hyapet wrote:Apt insight as always, Malvarezlaw.
It's best to remember, though, that the law isn't always focused on one thing. There are different departments for different crimes. Just because terrorism is (and has always been) a priority, doesn't mean that you can just steal cars at will. Most likely - there are different protocols for different types of people - and those that deal with "moral crime" are usually the best targets for extortion. Where the law will always have the right to shut you down - but, nobody is crying foul when the "criminal" gets "let off the hook" if they don't persecute.
What probably helped NRX and Erika Korti studios the first time around was that they were new. They probably were around for a year or two before anybody anywhere really caught wind of what was going down and where it was happening. At this point though, Nick is well known. Anywhere he goes, there will be whispers, even before he's gotten a physical location, built sets, gotten all the secondary talent that actually puts the production together, never mind sending out scouts which will no doubt catch people's attention more than anything.
This and enemies in the business makes for a really toxic brew. Birds of a feather ... word will be out before the first video is released. And ... what then? The police are one thing. They are rational and can be bargained with. They aren't going to start laying hurt on a possible wallet. But ... criminal elements? That's in part what the bargain with the police is for, I would imagine. So that they, in essence, become your protection. Just like the mob. If after making a deal with the police for a bribe, the person lined up after them is a local mobster in the town you're shooting in, then where does it end? Or, more realistically, when does the profit no longer justify the risk?
There are bigger problems at stage at the moment when it comes to both porn production and distribution. There are currently two worms that are eating their own tails at the moment. On the one hand, you have the traditional porn studios. They're closing down everywhere, world wide. The business element is still viable, but the talent isn't really there anymore. Why? Because of O-F. Why would
the best girls take the equivalent of a baseball bat up their rear if they can make tens of thousands of dollars just by being annoying and fully clothed in front of a cheap camera all day long? Sure - there will always be people lining up to shoot at the traditional studios - but if you take a gander at the videos going up on A-V these days, some days there's something like 90% of the output consisting of people having no right being in porn. Back of the alley in the poorest parts of town hookers have more appeal than these women. Not girls. Women. Old, saggy, fat, and just ... yeah. Usually poor lighting is porn's greatest curse - in many of these scenes, it's like, "Whoa! Turn that light down!
Waaaaaaaay down."
It gets even worse. Because now, despite O-F or likewise platforms being a draw for the 11s, 10s, 9s, and 8s, there's the onslaught of AI porn. And man ... some of this stuff is
really good. Like,
really good. There's a ton of crap, but out of every nine mehs, there's one that's seriously a masterpiece. Even worse - Google itself can't tell the difference yet between real people and AI. So, when you type in, "Gorgeous busty blonde teen" and hit enter, roughly 40% of the results are AI produced now. It was just like 10% a couple months ago. Traditional I-G/O-F/porn models are now fighting algorithms that start out at the girl being perfect, never mind having a mesh of facial features from what can be considered the top ten hottest people of all time perfectly melded into a pants-springing work of hyper-degrading art. And we're not talking cartoons here either, or uncanny valley creations. But photograph level reality. Where you have to blink twice, and even then you're not sure if the person isn't actually real.
And this is the
first generation of AI porn. The next generation, which has already been created (and they're working on the third) has been held back because, pretty much, it'll crash all content creation on the Internet. From YouTube to Facebook to I-G to O-F to literally
everything - imagine if you have AI making the most beautiful people and talking to you as if they were real - imagine them making a full length feature film in roughly a minute based on the prompts that you inserted - imagine video game porn that likewise can be made in a couple minutes based off of your input. The future is here and ... it doesn't look like people are really going to be necessary for it.
So, all things considered, who really knows where this is going to go. In the matter of like three years, studio porn went from being the undisputed king, to being the radio that got eaten by television that likewise got eaten by the Internet. There's a good reason all of these studios are shutting down. And when you see the kind of people they can attract to perform - it doesn't really give the highest amount of hope.
That's why NRX was so crucial. It shot such high-level porn, with such beautiful actresses, that it pretty much kept the entire industry relevant. North America is scared to go into degrading porn, where their actresses at their raunchiest typically do a DP, and Europe has too much opportunity for women to really want to go into porn, even with the family structure deteriorating like with the rest of the West, there's still too much shame associated with it. Even outside of that - European women really aren't all that hot. But the Russians - they absolutely had it. And the level of output NRX had - and the fact that it was pretty much the home-base of all degrading porn anywhere anymore - meant that actresses that wanted to become O-F famous afterwards, could absolutely do so using NRX as their ladder.
It produced such amazing quality - that it could easily top any cam show and attracts millions of porn enthusiasts - and in turn make itself relevant as the last bastion of studio made porn. But now - with everything else that's going on within Russia - and what's happening with AI on top of that - there are so many uncontrollable factors at play that ... I could honestly see Nick just deciding to stay out of it.
It's like, there's a luxury car! But the keys are in the swamp. And the swamp is filled with alligators. And the alligators are on fire and can shoot lasers from their eyes. At some point - with all the unknowns and the culminative risk - you can't be blamed for losing interest in the car.
It was him who started with all this exclusivity things and made life for girls just wanting to work as much as possible really difficult. 
