April 23/05: What I Think About DRM

Unless you've been sitting in a cave for a while, and a cave without Internet access at that, you've probably been hearing a lot about DRM recently. DRM stands for Digital Rights Management and what it basically amounts to is receiving a license to view video content while a member of a paysite, the license expiring with your membership (and with it your ability to view the DRM-protected video).

Now for the average porn surfer there are good reasons to be pissed about DRM, and I'll get to those in a minute. But first I'll say a couple of things in its defence, just to be fair. For starters, porn producers really are concerned about having their content ripped off and distributed free via file-sharing, etc. They want to protect their investment. OK, a lot of the time it doesn't seem like much of an investment, but making porn movies (even really bad ones) still takes time and costs money. And this is a business.

Another thing to say in defence of DRM, and this is a point that isn't often mentioned, is that it's better than streaming video, which has been around a lot longer. I find it a little hard to get that worked up over DRM when I think of how many sites continue to use streaming video, which I totally fucking hate! Streaming sucks, always has sucked, and, in all likelihood, always will suck. DRM is much better, playing just like a normal downloaded video until the license expires.

Is DRM the way of the future then? Maybe for some sites. It has mainly been adopted by the Big Boys, the mainstream studio producers like Hustler, Private and Playboy. These guys want to protect their large backlist catalogues. But as time goes by I'm not sure that will make as much sense. Let's face it, porn doesn't have much of a shelf-life. I find porn videos produced even in the mid to late 1990s to be almost unwatchable today. I know there are lots of retro-porn connoisseurs out there, but they don't justify such a high level of paranoia when it comes to protecting content that no one else is all that interested in. I'm more concerned about individual performer sites--like Dawn's Place--switching over to DRM. I'd hate to see that become a trend, especially among amateurs. But it could happen. Amateurs have a backlist too, and unlike studios they can't keep producing new content forever.

The non-DRM sites that are likely to remain non-DRM fall into two main categories. In the first place you have the large video networks like Deluxe Pass and VideoBox (Videosz, unfortunately, has recently gone over to the dark side). These guys know that when you buy something you expect to own it. And of course they are all middlemen anyway (that is, they aren't actually producing any of the stuff). They don't want to protect content, they just want to sell it. 

The other place you aren't likely to see DRM is in the large reality networks like All Sites and OxPass. That's because their business model is all about producing in volume. If you're adding a couple of hours of new video to your network a day, content is cheap. And this is why I think DRM will never take over completely. It's not that porn consumers will revolt, or that they will find clever ways to get around the licenses (which used to be possible by recording the playback, and I'm sure there are other ways now too). It's that porn consumers want stuff that is new. And they want more. And more. And more. Unlike with mainstream music and movies, where protection is a real issue, there aren't very many porn classics. Porn is a fungible product (that is, one that can be readily replaced in the marketplace with an identical product). So until DRM sites start charging less for offering less--and so far they sure as hell aren't--consumers should think twice about signing up.

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