Then some schmuck figured out that you could uuencode a binary file into 7-bit-clean text, and upload it into alt.sex, and every other schmuck on the planet could see teh b00bies.

When a scanner cost thousands of dollars, you could get your b00bies in one of three ways: Buy the dead trees (and deal with storing them :), download the pictures from a pay BBS at 2400 baud (because someone else paid thousands of dollars for a scanner), or copy them from the news spool free (and not have to wait, because the college's 56k leased line was up 24/7!) from USENET, because some other guy who already bought the dead trees was willing to use the scanner in the lab (that had already been paid for :) to scan in the pictures and upload them (again for free, because the leased line was always there) to alt.sex.

Needless to say, this didn't last long - kilobytes turned into megabytes, hard drives overflowed, links became saturated, and thus was born alt.sex.pictures. And because news admins got tired of dealing with alt.sex.yet.another.funny.group name (which had to be permitted) and denying alt.sex.pictures.* (whose groups would overflow the news spool in rapid order), there was a great split - and thus was born alt.binaries.*.

Long story short -- USENET administrators needed more diskspace and bandwidth, and at one time, pr0n was indeed a major proportion of all USENET traffic, and even though the transmission network was still in the process of shifting from UUCP store-and-forward technology to a TCP/IP network, the fundamental issues of bandwidth and storage remained.

That's not to say there weren't other legitimate uses for all that bandwidth and storage; there were. But the growth of USENET (on account of a lot of sites -- even corporate sites, which would be unthinkable today -- maintaining "a full feed", including alt.binaries.*, out of either a sense of tradition or a pervy newsadmin) was in large part fueled by pr0n. And in large part, the growth of USENET drove "the Internet".

USENET was the first peer-to-peer network. Each "peer" was a machine costing tens of thousands of dollars in hardware, and hundreds of dollars a month, but considering that "consumer-level" communications was limited to 2400-baud modems, the combination of a USENET server to store "everything", and deliver it through the university LAN, was a huge step forward for the end user.

Typical conversation from circa 1988:

Fourth-year-student: "USENET? It's like a BBS, with ten thousand message boards, a hundred thousand users, and no waiting to connect to it! And FTP? It's like a download section of a BBS, with no upload quota! And you can get files from anywhere in the world! Look, here's an FTP server with a collection of all those DOS utilities you'll ever need, and it's in Finland, fer Chrissakes, and it doesn't cost a cent to call it up!"

First-year student: "Finland? Why Finland?"

Fourth-year student: "Why not? But if you don't like Finland, we'll get it from the mirror at White Sands Missile Range!"

First-year student: "Whoa!"

Re:Power of porn?

[UserGoogol (623581)]

Yes, but he's not talking about the mid and late nineties. He's talking about the Internet's earlier growth in the eighties and early nineties. Usenet got things started and then WWW took things to the next level.

Re:Power of porn?

[by Anonymous Coward]

I work at a porn company.

My company has dedicated 26 Gigs of bandwidth, that during peak are all maxed out.
We have invested a lot into new technology.

The fastest web servers, fastest hardware, rate limiting technologies, hacker prevention, etc.
I know we push our hardware and software to its limits.

Our vendors like us because we find obscure bugs that no other company is capable of finding - very few companies on the internet are capable of even simulating the amount of traffic we have daily. Not only traffic, but the amount of users trying to hack our systems is astounding, which also pushes the technology to its limits. Our servers get over 150k hits a minute.

When a piece of hardware runs through our system, the vendors feel more assured at the capabilities of thier offerings.

There are many hardware and software companies in the world that happen to like our industry. They may not admit it publically, but they can't deny that no other customer is capable of ripping thier new child prodigy to pieces as fast and as "efficently" as we are.

If a bug or a hole exists, our users and bandwidth find it.

I personally like this industry, not for the content, but because I always get to play with the newest technological toys - We are at the front of the online industry, pushing the technology to its limits.

Re:Power of porn?

[Sique (173459)]

It's not only that. Porn sites were the first sites that actually tried to sell something over the internet. They were the first to try out identification (of people the shop has never seen and never will see in persona), automated user setup, online payments etc.pp. When the Dotcom bubble started to grow, porn content already had online stores, pay-per-view, pay-per-click-through and all the other really hot business bingo triggers.

Porn was also (at least here in Germany) the first that actually made the internet popular, when 'investigative journalists' discovered that students at the universities were wasting tax payer money to wank off. That was exactly when Xlink (which actually meant eXtended local inter net Karlsruhe) spun off from University of Karlsruhe and Eunet from University of Dortmund, which were the first to commercially offer Internet services to the public. Suddenly everyone knew about this Internet thingy, and about the fact that you could get GIF (Girls In Files) there.

Re:Power of porn?

