The latest group to jump on the DRM bandwagon is the porn industry. Seeing their bottom lines affected by file-sharing of dirty pictures, they are turning to copy-denial mechanisms to make sure that people don't share porn. The basic idea seems to involve wrapping porn in executable programs which require you to enter your credit card number before you see anything; in other words, a pay-per-perve scheme.

Other than the issue about screen grabbing being trivially easy, would anybody in their right mind download and run any executable content from a porn site? The porn industry is rife with unethical and sleazy business practices (from unkillable popup ads and equally immortal auto-renewing memberships to rerouting customers' dial-up modem connections via Moldova or wherever), all held up by a legacy of Puritanical shame. Customers don't want to complain or draw attention to their shameful vices; the cowboys and mafiosi who run a lot of porn sites take advantage of this and screw them royally. What's to say that if you downloaded a "copyright-enabled" porn viewer, it would not hijack your computer and use it for sending out spam or launching DDOS attacks on rival porn sites or something?

(Which is not to say, of course, that there aren't honest, ethical porn/erotica sites. Just that they're probably not a vast majority of the industry.) (via Techdirt)

Posted by: kstop | http://stunbunny.org | Wed Jan 15 11:08:42 2003

every time i go round to somebody's gaff coz "my computer is broken and please can you fix it?", I end up clearing off a half a dozen porn dialers, so people do download and run executables from dodgy sites, albeit often without realising it.

There were some on my girlf's mother's, ffs, they're everywhere.

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