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The uptake of those technologies never depended on pornography. VCRs had movies, internet video streaming had services such as YouTube, VR will have gaming. Por

by mrfregg 10y ago

The uptake of those technologies never depended on pornography. VCRs had movies, internet video streaming had services such as YouTube, VR will have gaming. Pornography just happens to be yet another use case, not exactly one that these technologies would otherwise have had lesser uptake because of.

bitwize 10y ago
No, VCRs didn't have movies, at least at first. At a time when porn producers saw a direct-to-viewer distribution channel in the VCR (and a means to avoid the hassle of having to find theaters willing to show their work), the mainstream movie industry saw a threat. MPAA head Jack Valenti delivered his famously tasteless speech stating that the VCR was to the film industry what the Boston Strangler was to the woman home alone. He would go to his grave wishing he could make the VCR illegal; thankfully most of the rest of the industry got a clue and saw the potential of video rental of mainstream movies. (Fun fact; this is a large part of why VHS won the format wars; at 2 hours an SP VHS tape was long enough to fit a feature-length film of the day on a single cassette. But the victory wasn't so decisive until after Hollywood took interest, well into the VCR's history.) And video streaming well predated YouTube. Granted, it was a mess of proprietary plugins, RealPlayer, abd/or Windows Media Player. But I'm fairly certain most of the sites doing video streaming before YouTube were porn sites.
Finnucane 10y ago
Then I guess you don't remember the early 1990s when Congress was already freaking out about how much porn was being distributed on this new Internet thingy that most of them had never even tried to use at that point. But to the main point, excluding porn from copyright protection means going back to the days of prudes using obscenity laws to suppress works they didn't like and requiring their publishers to go to court to defend them (i.e, D.H. Lawrence, James Joyce, William Burroughs, Alan Ginsberg, etc.).

by mrfregg 10y ago

bitwize 10y ago

No, VCRs didn't have movies, at least at first. At a time when porn producers saw a direct-to-viewer distribution channel in the VCR (and a means to avoid the hassle of having to find theaters willing to show their work), the mainstream movie industry saw a threat. MPAA head Jack Valenti delivered his famously tasteless speech stating that the VCR was to the film industry what the Boston Strangler was to the woman home alone. He would go to his grave wishing he could make the VCR illegal; thankfully most of the rest of the industry got a clue and saw the potential of video rental of mainstream movies. (Fun fact; this is a large part of why VHS won the format wars; at 2 hours an SP VHS tape was long enough to fit a feature-length film of the day on a single cassette. But the victory wasn't so decisive until after Hollywood took interest, well into the VCR's history.) And video streaming well predated YouTube. Granted, it was a mess of proprietary plugins, RealPlayer, abd/or Windows Media Player. But I'm fairly certain most of the sites doing video streaming before YouTube were porn sites.

Finnucane 10y ago

Then I guess you don't remember the early 1990s when Congress was already freaking out about how much porn was being distributed on this new Internet thingy that most of them had never even tried to use at that point. But to the main point, excluding porn from copyright protection means going back to the days of prudes using obscenity laws to suppress works they didn't like and requiring their publishers to go to court to defend them (i.e, D.H. Lawrence, James Joyce, William Burroughs, Alan Ginsberg, etc.).