EDIT: I found out I was mistaken about the DRM. It turns out the video has no DRM. Sorry for the confusion!
You all know I love Louis CK, right? Well, in case you didn’t know, now you do. He’s a brilliant and hilarious individual. I’m a big fan of his show, I’ve been lucky enough to see him in person and I bought his latest DVD called Live at the Beacon Theatre. The promotion he did for this latest DVD is very unorthodox, and I wanted to talk about it a bit today, specifically as it relates to my own experiences with the porn industry.
What Louis CK has done with his DVD is to have it available as an online item, which means that there’s no physical product, so he decided to charge just $5 for the video. Personally, I think he was selling himself a bit short, since it’s no more than a quarter of what an average comedy DVD would run for, but who am I to judge?
The result was incredibly positive, and he ended up breaking even within half a day and make a considerable amount of money within a week. That’s pretty impressive, but the fact is that he would have probably made more money and had to spend much less time and energy on it if he had just gone the traditional route. So, why did he do it?
Piracy. And I hate piracy. I applaud him for doing something like this to send out a message about how unfair piracy is. People don’t want to pay enough money for artists to actually turn a profit, so they find a way to get it for free. He’s created the alternative, to get more people to pay less instead of less people to pay more. He took a project he cared about, created it from the ground up, compensated the people around him fairly and gave a over a quarter of a million dollars to charity. That is a really cool thing of him to do, because he is a really cool guy. I wouldn’t expect any less from him and it’s really inspiring for someone like me, who deals with piracy and does things herself.
As I’m sure you can imagine, I deal with thoughts like this all the time. My sites aren’t ridiculously expensive, but people don’t need them to live, so they won’t pay for them unless they have ample money to do so. I completely understand it. To those of you who enjoy the blog and check out the free samples, great. I have no problem with that at all. What I have a problem with is that there is this deep sense of entitlement that results in people pirating what I do, posting it on evil forums, sharing around passwords and uploading my content to tubes. It’s one thing for me to share some samples, but it’s quite another for someone to decide they’ll just throw up a whole bunch of my new videos.
Piracy in general is a really big deal in porn. Everyone suffers, but at least larger companies can take the hit. Smaller companies rely on memberships to survive. The worst thing is that, whenever I find someone posting my content illegally, they are always so positive about it. They obviously like what I do and they act like they were just trying to help when I politely ask them to take it down. We’re in a culture where we’re already pretty deep in the mentality that “I can get it for free, so why should I pay?” and it’s not a good thing for a lot of industries.
This isn’t to say that we’re having issues staying afloat or anything. We’re lucky enough to be doing quite well. But the fact remains that each time someone pirates our content, that’s money that could be put towards creating new sites, hiring more people so we can focus more on shooting, getting better equipment… The things that will ensure that you can have lots more of the stuff you enjoy.
Ultimately, Louis CK’s experiment has opened some eyes about what has become necessary for artists to make a living making what people love. He’s brought an alternative to piracy into the spotlight, now it’s just important to look at his example and see what we can do to be as innovative.
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