from www.zeropaid.com – A number of porn studios got together recently for an event dubbed the “Content Protection Retreat” (CPR) in which they tried to figure out how to turn the rising tide of piracy that has placed its business at greater risk than others because its income is derived mainly from individual sales that occur in the privacy of one’s home.
“Like a certain better-known form of ‘CPR,’ the Content Protection Retreat is all about breathing new life into something that might otherwise die,” reads a description of the event. “In this case, what we’re trying to ‘resuscitate’ is nothing less than the profitability of the adult entertainment industry.”
Held early last week in the southern Arizona desert, CPR was intended as an “unity of effort” that was hitherto “unprecedented” for an industry that prides itself on the self-reliance of its individual members.
The adult industry claims that it has been particularly hurt by piracy over the years, more so than its mainstream Hollywood counterpart, due in large part to its failure to be as aggressive with anti-piracy efforts.
It says the impact of piracy on the porn industry has been “severe,” contributing “mightily” to the demise of dozens of companies that were at one time highly profitable.
“The companies and studios that remain standing find themselves battling a consumer mindset that adult content is something one should not have to pay for, and scrambling to prevent further infringement on their intellectual property rights.” it continues.
It’s true. For some time now the web has been inundated with websites that specialize in bootleg porn clips. The question is, however, is there really anything the porn industry can do? Even if it mustered all the combined strength of every RIAA-style lawyer and launched a sue-em-all campaign of its own, it’ll simply push the sites responsible for the problem overseas beyond their reach.
The organizers of CPR confirm that several law firms will help the porn industry target video streaming and torrent tracker sites for damages, and try to force them into adopt content filtering technology, but how they plan on suing sites based beyond the jurisdiction of US courts isn’t clear.
And as for the end downloader, unless he’s dumb enough to grab content from Direct Connect-style programs, he’ll likely go unnoticed. There’s also some disagreement among the group as to whether this a smart approach. It obviously had little success with the music industry, managing only to anger millions of music fans in the process, and so a number of companies said would “decline employing that approach.”
In any event, the goal of CPR was to “drastically reduce the piracy of adult content by 2012.” Anti-piracy efforts that don’t include lower pricing and larger selection, both the main enticements of pirated porn, will likely fail.
You can’t police the entire Internet.