14 DAY TRIAL // It appears that the folks in the porn industry have finally had enough of their materials being pirated and distributed on the Web. They are now acting against this, as a large group of producers and other industry members have met up with lawyers last week in order to talk about how to properly enact on piracy. As Ars Technica has it, this is one of the first major roundtables for the industry to get together and address what has become a big problem for porn sales.
To be frank, it's clear why things are going so bad - it's natural that people are downloading porn for free from the Internet, instead of buying it, because they cannot be punished. It's not that there are no laws against this (they exist and are pretty harsh actually) it's just that they are not properly enforced, with the Internet being such a huge scene to monitor. The problem with illegitimate porn is that it's very popular and easy to get, you bump into it on the Web even by accident, but you are prone to get a lot of it, if you actually look.
As seen on AVN, an attorney stated at the meeting that "At the present time, if you were to take all of the content that is produced by the adult business, the legitimate sales currently account for no more than 15% to 20% of the actual numbers of copies that are out there, and the lack of enforcement over the years has left the pirates and consumers with the impression that copying and stealing adult content is something that has absolutely no punitive consequence associated with it whatsoever, and so the industry has really sort of dug its own grave to this degree."
So, this is quite bad, it actually means that if users continue to download for free the things that they like so much, instead of paying for them, they will no longer get what they like. The porn industry, just like any other, needs money to operate, that's why more things need to be done in order to enforce DRM and thwart piracy.