LOS ANGELES — More adult entertainment professionals would prefer to call in the lawyers to fight rampant content piracy rather than do nothing about it, according to the results of a new XBIZ Research poll.
The adult entertainment industry in the past few years has seen bottom lines sharply eroding because of illegal streamed content, leading to growing discontent over online thievery.
That discontent is so strong that one-third of those polled also feel that end-users should be held liable for poaching and sharing videos.
The results are based on opinions of members of XBIZ.net, the adult entertainment industry’s leading social network.
XBIZ asked community members, "Should legal action be taken against end-users involved in content piracy?"
XBIZ found that 33 percent of respondents said, "Yes, any and all end-users accessing pirated content." Another 38 percent said, "Yes, but only those who share and distribute pirated content. But 29 percent of those polled said, "No, legal action against end-users is ineffective."
Pirated adult content can be found everywhere over the Internet, particularly through BitTorrent networks and file-sharing lockers. In fact, some companies' entire catalogs are available online.
"Piracy has affected our entire industry," Burning Angel's Joanna Angel says, "but in our case we are a small company, and we would have been a bigger company if piracy weren't so rampant."
Piracy extends well past BitTorrent networks and file-sharing lockers. Some tube site operators, too, poach and republish adult content.
Being clubbed so hard by piracy, adult companies are fighting back with litigation, bundling defendants in large numbers, and going directly after tube site owners and file-sharing locker operators with multimillion-dollar suits.
Adult companies Corbin Fisher, VCX Inc., Grooby Productions, Titan Media, Lightspeed Media, BlazingBucks, Elegant Angel, West Coast Productions and Axel Braun Productions have been the most prolific in filing porn BitTorrent claims.
And Private Media Group and Pink Visual have taken the strongest legal approaches against tube sites posting content online illegally.