[InterruptDescriptorT (531083)]

If [...] a hole exists, our users [...] find it.

Quite appropriate, given the business you're in.

What Is It?

[Doomedsnowball (921841)]

I watched Orgasmo like, five times! I know what DVDA is... but what is DRM? --shudders--

Re:What Is It?

[Duckz (147715)]

Some folks think it's Digital Rights Management, but I know it as "Dick Ramming Motion".

Huh, that's surprising. What about p2p and porn?

[Vokkyt (739289)]

I would think that on a whole, the pornography industry would see The Internet as a love/hate relationship. Granted, it allows production and sales to a degree that wasn't fathomable for porn before, however, the mass filesharing means that one well off user can make off with tons of files from the site and host it else where. I mean, I guess it's good to know know that the love that the Internet has for porn is mutual, but wow, that's an awfully warm reception.

Re:Huh, that's surprising. What about p2p and porn

[NeutronCowboy (896098)]

I think that on the contrary, it proves beyond the shadow of a doubt that there is no need for DRM for the content industry to flourish. Porn has got to be the most ripped content there is. And yet, it is raking in profits that make every other industry green with envy. So when traditional media companies say that they need DRM because of the Internet... I say shove it.

The porn industry won't be such a big driver

[99luftballon (838486)]

Back in the early 80's there was very little access to pornography, particularly film.

Nowadays the situation is must less restricted and anyone with an internet connection can watch the filth of their choice with little difficulty and with no need of a media player. The internet distribution system is also a lot harder to censor.

One of the interesting things about the Blu-Ray announcement was that a key driver for the porn company was that PlayStation 3's will have drives built in. Is this an oblique way for calling PS3 players wankers?

Re:The porn industry won't be such a big driver

[OS24Ever (245667)]

Yes but in the late 70s and early 80s the performers were being hunted down and arrested for prostitution here in the US. I can't find a link that describes it but in Ron Jeremey's Biography [imdb.com] they talked about the challenges to making porn there is a little bit mentioned here [wikipedia.org] in his wiki entry.

I believe it was California v. Freeman [wikipedia.org] that killed this method of persecution, opening the door up for what we have to enjoy or hate today.

The Truth

[PastAustin (941464)]

I heard somewhere that there are three things that have a lot of popularity online.

1.) Porn
2.) UFOs
3.) Fantasy Football (more popular than porn during football season)

I think that he's very right to say that the internet is the only reason these people are in business. There are so many disgusting pieces of smut to feast your eyes on that it's actually amazing that we all get anything done online. It once was that you would go online and stumble on a couple porno sites. Now it has moved in every direction. There is 3D porn software, there are websites where you can watch girls in Austria get naked, there are websites where you can watch someone's grandmother get it from all sides. I personally don't like any of this stuff but it is truly what keeps the internet going. If it weren't for all these websites, successful or not, there would be a couple million unregistered domains and who knows how many horny men.

My point is that it's a good point that he makes.

I personally have seen internet porn and I have many friends who watch internet porn, however I don't know that many people who buy the DVD / Mags / VHS tapes. I would be interested to see the quality of a Blue-Ray / HD-DVD porn because I would imagine it would be amazing. So in my opinion moving to a high-def format would up physical sales but perhaps stunt online sales (due to long downloads)

What do you think?

Group Hex

[digitaldc (879047)]

Others, like Vivid Entertainment, seem to think that the answer is diversity and will be supporting both Blu-Ray and HD-DVD.

It figures that when given the choice, the Porn Industry would opt for a threesome.

I only got as far as...

[r3adah3ad (936993)]

"At the adult entertainment awards..." before I choked on my soda (yeah, yeah,here come the replies).
I mean, come on:

"Yeah, the music rocked, but the grunts and moans weren't all they could have been."
-or-
"The plot was amazing! I never knew what was going to happen next!"

Wait! Does that mean...

[JaredCE (948344)]

At the recent adult entertainment awards, host Greg Fitzsimmons highlighted the deep relationship between the internet and pornography stating "'The Internet was completely funded by porn,'

Al Gore is a pornstar?

DRM?

[Travoltus (110240)]

This article appeared to be more along the lines of "Adult Entertainment Antes Up In the HD DVD Format War" than "Adult Entertainment Antes Up In DRM War".

I didn't even see "DRM" or "copy protection/prevention" in the entire article.

Was there another article to this that I missed?

Re:It's in the format specs.

[Travoltus (110240)]

Right, it's in both the Blu-Ray and HD-DVD format specs. But I still don't see where the porn industry anted up in the DRM war any more than they did when they moved from VHS to DVD. Many porn DVDs come out that aren't region encoded (in fact, hardly any are), and a majority of them (*ahem* *hmmmm*) aren't even CSS encrypted. You can copy them right to the hard disk and to another DVD (*sirens*). There's nothing in this article that says porn producers are looking for any kind of DRM - it's just there no ma

It's backwards

[max born (739948)]

The Internet was completely funded by porn," he said from the stage of the 23rd annual AVN Awards show. And if it wasn't for the Internet, he added, "you guys would be completely out of business."

