the porn content business

Filed in archive Global Economy on February 9, 2004

The NYT takes a new perspective and sheds light on the dealing with copyright infringements in the porn industry.

"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."

Mr. Hymes of AVNOnline said that the salvation for the industry would come not from laws or lawsuits as much as from bits and bytes. "Technology is going to solve the problem that technology has created," he said. "The people in this space are seeing it as an opportunity to change habits and to create new opportunities."

Mr. Sperlein said Titan Media had experimented with software that would require people who download a video clip to return to the Titan site to unlock it and view it, but that this process was too intrusive. So, he said, the company is coming to realize that "the key is to make a product available that's reasonably priced and reasonably easy to obtain."

I think this holds true, only technology can solve the problems it brought.