Chapter 65

Melody kept the group together when she passed out paychecks. Sarah, Allie and Shelly were paid a small fee because they would appear in non-sex roles. Shelly's fee was larger because she had done the lighting. Melody was one of the few producers who paid in cash, particularly for a weekend shoot. She documented each transaction – and she had decided to be scrupulously honest with the taxing agencies, so the numbers on the contract and release were exactly what the performers received.

Melody had been in the business for several years. She worked as a performer – off and on – for a while before deciding she would try a web site instead. She was only 35 but that was ancient in the business. Sure, there were MILF scenes available. She got one or two offers a month from sites that featured young men (or young women) having sex with a woman twice their age. She had always passed. Her idea was to break people into the business in other ways.

The day Karlie and Adam had shown up was not typical for Naughty Newbies. Sure, some of the guys were rough and some of the women were hard-edged. There was no way around that in this business. She tried to present a professional product – given what she had to work with. The girls she used were almost always amateurs. They were shooting their first or second scene.

First off, those girls were cheaper – as in, they cost less money, but also in the way they behaved. Melody and Frank, her sole full-time employee, would run casting notices two or three times a month and they could book enough performers in that time to post three new videos a week.

Melody had already made the conscious decision to pay Karlie a small bonus. Her budget didn't allow for much but she knew anything would be appreciated. Instead of seven $100 bills in the envelope there were 10. Adam was paid the $350 she normally paid men along with the $200 he had lost when the shoot was cancelled two weeks earlier. She didn't think twice about the extra money, and once she saw the quality of what they had produced, she happier than ever. She also noted that, unlike most of the others she worked with, they didn't rip open the envelope to make sure they hadn't been shorted.

"Would you mind working with me if a project crops up in the future?" she asked Adam when she passed his envelope over.

"I asked you the same question a few days ago," he reminded her. Melody was an attractive woman. She was tall, almost 5-11, Adam guessed, and thin. He figured her breasts were probably A or B cups. Her face showed the passage of time but he never would have guessed she had spent the amount of time before the camera that her bio suggested.

He had checked on Judy Jackem after they had talked for the second or third time. She had performed for more than a dozen years, starting at age 19 and ending at 32. But she had done less than 60 things in that time. There were some girls – like Allie, he realized – that would have done 60 scenes in their first 9 months nowadays. Judy had retired a couple of years before. Or least her last credit was copyrighted two years before. Adam could guess that the transition from playing a nymph to playing the nymph's mother would be difficult for most women.

"True," Melody laughed. "But I thought that might have been just to bolster an old woman's ego."

"Actually, Adam finds you very regal in demeanor," Sarah said. "He thinks you should be our first choice to play the part of a royal personage in a script that I submitted to Daystar recently."

"He told me you sold a script," Melody said. "That's really wonderful." "I haven't sold it," Sarah admitted. "I submitted it for consideration. Ben is pricing it to see if it's doable. That's what we did Thursday night. We met with Daystar and Dazzle to show them ways to make it extremely profitable to them – if they let us in as a partner."

Melody smiled. These people were doers. They saw something and went after it. She liked that.

"Did you bring that folder I set out?" Allie asked Shelly. Shelly pulled out her laptop bag and produced it with a flourish. "Melody, here is a proposal from Subarctic Enterprises for Goldwall Productions. What this does is give you access to our data-protection product if you will agree to use your site as a beta-test, providing us with feedback on its usage – including any problems you encounter, all comments offered to you from consumers or your employees and your overall perception of the product as it relates to your industry."

Melody read over the proposal.

"It says I can use it at no cost for 5 years and I'll get free upgrades if I remain a tester in good standing," she said. "You can't afford to give this away. It's freaking huge."

"You are the only person we're offering this to," Allie said. "We only ask that you do not reveal where you got the product – only that you are testing it for an anonymous company – until we give you written permission."

She glanced up to see the stunned woman's face.

"It's like this, Melody," Allie continued, deciding to go with Adam's habit of speaking honestly. "You're a small outfit. If it doesn't work or creates problems we'll be able to cover the costs to you without going out of business. We don't anticipate any issues but, if people could foresee problems with any technology upgrade, they would fix them beforehand. You'll notice the second condition: You will offer a 2-inch by 2-inch spot on your web site where you will advertise a link for Polar Power FTP. That link will direct your consumers to an information site where they can learn about things. We brought along a demonstration for you, but we can do it another time if need be."

Melody had nothing pressing going on – certainly nothing more important than this – but she didn't want to keep the group away from something they had planned.

"I'm good if you are," she said. "I do most of the uploads so I should be able to give you my initial reaction now."

They walked Melody through the procedures, happy she was a little more technologically savvy than Tate and Jerry had been. Each stepped back to watch her reaction when she tried to copy the program a fourth time.

"No way!" she said. "Absolutely no way!"

"Go ahead and copy it again and then try to play your original file," Shelly said. Melody complied.

"It doesn't work," Melody announced. "I mean, I get an error message telling me the file was either obtained illegally or copied illegally."

"So far we have found about 30 different products used for playing movies," Adam said. "None of them will play that file. There might be a product out there that will. But if there is, we haven't found it yet."

Sarah handed forth a hand-written sheet of paper.

"These are the video programs loaded on that computer," she said. "Feel free to use any or all of them."

Melody scanned the list carefully. There was one freeware product that proclaimed it could play almost all files – even broken ones. She saw it listed and went to Applications folder and opened it. She didn't want to be the one to burst the balloon but she thought she owed them a true test.

She had experience fixing broken files. During the first few months of her business, she had copied files from disk to DVD to CD to portable drive as the need arose. Some of the files had been corrupted in the process and a friend had pointed her to this program to fix them. She still remembered how she had accomplished that feat.

