Apple is selling music without DRM via iTunes and Danni.com - one of the bigger adult websites online - has quietly removed DRM from the videos in its members section.
The effects of this could be significant. The adult market is notoriously fond of trends and will follow Danni.com’s lead as soon as enough time has passed to be sure it’s profitable.
It will be.
The DRM fantasy is that DRM prevents content from being copied and distributed without authorization. An argument slightly less convincing than a speech by Paris Hilton at a ‘True Love Waits’ event if you’ve ever visited a file sharing site. If DRM was transparent and unrestrictive it would be a curiosity, but in practice is stops users for enjoying what they buy. For example, I buy DRM’d magazines online and have great difficulty moving them between my various computers. If I was trying to pirate the content I could do so by taking screengrabs and then compiling them into PDF’s. Obviously I’m not going to spend the time doing that for my own convenience but a pirate will. Thus the DRM effectively restricts paying customers like me, and does nothing to dissuade copyright abusers.
Windows Media DRM, the flavor Danni.com and the rest of the jizz bizz most often use, is clunky and almost impossible to work with on a Mac, so while adopting it gave Danni.com a false sense of security, it cost them the thousands of members who canceled due to problems viewing video. The decision to remove DRM means Danni.com will lose fewer subscribers and that’s money straight to the bottom line. That’s why whatever happens with their free to copy content, they’ll still be richer without DRM than with it.
Danni.com’s lead will cause most of the other large adult sites who’ve made DRM part of their offering reconsider how much they’re prepared to spend on security measures which only foil the least capable downloaders. I suspect it won’t be much.