Other porn companies also are upset by the explosion in Web video sites, many of which rely on user submissions that borrow heavily from copyrighted material.
"What's happening in the industry is an unacceptable amount of theft," said Jon B., a vice president at Red Light District who asked that his full name not be used because family members don't know what he does.
He said Internet piracy might be reducing his company's profit 35%.
The executive said suing websites was likely to prove futile because so many existed and because file-trading occurred over decentralized networks, leaving no single party to sue.
Instead, he said Red Light was considering suing individual downloaders for pirating copyrighted material, as the music industry is doing.
"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.
Hirsch said the Internet remained a positive overall for Vivid, helping to provide new ways to generate revenue to make up for declining DVD sales.
Piracy has always existed, but it's more detrimental for the company as it tries to sell more of its content over the Web, Hirsch said. Competing with free Internet videos is bad enough, but competing with free versions of Vivid's material is maddening, he said.
Industry revenue as a whole is up, but it is getting split into more pieces, said Farley Cahen, publisher of Adult Video News Online magazine.
"In the past, it was peer-to-peer networks" that took a modest amount of technical ability to use, Cahen said. "Now, there's PornoTube, XTube, RedTube -- any kind of -Tube you can think of."
"There are longer and longer clips that are free, and the companies are at a loss over what to do."
--
joseph.menn@latimes.com
