Tuesday, Mar 2, 2010    Text size: 

SAN FRANCISCO — USAToday.com published a story today on tube sites and what they mean to the adult industry.

The article says that the industry is in a tailspin and DVD and online pay sites are in a free fall because of the rise in tube sites.

According to the story, adult entertainment has reaped the benefits of innovative technologies such as video streaming, webcams and online payments, but this same technology is now contributing to the industry’s financial woes.

"The industry has known about the impact of free tube sites for some time and is trying to deal with it," Vivid’s Steven Hirsch told XBIZ. "This subject has been widely covered by adult trade media. Some mainstream media is just now catching up with this and is making it seem like a new development, but we've been fighting it in every way we can and will continue to maximize the franchise that we've built over 25 years.”

The article says the number of tube sites keep growing. Nearly 1,000 sites, double the amount of a year ago, have put a sizable dent in the porn industry and have sparked various copyright infringement lawsuits.

Pink Visual recently filed a $6.75 million suit against the owners of Brazzers alleging that four company-owned tube sites poached content from 45 copyrighted movies and have streamed them “tens of millions of times.”

“The nature of the Internet being what it is, it's really incumbent upon producers and rights holders to proactively protect their intellectual property,” Pink Visual spokesman Quentin B told XBIZ.

Digital Millennium Copyright Act takedown notices are the current recourse for studios that find their copyrighted content on sites where they shouldn't be.

"It would be great if tube sites were made liable for any copyright infringement and not just this 24-hour notice, which requires constant monitoring,” Hirsch said.

Vivid Entertainment scours the Internet for pirated material and issues a takedown notice to sites that illegally show the company’s content.

But more often than not, the content just re-appears somewhere else.