Saw this earlier today. I’ve got 120 titles I’ve purchased over the last 8 years that I’m going to lose permanently. And no chance to legally download or transfer this content. No explanation, no remorse, just a giant foam middle-finger. So this is precisely why DRM and forced streaming is so horrible for consumers. Daylight robbery is what this is.
argyle43 R18 has not done anything abnormal. You have not bought movies, you have bought licenses for use, permanent rental, if you will. That's what it says in the contract when you "buy" a tittle. And if the store closes, that's it.
That's the thing about streaming, you pay for smoke. It steals consumers of all rights, all power goes to the stores. An unacceptable abuse that we have allowed. And here are the consequences.
That's why I only pay for things that can be downloaded, like SLR allows.
argyle43 Their ToS is ironclad in this regard, sadly. What I have been telling people is probably the only way to 'get back' at them is to bring this to the attention of Japanese media. It's a travesty that users who have spent thousands (and in some cases I'm aware of, tens of thousands (!)) of dollars there over the years are now being given a couple of months before they can't access their content anymore.
Hunting all around for information about why this is happening I found these excellent blog posts. I guess this is your site ZENRA?
https://www.zenra.net/blog/whats-going-on-with-r18-how-did-we-get-here
https://www.zenra.net/blog/breaking-news-r18-permanently-closing
I guess these rumblings have been going on for awhile and I just wasn’t tuned in. Unrelated to all this I did notice some time ago that all content with Rio (Tina Yuzuki - god I miss that sweet, sweet angel) had just inexplicably vanished. And I’ve also noticed titles are getting specific words censored (FO - - ED, ST - - - - TS, etc.) and related content to said words just suddenly vanished too. Very similar to the compliance measures that led to scenes getting pulled here at SLR. So basically Visa and MC are wreaking their puritanical havoc in JAV World too and it would seem Fanza has said fuck it, we don’t need this shit, we’re pulling the Western plug. Those of us left outside of Japan holding our empty boxes it seems all we can do is direct our ire towards the payment processors once again 
Crypto hitting the mainstream, it seriously cannot come soon enough!
Crypto solves close to nothing as you still need to convert your crypto into fiat to buy groceries and to pay performers/employed/listgoeson
My two cents. Credit card companies and the administrations pushing for this in the so called "free world" must be out of their God-forsaken skulls. And same goes with what they are doing with gas and other items. They are decreasing the power of their currencies. When the American dollar ceases to be a standard currency, and this change is on its way, there will be a whole tonne of suffering all around the globe. Americans don't really have assets, like large repositories of gold (Big V over in Russia has been buying up Gold). Like a tech company all they can offer is the illusion of stability. When folks don't trust in the power of a country's currency, they lose trust in the power of a country's government. Porn is a small piece of society, but it's a good predictor of the state of the nation to come. When money ceases to be good for a service, folks find new forms of money.
Punksxc from what I’ve been reading, Fanza, DMM, R18 are all part of the same larger entity. R18 was the Western facing side of that. I’m guessing they could make links, to the content we purchased access to, available on the native Japanese site DMM, but they’re taking the conscious decision to be done with English speaking customers altogether now. If you’ve ever tried to navigate DMM as one who knows nothing more of the Japanese language than the lyrics to Mr. Roboto, you’ll probably conclude as I have that transferring licenses to that site for us would probably turn into a nightmare. Plus it reopens all the issues they’re having with Visa/MC all over again. This whole thing sucks. Doing away with DRM is something they’re never going to do as we also see with JAV on SLR — strictly streaming only. The rest of all this falls squarely with the thought/morality police over at the payment processors.
Philip Actually--and I hate to be that guy--there seem to now be ways to get credit card tied with crypto. It seems like the exchanges that offer them still require KYC which is a good thing here, but having a CC that way could be used for a variety of things such as buying groceries and other expenses. Also, I've noticed contractors in certain parts of the world with less than stellar banking reputations seem quite fine with accepting crypto. Thus, it's not a replacement for fiat, but it has a use.
[deleted] Credit card companies want to process for as much as possible. They just don't want to get into any legal trouble. If you want them to be more open, push for repealing obscenity laws. It's easy to be a keyboard warrior by sitting back and pointing fingers, but the problem is way more complex and we should be thankful the two giants have been vocal many a time about not wanting to decide what legal services to process for and what not to process for.
Punksxc DRM has a use, but I agree it appears like studios focus so much on 'copy guard' but bury their heads in sand when it comes to preventing actual piracy from happening that makes the situation a bit frustrating. At the end of the day though, in spite of this imperfect system, running a totally legal site makes it easy to rest easy at night compared to running a pirate site worrying if that sketchy ad network will actually pay on time, whether you'll wake up with a billion DMCA's, hard knocks on the door at 3AM, etc.
ZENRA timeline of Primer
I got the reference immediately but had to go see what that would look like. Holy crap - the movie made my head hurt, even after three viewings - in fact getting to the periphery of understanding makes the head hurt even more. That diagram nearly made it explode!
I'm still getting my mind around the plot of "Immortality"
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1350200/IMMORTALITY/
@doublevr and the good folks of SLR Originals need to hire those guys to shoot interactive porn. The game / film is visually stunning.
What I'm wondering is if a studio or company like SLR that is in another country with different laws buys out their entire catalogue or buys out one of these Japanese studios, could they then get all the files and remove all the censorship and redistribute them without the blurring/censorship since they are now operating as a company outside of Japan?
