Porn and Transportation are Substitutes

OK, I couldn't leave this one alone. Greg Mankiw points to some research showing that "many websites focused on adult or erotic material have experienced an upswing in sales in the recent weeks" since the stimulus checks were mailed out. I can buy the theory that many of their marginal customers are liquidity constrained, which I'm guessing is the way Greg sees it, but there's another issue here that hasn't been addressed. The stimulus checks are only one of a number of things that have happened over the past few months. You might also have noticed, for example, a dramatic increase in the price of gasoline, coming at a time when people were already adjusting to dramatic increases over the past 4 years. I think that particular change is an important part of the picture.

"Adult or erotic material" is a form of entertainment, or, if you will, recreation. But unlike various other forms of entertainment and recreation, it can be consumed at home. And I suspect that a lot of people think it's more fun than most other forms of entertainment and recreation that can be consumed at home. You can go out to a bar or a club or a ball game or a movie or a show or the beach or, well, a brothel, if you're in Nevada, or you can stay home and consume forms of entertainment that can be consumed at home. I can remember seeing a story recently (I don't remember where) about how brothels in Nevada are being hit hard by the economic slowdown. If you stay home, you don't have to use up gasoline, so the relative cost of at-home entertainment goes down when the price of gasoline goes up. Adult Web sites are probably not a Giffen good, so, if we could hold other income constant, we should expect that the demand for adult Web sites should go up when the price of gasoline goes up.

Granted, other income isn't constant. The rising price of gasoline affects a lot of other areas besides entertainment and recreation, so it represents a general decline in real income. And the economy is weak. So maybe the stimulus checks compensate for these declines in income. If the effect of the stimulus checks is to bring income up to the level that it was before the increase in gasoline prices, we should expect an increase in demand for adult Web sites. So the stimulus checks matter, but it isn't just the stimulus checks.

I should give credit where credit is due. The basic substance of this idea about gas prices and porn comes from this YouTube video:



Not coincidentally, the woman in the video (Isobel Wren, whom you may remember from an earlier post on this blog) has her own Web site "focused on adult or erotic material." And in the interest of smoothing the transition to a less energy-intensive economy, or maybe just to be naughty, I'll give you the link again. (Note that it is an adult Web site, so don't click the link unless you're over 18 and your boss isn't watching.)


UPDATE: I just noticed that this video is the same one that I linked to in the earlier post. Oh, well, now you get to watch it in embedded form.

Is the music industry shooting itself in the foot?

After Viacom’s negotiations with YouTube (Google) fell through, Viacom went through all the videos on YouTube and had removed those videos which violated Viacom’s copyrights. Well, not exactly. It would have been impossible to go through all the videos on YouTube and make an accurate determination as to which ones violated Viacom’s copyrights. There are simply too many, and the process cannot be accurately mechanized with today’s technology. What exactly Viacom did do is an open question. Certainly they had a lot of videos removed. Most of those, we may hope, were actual copyright violators, at least according to Viacom’s interpretation of the copyright law. Some clearly were not. And it is quite implausible that the videos removed included every single video that does violate a Viacom copyright.

In this post I’m concerned particularly with music copyrights. It is a common practice on YouTube, almost certainly illegal in many cases – perhaps in all cases – but arguably quite fruitful artistically, for non-copyright-holders to use copyrighted music in their videos. Sometimes it is an integral part of the video, and other times it is just background music. Until recently, it was also common for those who engaged in the aforementioned practice to identify, in some text format, the music in their videos. This latter practice served two functions. First, it enabled those interested in the music to find those videos. Second, it enabled those who watched the videos, but who were not previously familiar with the music, to find better copies of the music itself – often, I would imagine, for purposes of purchase. It also had the unintended function, so it turns out, of enabling copyright holders to find violations easily.

But things are changing. In the aftermath of the Viacom purge, video makers are recognizing that they do not have an incentive to identify the music in their videos. Without a text format identification of the music, each copyright holder is searching for a very specific set of needles in a large haystack. So this form of copyright violation is likely to continue – indeed to continue with greater impunity than in the past. The difference is that it will no longer benefit copyright holders by publicizing their products.

