Tough climate:
The adult entertainment industry is not only seeing its DVD sales plummet as consumers watch more porn online, but the estimated $13 billion industry is also having its own version of a Napster moment - named after the Silicon Valley company that transformed the music industry by allowing users to share songs free online.
Over the past year or two, an increasing number of online sites - dubbed "tube sites" for their emulation of the video-sharing site YouTube - have offered snippets of free porn, some of it pirated, some of it legally obtained from longer films or amateur-shot footage.
Vivid Entertainment founder Steven Hirsch, a longtime porn heavyweight who sued one of the free porn sites for illegally using his company's material, say the Los Angeles company's DVD sales have dropped 30 percent in the past year, and the free porn sites are adding economic insult to injury.
"Between the DVD sales, the piracy, the free porn online and the economy," Hirsch said, "I've never seen it this bad in 25 years in the business."