Porn Industry vs. Digital Pirates

[KobyBoy]

Interesting article in the New York Times. Good read for a Saturday night: http://www.nytimes.com/2004/02/08/bu...ey/08porn.html

[Ic3m4nZ]

Can't see shit fuck this lame registration

[Mr.Fiction]

THOUSANDS 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.

[hudson]

newsgroups rule

(didn't read the article, but what the hay)

[Snowone]

text of the article

[Rictor]

Hollywood has a lot to learn from `Playboy'


NY TIMES NEWS SERVICE , NEW YORK
Sunday, Feb 08, 2004,Page 11
"It's like asking Henry Ford, `What were the buggy-whip guys doing wrong?'"

Randy Nicolau, president of Playboy.com

Thousands 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 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 US$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 1980s. By comparison, the movie and music businesses are relative newcomers. 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. Hymes' 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 who represents Hustler, Vivid Video and other companies on copyright issues. He does send out some 20 letters a week, he said, warning for-pay Web sites to remove material owned by his clients.

Cambria suggests that the mainstream entertainment industry is much more combative when it comes to consumers partly because the songs and movies are so carefully and expensively made and distributed. Movies in his industry, by contrast, are often made in a few weeks, and on budgets that a major studio may spend on coffee and pastries, so piracy is not taken quite as seriously. "Maybe a classic is one thing," he said, "but they're not all classics."

[KraZ]

Thanks Rictor - a good read

[GonePhishing]

Nice!