I think you have it the wrong way round, porn was completely funded by the Internet and if it wasn't for the Internet's distribution system you guys wouldn't have a medium to generate that $2.5 billion revenue, you'd still be relegated to the back rooms of selected video stores selling tapes and DVDs.

Re:It's backwards

[drinkypoo (153816)]

I think you have it the wrong way round, porn was completely funded by the Internet and if it wasn't for the Internet's distribution system you guys wouldn't have a medium to generate that $2.5 billion revenue

Porn is a huge percentage of the traffic on the 'net. That 'net is paid for by people who pay for a 'net connection and possibly pay even more per byte transferred. Thus, porn is paying for the net. It's not that they have it backwards, it's that they're only talking about half of the relationshi

hmm.

[Archon-X (264195)]

I must admit, I find it interesting how 'mainstream' identities love casting references to pornography as if it will get them brownie points on their target demographic.
'Porn does this..' - 'Porn did that'.

If it's loved so much (and it is), why is the industry constantly under attack?
Read: Obscenity laws [FBI raids on STORY sites]
Read: 2257 laws [Forcing primary content producers to release the ID, names and addresses of models]
Read: .xxx [forcing adult onto one controlled platform]

etc etc etc.

Watch out for censorship

[argoff (142580)]

Once the "officially DRM'd" industry realises that they can't lock people (or profit) into their content managment schemes - then they will come out saying we need to protect kids from pron, and we need to outlaw any porn that isn't digitaly signed "for, OH MY GOD, the sake of the children!". Hollywood, and big media, will then surely jump on the bandwagon, and it won't be long before they try to outlaw any content that is't DRM controlled.

...And protection-cracking funded by ?

[HPNpilot (735362)]

'The Internet was completely funded by porn,'

Perhaps, but IIRC all the Macrovision "picture enhancers" were sold so people could copy rented porn tapes.

Maybe in this case porn using the newest digital protections will cause a thriving black market for the newest cracks.

Am I the only one...

[TimTheFoolMan (656432)]

...who thinks it's ironic that we'll see Blue Movies on a medium dubbed Blu-Ray?

Tim

Not far off track.

[UnknowingFool (672806)]

My comments are not an endorsement of porn, but the porn industry deserves some credit for the adoption of many technologies on the internet in that it was a pioneer. It is not the only industry that has been instrumental, but given its taboo nature, it's not likely that it would get any public acclaim. The adult entertainment industry was always a pioneer in technologies like multimedia, streaming content, and secured online transactions. Adult websites were taking credit card payments long before Amazon.com existed. In almost every hotel room in America, you can get movies on demand. Some of them are most likely not G rated, and the industry was one of the first to offer that service to hotel guests. Other mainstream industries like Hollywood could have been the first but they were not.

Today it is a huge industry that is not as taboo as it once was. Its power and influence has given it the nickname "America's other Hollywood." A few years ago Frontline covered the industry in an episode entitled American Porn [pbs.org] which you can watch online.

I thought most porn is region free

[DrXym (126579)]

So where does the DRM come into it? Whichever format they choose most porn studios are going to throw the switches to reach as large an audience as possible.

HD Porn? What's The Point?

[ausoleil (322752)]

Think of the benefits that HD porn will offer:

"Wow, I never knew Jenna Jameson has all those in-grown hairs from shaving her coochie!"

"Dang, that dude has a dingleberry hanging!"

"Did you see that! What a scar under her armpit from the implant surgery!"

And so forth and so on.

I think HD will make porn look worse, not better...low-def analog tv has a way of hiding the wrinkles, so to speak.

What's really interesting, however is that porno DVDs will have DRM embedded. Currently, they are not encoded, and how many DVD burners has that sold? More than a few, I think.

Pron is the only use for alternate DVD scenes etc

[Werrismys (764601)]

The only interactive, multiple-point-of-view DVD's I've seen were all pron. Almost like those sucky adult games the japanese make.

MS DRM

[TubeSteak (669689)]

I don't think anyone has broken Microsoft's WMV DRM.

You know, the one that requires you to connect to some server and get a license.

Anyways, I don't think 30GB dvd rips are exactly going to 'take off' on P2P networks. Even the DVD-R trading scene isn't that big.

Re:MS DRM

[Rufus211 (221883)]

A hack for DRM10 (what's on WMVs) has been floating around [doom9.org] for about a year now. Basically you play it normally and it intercepts the license. It then uses the intercepted license to decode the video.