Company representatives said FMP would be the first adult video post-production house in the U.S. equipped with RipGuard, which also incorporates Macrovision’s analog copy protection technology.
Both technologies have been guaranteed by Macrovision to offer seamless playability on nearly all DVD players, drives and recorders currently on the market.
“We have turned a corner in copy protection,” said Monty Rensselaer, creative director at FMP. “Up until now, ripping was the easiest thing in the world to do, and while nothing is 100 percent, ripping has just become a whole lot harder.”
Rensselaer said the newly protected DVDs require no additional software or hardware and can be authored for both new content and stamped on existing DVDs.
“We are now able to offer the highest level of protection available, even if a producer or studio authors their own DVDs in-house,” said Rensselaer.
Piracy is, of course, a huge issue in the adult entertainment industry. While piracy isn’t nearly as prevalent in the U.S. as it is in other countries, some within the industry estimate that illegal copying is sapping as much as 30 percent of annual profits from larger studios such as Wicked and Vivid. In addition to lost income, piracy can also seriously damage a company’s reputation due to faulty motion menus and poor image quality.
One company, Convex Group, went as far as marketing self-destructing DVDs last year in an effort to combat piracy. Called the disposable EZ-D, the patented discs are red on the surface and contain a chemical substance that causes them to become unreadable after a set amount of hours. Makers of the DVDs can make them last for as briefly as an hour, or as long as 48 hours.