She imported the broken video as a raw data stream, and exported it as flash video. The time given seemed short but it was a small file so she didn't consider it a problem. The group stood silently, not watching her directly to see what she was doing but instead letting her do whatever she wanted. When the file finished exporting, she re-imported it to the program. The key was that operator didn't open the video directly. She imported the raw data and added the codecs during his second pass.

It took Melody 20 minutes to recreate the 45-second video. She knew it would have taken her 15 hours for a video of normal size. But still, it was really only two or three minutes of her actual time. She could have been doing other things instead of watching the export window.

She brought the video into the program for a third time, this time opening it instead of importing it. She was terrified it would play unimpeded and she would have brought the hopes of this group crashing down.

But it didn't. She got the exact error message as her previous attempts had offered. A huge smile spread across her face.

"I'm not sure of the specifics," Adam said, putting his hand on Melody's shoulder gently. He had seen the worry etched on her face. "But what you tried is good if the file has been corrupted – additional data added or subtracted during transfer across a network. Polar Power doesn't do that. A small piece of data is added to each frame. It's not like that licensing program they tried a few years ago. It can't be edited out nor can it be parsed and overwritten. Well, I should say, we don't think it can at this point. It is set up on an algorithm that places it in a different spot on each sector of the file. It is never the same on any two files, so you can't use a program to look for it in a specific piece of information. Does that make sense? If it doesn't, it's probably because I've gotten something wrong."

"It does make sense and it's brilliant," Melody exclaimed. "How much work does it take to add this to each video?"

"Polar Power does it as it is uploaded to the FTP site or the server," Allie said, nodding. "The file you uploaded was pure data until you ran it through Polar Power. The reason it takes longer – about 10 or 12 percent longer than some of the better programs – is because it is completely reformatting the data. That's why you will need to keep a raw copy separate. You won't be able to simply download a video from your own server and copy it numerous times. That is a drawback but we considered it minor. You are probably doing it that way anyway.

"Additionally, if you change IP addresses, you will have to resubmit all your files. You will not be able just to copy them across to anyplace with a different IP address than the original. Well, you can but your fourth customer would be highly pissed when he tried to download it. The second mechanism that Polar Power uses is a key to the IP address at the location the file was sent. You will not be able to use the same file and copy it to a mirror. It won't work. But, I think everyone knows this process is not easy. If it were, it would already be done."

"Can I try something else?" Melody asked.

"You can do anything you want," Allie assured her.

"Have you tried making a compressed format, splitting it and uploading it that way?" Melody wondered.

"You mean a split archive?" Allie asked for clarification.

"Yeah," Melody replied. "But more than that. You can compress the file and there is a really good freeware program that will split it into numerous segments. You need all the parts to put it back together."

Allie nodded and looked at her notes. She named the product Melody referred to.

"That's the one," Melody said.

"The only way that product has created any issues was if they took three separate identical files, split them exactly the same way and posted different parts to be downloaded. Even then it would only let them copy it the same number of times. And only if they reassembled the split video on a computer with same serial number that split it."

"So the number of copies goes from three to three times the number of files they split it into?" Melody wondered. "I mean, see if this works. I bought one video and made three copies – as your program lets me do. I split each of those copies in the same way. I upload them, using one from each copy. The first one is say 1, 2, 3; the second is 3, 2, 1, et cetera. That gives me what, 9 different combinations. Each of those can be copied and split two more times. If I put those combinations on a sharing site, any number of people could download it. Meanwhile, I've still got my original. You've made it slightly harder but not significantly so."

"Except for one thing," Allie said. "According to my notes, you could download the video and join it. But you couldn't play it. First off, in your scenario, the files would not be identical. Number 1 would have been copied once, Number 2 twice and Number 3 three times. They would not join successfully. In order to make it work, a person would have to purchase three copies of the same video. That creates problems because the algorithm is different on each video. They still would not join successfully. In that instance, you get no video at all. You might get some sound but no picture. The sound plays only in one of the 20 most popular applications."

"But what happens if I just upload all three versions of one file?" Melody asked.

"From what I understand, you can do that but unless it matches the serial number of the computer where it originated, you're out of luck," Allie continued. "Again, none of us are really qualified to answer a lot of technical questions."

She giggled musically.

"Adam's cell phone is a dinosaur," she added. "He can't even snap pictures with it, let alone video. He doesn't even have text messaging."

"The horror," Melody gasped in mock appreciation. "Can we get together to discuss this further when your tech weenie is back in town?"

"Absolutely," Allie said. "And it has been really good to hear you go through scenarios like that. Mary, our tech weenie, as you call her, is a pirate from way back. She is familiar with almost every way there is to circumvent copyrights. She uses bit torrent protocols. She uses file-sharing networks. She uses spilt files and probably a dozen other things. She has tried them all and found only one way to reliably steal content."

"Which is?" Melody asked.

"If you use your second hard drive slot, format the second drive completely," Allie admitted. "You can do that as many times as you want because we let you copy files back to your own computer – so long as it has the same hard drive serial number. Basically, you can clone your hard drive and sell it or give it away and we can't stop you."

"Sounds expensive and time consuming," Melody admitted.

"It is, from what I gather," Allie said. "From what Mary tells me, it is how a whole host of illegal items are swapped. People will fill a second hard drive with content and sell it. It's not exchanged digitally, so it's hard to trace electronically. That is why Mary made sure you could not use an external hard drive. I mean, sure, I guess you can take three externals, fill them up and sell them. But that is a hell of lot more difficult than simply clicking on a link and downloading it."