Makes one wonder.....

ecchi · 2005-09-14, 03:58 PM

My personal guess is that it is people in the industry. "Forbidden fruit" sells a lot better than legal porn. Take the UK for example, when all but the softest of softcore was illegal over here, softcore video tapes sold at about the equivalent of $80, and hardcore videos went for close on the equivalent of $200. Now it is legal, you can pay up to about the equivalent of $50 for hardcore videos and DVDs, but if you look around you can get them for about $10 to $20. Softcore goes for even less (often under $2 on video). A lot of smaller dealers would love to see hardcore banned again.

I myself was lucky. In the early 80's you could sell almost anything on video, but somewhere around 1982/3 they passed a law so that video was covered in the same way as everything else. To give shops with large stocks of videos time to get rid of what they already had, the law did not make selling the tapes illegal until 1984, and even then there was a further two years for most films (it was a complicated law). As soon as the law was passed shops and wholesalers started selling off old stock cheaply to get rid of it. I started buying up porn, horror, and martial arts films (the ones that were going to get hardest hit by the ban). Then I resold them at markets, advertising them as "soon to be unavailable" and charged ridiculously high prices for the tapes. People purchased them by the bucket load at many times the price I paid for them, and long before the law finally came into force I was able to get into the legitimate video business.

Now the law has got a lot more lax over here, it is interesting to see films that were illegal over 15 years suddenly reappearing again. And selling for a lot less than I used to charge for them two decades ago.

2005-09-14, 03:58 PM	#2
ecchi Banned Join Date: Oct 2003 Location: About to be evicted!!!! Posts: 4,082	My personal guess is that it is people in the industry. "Forbidden fruit" sells a lot better than legal porn. Take the UK for example, when all but the softest of softcore was illegal over here, softcore video tapes sold at about the equivalent of $80, and hardcore videos went for close on the equivalent of $200. Now it is legal, you can pay up to about the equivalent of $50 for hardcore videos and DVDs, but if you look around you can get them for about $10 to $20. Softcore goes for even less (often under $2 on video). A lot of smaller dealers would love to see hardcore banned again. I myself was lucky. In the early 80's you could sell almost anything on video, but somewhere around 1982/3 they passed a law so that video was covered in the same way as everything else. To give shops with large stocks of videos time to get rid of what they already had, the law did not make selling the tapes illegal until 1984, and even then there was a further two years for most films (it was a complicated law). As soon as the law was passed shops and wholesalers started selling off old stock cheaply to get rid of it. I started buying up porn, horror, and martial arts films (the ones that were going to get hardest hit by the ban). Then I resold them at markets, advertising them as "soon to be unavailable" and charged ridiculously high prices for the tapes. People purchased them by the bucket load at many times the price I paid for them, and long before the law finally came into force I was able to get into the legitimate video business. Now the law has got a lot more lax over here, it is interesting to see films that were illegal over 15 years suddenly reappearing again. And selling for a lot less than I used to charge for them two decades ago.