The Butt Ugly Weblog

The leading edge of porn

I remember a time when DVD was new, and 80% of all titles were pornographic. The reason was simple: the adult entertainment industry targets the first adopters: young males with money - the same bunch that were likely to be the first to own a DVD player.

Now, Digitoday writes that DVD sales of porn are going down, because of the internet distribution of porn. Not piracy, but legal porn; sold by thousands and thousands of web sites. This internet distribution is growing tens of percents every year, and is impacting heavily on the market of physical storage media, i.e. DVD and VHS.

It is, of course, just matter of time when this occurs also in normal movie and music business. It has been talked about a lot, but now the real impact is showing. Of course, the CD and DVD business will not die, not for many years, but they're becoming less important.

The people who make MP3s of their files are doing it because in almost every significant way, MP3s [of sufficient quality] are better than CDs. You can put 1,000 songs in your pocket in a package that's bigger than your comb. If it gets stolen, you just buy a new one and don't have to find your music again. You can burn the music on CDs, and just discard them as they become worn. Et cetera, et cetera. [There's of course the satisfaction of owning something physical, which must not be ignored, but it might as well be a scarf or a sock or a book or something else that connects to the music; the music could still be digital.]

What this means in practice is that the new copyright legislation - which seems to give you a permission to copy on even days, and makes it a crime on odd days - is even more dangerous than what people may realize. It contains far stricter rules for media which is digitally downloadable than the kind of media you can buy in the shop. It remains to be seen what their effect is, but it may be that no matter how hard one fights for right to rip MP3s, it will be a temporary victory only. The law is clear on DRM'd music you download from iTunes Music Store: whatever you agree with Apple, that holds. It's completely up to them to decide where, how, with whom, how many times, and on what equipment you listen to their music.

In a couple of years, there will be "superhits" that are only downloadable from the Internet. You won't be able to buy the CDs, no matter how much you want. And then the full force of the new copyright law will hit you.