Porn Restriction Management to the Future

The porn industry and porn consumers are often said to be early adopters of consumer technology, e.g., VCRs and modems. So to what extent is porn delivered with Macrovision, CSS, region codes, and other copy protection methods as relevant to the formats in question?

I searched briefly but didn’t turn up any good answers, just assertions like

We can expect DRM to become commonplace as more porn producers take measures to prevent pirating of their content.

and

I should add that the porn market is also hot for DRM, but not too many vendors want to call attention to that.

and others wondering or speculating that porn site competition will stop DRM:

Some websites have begun to encode pr0n with drm requiring you to download a license everytime you want to watch the movie. I’d just stop using those sites. They’ll get the hint when their traffic starts moving to sites with no drm. Hopefully. It doesn’t really make sense to drm a 10 second clip when it takes 20 sec. to dl the license.

I’m looking for data regarding DRM use for pornographic content. Please tell if you have any ideas or know a good place to ask, even if you’re reading this long after the posting date.

Update 20040813:Jake (last cite above) comments below that a company is already selling DRM to the porn market. Actually there are several. I’d be surprised if any DRM concern isn’t making some effort in this regard. My question has to do with whether many in the porn content industry are buying.

Tom W. Bell adds another guess:

My guess: No. Porn consumers seem content with cheaply produced and only modestly original works. Porn producers thus need not recover the sort of fixed up-front costs that plague the traditional film industry.

That’s my guess as well, but I have no evidence. Thus the query.

5 Responses

  1. Well a company called CinemaNow.com ( http://www.cinemanow.com/ )is allready doing it. They are an online video store that “Rents” movies via Windows Media Player 9 and WMP 10 DRM. They also have a porn section ( http://www.cinemanow.com/home_ad.aspx ) and the videos do stop working after a matter of days. I did not know that when I wrote the article but I found out about it when I started using the Public Test of Windows Media Player 10 ( http://www.microsoft.com/windows/windowsmedia/mp10/default.aspx ).

    Just wait until Windows Longhorn is in every home. That is when Porno DRM will really hit. Macrovision protected DVDs really don’t matter because it can be defeated with a $20 signal booster or an old VCR.

  2. Ileana says:

    I don’t have statistical data, but a Google search for DRM and porn revealed several real-life examples (after Google asked me whether I meant “dorm porn”, heh heh…):

    from big straight porn studios:

    In the adult space, the big studios are still experimenting with VoD business models. Vivid (www.vivid.com) recently reached an agreement to distribute video on a pay-per-minute basis over HotMovies.com. HotMovies charges from $.08 per minute for access. They also offer full movie downloads and 48-hour rental. David Schlesinger, vice president of licensing for Vivid, says more major VoD distribution deals will be signed soon.
    (found here: http://www.avnonline.com/index.php?Primary_Navigation=Editorial&Action=View_Article&Content_ID=107161)

    to big gay porn studios:

    (SAN FRANCISCO, CA 03/09/2004) – NakedSword.com, an online leader in gay adult Video on Demand, and TitanMen.com, a leading producer of gay adult entertainment, announced a deal today that will distribute TitanMen.com films via NakedSword.com. The licensing agreement will allow NakedSword.com to sell and distribute TitanMen.com films via Digital Rights Management (DRM) protected pay-per-download and pay-per-view streaming.
    (found here: http://www.gaypornblog.com/archives/000260.html)

    to smaller productions, in the words of the discontented porn reviewer:

    When you consider it, there are three options when it comes to video content now. You can download the videos, stream the videos, and now there are the DRM videos which you can do either one but you can’t keep them. Where does DRM stand, in my book? Well, I think that DRM is probably the least desirable of the three options for me right now. When you can download the videos, that is the best. You save them, burn them on a CD, and break them out a few months later and its like new porn content without having to pay for a site all over again. Streams are effective too, and thats because you can go on there, watch in your browser and not have any real “mess” left in case you are on a community computer. Also, there are ways for you to save your streamed videos. You may have to be more computer saavy to do it, but thats why there are places like Pornliving to gain that saavy! Streaming movies were originally (and still) meant to prevent people from saving the movies. I think in some twisted webmasters minds, they think that will keep people members longer and save them bandwith. Lets face it, the average membership to a porn site is one month or a trial period. People download all the content, and then move on. You really need something special to stay a member to a site. It has to hit you in a certain way, it needs awesome update schedules, and it needs lots of content. With all this said, DRM just doesn’t stand up to your other two options. There is no trick to get around it (afaik) and that just ruins the whole thing for me. When I pay for a porn site, I pay for the content. I should deserve to keep it, and watch it at will. $40 is damn high for a porn rental, if you ask me, and thats what I consider this DRM business.
    (found here: http://www.pornliving.com/rev/765/girlshuntinggirls.html)

  3. someone says:

    When you rent a drm protected movie there are several ways to make a unprotected copy. Do some research… or just point a video camera at your screen. It has to be decrypted for you to view it. Some screen capture programs also have an option to capture “transparent” screens.

  4. […] No, I will not be talking about porn restriction management. […]

  5. […] Porn Restriction Management to the Future wishfully speculates that porn publishers may not use DRM, perhaps implicitly criticizing non-porn publishers. But comments provided some examples of porn publishers using DRM. Others continue to promote statements from porn executives about DRM-free downloads, but this demonstrates nothing: one can find many non-porn publisher executrons saying the same thing. DRM probably continues to be used by porn and non-porn alike, and there’s nothing to learn, no criticism of publishers to make, that is anything but boring, scummy, raw assertion. […]

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