James Delahunty
16 Dec 2007 8:45
Vivid Entertainment Group has filed a lawsuit in a Los Angeles Federal court against an adult-oriented YouTube-knockoff site called PornoTube. The adult entertainment giant targeted the video site for copyright infringement, representing the first move by a Porn Industry company against a YouTube-like site. While the Porn industry has certainly been somewhat more successful at marketing content for online-consumption compared to the movie industry for example, it has always had to compete with free clips.
Unlike the movie industry, Internet users surfing for free adult videos are more likely to be happy with 5 - 10 minute clips than a user surfing for TV shows or movie downloads. While the porn industry has always had to compete with free clips, it doesn't accept that it should have to compete with freely available clips from is very own catalog of premium content.
"We've decided to take a stand and say 'no more,' " Vivid co-Chairman Steven Hirsch said. "We will go after all the free sites." To a degree, Vivid's complaint about PornoTube echoes Viacom's complaint about YouTube. Both companies seek to discover just how much responsibility services like YouTube have over the content uploaded to the service by third party users. Neither company wants to act as police officers that specialize in online copyright infringement, an activity that would require a lot of time and money just to ensure that your content isn't freely available to view.
The Vivid suit accuses PornoTube of hosting clips from several of its adult titles, including "Night Nurses" and "Where the Boys Aren't 7" and it seeks damages of $150,000 per infringed work. "What's happening in the industry is an unacceptable amount of theft," said Jon B., a vice president at Red Light District (not his real name, but rather an identity used to keep his name from the public for the sake of his family).
He estimated that Internet piracy reduces Red Light's potential profit by about 35% but he has a realistic stance that suing websites and similar actions would be futile in the fight. However, he does approve the RIAA tactic of suing sharers on P2P networks. "If it scares them enough, if it can take away 20% of the illegal downloads, we'll be doing the best that we can," he said.
Source:
Los Angeles Times