Professor Rat writes: Understand this… The ” Porn industry” is royally screwed seven ways from Sunday. They know it too, don’t kid yourself otherwise.

See, they need wank…”customers”.

In order to exist, the porn industry has to convince people to buy what they are pushing. They’re between a rock and a hard place here, because if they make that DRM too obnoxious, if they go beyond the line too much, then their own customers will flip them the bird and jump right back onto P2P networks. It’s already happened once, in their eyes. Does the P2P scare back around 1998 ring a bell? Leechnet? Back when it didn’t quite suck, I mean.

See, Leechnet opened a new world for the porn industry, because it showed them that the world had changed and now they had to compete with “free”. How in the hell does one compete with free products?

DRM is a reaction to this, by trying to make it difficult for people to convert their products into a format than can easily become “free”. Unfortunately, this is an impossible task. It’s *proven* to be impossible, no less. So they now have to not only compete with “free”, but to do it, they have to do something that’s absolutely and totally impossible to do. What a bind that puts them in, huh? 🙂

The porn industry is scared shitless, and with reason. This new medium takes their products and puts it into a form that:

a) damn near eliminates distribution costs, b) makes low cost viral marketing into one of the most powerful forms of marketing there is through the rapid dissemination of the meme in question, and c) eliminates all ability to control distribution of their product and thus be able to charge for it.

A and B they love, but C is included in the bargain and they cannot escape it. Furthermore, they’re starting to figure out that the combination of A and B on a large enough scale eliminates the need for the middlemen in their business. Artist and customer can directly interact just as easily as middlemen and customers can. Since most of them are middlemen, this naturally makes them nervous. Right now, they’re engaging in heavy media spending to combat this knowledge, leading to the current meme of “taking product without paying is stealing” and so on. They’re engaging it on both the artist side and the customer side, and if both sides would just wake the hell up, the middlemen would be out of jobs.

So what I’m saying is that the idea that they can NOT offer their product on the internet is an unrealistic notion. They don’t have that choice, not really.

If they don’t offer something out there, in a light enough restriction no less, then what will happen is that they eventually die off. People will go back to passing around pron for free, legislation and lawsuits be damned, they will find a way to do it safely if it comes down to it. Many very bright people are already looking for that way.

And if the talent see that the porner companies aren’t actively trying to make them some cash by selling their DVD’s online, the talent might start waking up en masse and seeing that the old system is unnecessary with the new technological capabilities to directly reach the customers.

So the porn industry “will” sell online. They don’t have a real choice not to do so anymore. They can no longer pack up their toys and go home, because that would be a losing move.