The New Reality of Porn?

You know there are serious problems in the porn industry when a prestigious program like ABC's Nightline devotes an entire segment to it, which is exactly what happened last night. While it's worth your time to watch the entire video, the basic gist of it is that the porn industry is under attack by the increasingly popular "tube sites," which offer up sometimes copyrighted material completely free of charge.

The biggest offender is a company called Mind Geek that owns, among other sites, Porn Hub. Nate Glass, the founder of Takedown Piracy, has declared war on these tube sites, and has taken down "26 million and change" videos from various tube sites. Mind Geek has always complied with requests to take down footage, but since all of their clips are posted by users rather than the site itself, they are legally in the clear.

While the studios are certainly feeling the pinch, it's the porn stars that are really bearing the brunt of this new reality. Aaliyah Love illustrates this by saying, "The smaller studios are getting shut down; The larger studios are shooting less, they're paying less, it's affecting all of us." Jenna Ross sometimes goes weeks without getting work, and she lays the blame firmly at the feet of piracy. "It bothers me only because I work so hard to produce the content that I do produce, and then you just turn around and it's out the window."

Of course, the strangest twist of all is that the windfall of cash that has come Mind Geek's way, via these tube sites, has allowed them to actually purchase porn studios, meaning that many of these actresses are now in their employ. Plausible Films co-founder Paul Fishbein said, "The irony is that the industry which, for fifty years, fought the government on obscenity... wish the government would get interested in this and try to shut down some of these tube sites."

When asked what he thinks the odds of that happening are, he simply responded, "Zero."