California pornography company exploring blockchain DRM
Adult entertainment company Naughty America has announced that it will be partnering with Geneva-based blockchain provider Decent for a pilot digital rights management (DRM) project. Naughty America hopes that Decent’s DRM technology can be applied to its adult video content to prevent illegal downloads and sharing. The technology will introduce digital video fingerprinting, cryptography technology and general database management. Naughty America’s chief information officer Ian Paul has said that investing in blockchain technology will enable the company to fight piracy and protect user privacy at the same time.

We’ve covered, at great length and in explicit detail, the many benefits that businesses from banks to manufacturers to retailers have to gain by investing in the blockchain – but let’s be honest, we all know that a new technology hasn’t truly hit the mainstream until the porn industry embraces it.

In that (red) light, it would appear the blockchain’s time has come, with San Diego-based Naughty America announcing today that it will be collaborating with Geneva, Switzerland-based blockchain provider Decent on a pilot project that will apply the latter’s blockchain-based Digital Rights Management (DRM) technology to the former’s pornographic videos.

In other words, Naughty America hopes the blockchain can serve as a cold shower for tech-savvy consumers who have embraced another once-cutting-edge technology: Peer-to-peer (P2P) file sharing.

“The aim of this collaboration is to create a next-generation content distribution platform in the adult video industry, currently plagued by illegal content sharing and privacy concerns,” Decent staff wrote in an Oct. 3 statement, which called the collaboration “a new bar in the future of digital content distribution systems.”

In addition to blockchain technology, which involves recording, organizing, and validating information across a series of identical databases that are shaped by the actions taken by users online, Decent’s DRM service for Naughty America will incorporate digital video fingerprinting and cryptography technology.

In the Oct. 3 press release, Decent co-founder Matej Boda said his company looks forward to exploring blockchain’s potential for solving the adult industry’s security concerns, while Naughty America CIO Ian Paul emphasized that investing in the technology would not only allow his company to fight piracy, but protect user privacy as well.

We’re not linking to its website for obvious reasons, but this isn’t the first time Naughty America has positioned itself as the Silicon Valley startup in an industry filled with dinosaurs: the company has already embraced virtual reality, with “Naughty America Virtual Reality” among its network of 27 sites, and apparently supports a range of devices including Samsung Gear VR, the Oculus Rift, the HTC Vive, and even its own Google Cardboard-derived VR headset.