Frequently Freakonomics-addled economics professor Alex Tabarrok relays the following from Louis Theroux in The Guardian
...it is difficult to see how a business selling hardcore movies and even internet clips is sustainable when most people simply don’t want to pay if they don’t have to. To many people, when it comes to porn, not paying for content seems the more moral thing to do.
Source: The Guardian
To which I can only say I'm winning. That's a link to what I think was my first assertion that as both the stigma for acknowledging one's sexual activities and the economic barriers to entry drop, the number of people who find it exciting to upload "porn" made with partners who similarly enjoy exhibitionism is going to increase. And as it increases it's going to eclipse industrial porn.
Or, as I'd put it today, I would add that, especially now that both stigma and capital barriers to entry are so low, to many other people when it comes to porn not charging for the content they and their sex partners produce and upload also seems like the more moral thing to do.
Because the best thing about zero-marginal-cost porn is there’s also approximately zero marginal incentive for the coercion, exploitation, and unsafe working conditions which have traditionally been the biggest objections to porn, at least on the progressive side of anti-porn debates.
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I work at a sex/BDSM shop
Submitted by Paradox (not verified) on Thu, 2012-06-07 18:29.I work at a sex/BDSM shop that's been in business for 20 years. For all of that time, my boss sold VHS tapes and then DVDs, particularly to people who wanted specialty bondage/cross-dressing/whatever kinky videos. In the last year and a half, we've straight-up stopped selling movies. It's an anecdote, but I'm just chiming in that from personal experience I totally agree with you.
While I agree with the basic
Submitted by Absurdist (not verified) on Fri, 2012-06-08 00:25.While I agree with the basic thesis, here's the thing.
Observe what happened to Megaupload. That whole thing happened, with the subsequent chill throughout the cyberlocker/cloud sector of the internet economy, because of filesharing. I concede that yes, there are more people entering the market at xTube and its analogues, but most of the profit-margin encroachment against the major porn studios is not entirely due to amateur porn as much as it is to internet piracy. As Theroux explicity says in the quote, people don't want to pay if they don't have to. If someone can pay ten bucks to a cyberlocker service and download unlimited pirated porn (or pirated music, pirated mainstream film, pirated software...) for 30 days as opposed to paying upwards of $30 for a legitimate DVD from a porn studio (or 99 cents for a song, or up to $600 for a high-end software suite, or even ten bucks for a movie ticket for a first-run film), what choice would you expect any person with a broadband connection to make? Even the amateur sites have to contend with piracy/intellectual property issues, and they don't always have the resources to retain counsel and prosecute copyright violators the way the large porn companies can.
There are few barriers to entry, true, but now there are no barriers to content access without payment, so everyone loses. The amateurs lose less because of their lower production costs, but still, if their content is being distributed through distribution channels over which they have little if any control, they ultimately see fewer paid subscribers or consumers as well.
That professional porn
Submitted by Martin Brock (not verified) on Mon, 2012-06-11 16:48.That professional porn producers can't so easily sell their produce at a given price because amateurs will produce the same product at a lower price, or no price, doesn't concern me. That professional producers can't so easily sell their product at a given price because copyrights are unenforcable doesn't concern me either.
I wonder if producers of reproductions of music face the same dilemma. They can't so easily sell reproductions of music at a given price, because the ability to make a copy is too widespread. In this scenario, producers of music, as opposed to producers of copies of music, might still profit by selling live performances, for which copies of music are advertisements. Access to a live performance can be excluded in ways that access to a copy cannot.
Maybe porn stars must become live performers selling live performances to profit in the future. Is that a bad thing?