Tuesday, Jan 6, 2009    Text size: 

In removing portability and burn limitations from its products, Apple has joined many adult websites in an attempt to make its products more consumer-friendly.

“Apple has learned what adult biz companies learned years ago: DRM is anti-consumer,” said Brandon “Fight the Patent” Shalton, founder of T3Report.com.

DRM, which has been widely used and dropped by most major adult websites, according to Shalton, “was a failure not because of the technology, but because of the consumer backlash. It sounded great in the beginning — the ability to protect content from being stolen — but webmasters implemented DRM badly.”

An example of poor implementation, Shalton said, is the situation in which members lose license to view content they had purchased and felt they owned upon ending their membership with the site.

“Adult review sites like TheBestPorn.com started to document if the paysite used DRM or not,” Shalton said. “Consumers wouldn’t join sites that had DRM. Since there is plenty of competition for content in the same niche, consumers went to other sites, forcing those who used DRM to either stick to their guns or remove DRM so they would not be excluded. Porn consumers like to collect videos, so being able to download [and] save [is] a major selling point to the consumer.”

The DRM-free versions of 8 million iTunes songs are available as of today, and the remaining 2 million will be available by April.