In principle, in deciding how aggressively to enforce its copyrights in this context, a holder faces a tradeoff between, on the one hand, the free advertising provided by the videos and, on the other hand, (a) the possibility that the videos substitute for the genuine musical product provided by the copyright holder and (b) the possibility that video makers would be willing to pay for copyright use if they were not able to steal it. The problem is, neither (a) nor (b) is really plausible. The audio track from a video designed to stream over moderate-bandwidth connections – in YouTube’s case, not even in stereo – is not at all a close substitute for a CD or an iTunes download. And as for (b), if you didn’t laugh when you read it, that’s probably just because I told it wrong. And then, of course, there’s the fact that enforcing these copyrights doesn’t actually stop people from violating them; it just stops people from violating them in ways that might benefit the holder.

Obscure Musical Thought

As Sheryl Crow’s “A Change Would Do You Good” is running through my head, it seems that a lot of the musical ideas were taken from the Beatles’ “You Can’t Do That”.

Sunset over Hyannis

My Favorite YouTube Channel

OK, it’s my blog, and I can talk about whatever I want. This has nothing to do with economics (unless I think of a connection before I finish writing this). Today I’m going to practice embedding video. I haven’t come across any economics videos that are really worth watching (except maybe the occasional joke video like the “Every Breath You Take” parody addressed to Ben Bernanke, but that’s no longer current enough to be funny). So instead I’m going to promote my favorite YouTube channel, which is probably about as far from economics as you can get.

This video is from OhYeahShauna. I didn’t know which of Shauna’s videos to choose, so I picked the one with the highest user ratings. (Shauna also has videos up on ShaunaInWonderland, which she used before she accidentally converted it to a comedian account.) Frankly, Shauna’s videos are among only a few that I’ve seen on YouTube that didn’t seem like a waste of my time. She’s not a professional, and she’s still very young (just out of high school, and apparently not yet aware of the subtle orthographic difference between the adjective “cubical” and the noun “cubicle”), but she seems to have a real knack for video editing, and I like the music she chooses. Oh, and it helps that she’s gorgeous.

She works with certain limitations, such as a small memory card that frequently cuts her off, and sometimes needing to film in the bathroom to get adequate lighting at night. Somehow she seems to turn the limitations to her advantage. (A bit like Picasso’s blue period, perhaps, at least if you believe the rumor that he couldn’t afford a full palette.) One of the scenes from one of her videos seems to indicate that her boyfriend Max is also involved in some of her videos, but it’s not clear whether his involvement is creative or merely technical.



…and after you’ve finished watching all of Shauna’s videos, go rent the DVD of Kurosawa’s Ran.

Life Expectancy

By way of Battlepanda:

Ran is awesome

I rented a DVD of Kurosawa’s Ran to watch on a flight from Boston to LA, and I have become once again restored in my flagging faith that the art of cinema can on occasion rise comfortably above the mediocre. Ran won the Oscar for best costume design, and in my mind it is the all time best in that category, as well as in art direction & set decoration (nominated but didn’t win), and possibly in cinematography as well (also nominated). I’m not one who is normally impressed with great costumes and sets, but this film is one of very few that could compete with the aerial view of the Rocky Mountains from my window seat. I was mesmerized from the very first scene. (Amy Taubin of the Village Voice described the film as “stunning”, and this is one of those occasions when I remember that the word is derived from an actual verb.)

Ran is an adaptation of Shakespeare’s King Lear, set in 16th century Japan. Kurosawa cuts and pastes a lot of elements from King Lear: for example, there is a character who has had his eyes gouged out, like Gloucester in Lear, but in Ran, the gouging happened long before the movie began, and his relationship to the lead character is quite different; and there is a non-fatal cliff jump, as in Lear (though in most productions the cliff is not even a real one), but in Ran, the blind character is not the one who jumps. Anyhow, the plot is secondary. It’s mostly about visuals. It reminded me of (and undoubtedly influenced) the recent Chinese film Hero, but I didn’t miss the supernatural martial arts tricks, and the presence of some emotional substance within the “visually spectacular Asian war film” genre is a distinct plus.

So now we have Ran, The Ox-Bow Incident, and Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans on my list of films that justify all the time spent watching mediocre films. I was beginning to wonder if the invention of color photography had contributed anything to the art of cinema. Now I see that it has – if you know where to look.