Ron Jeremy, Thespian, doesn’t like that sites such as YouPorn are sucking the adult entertainment industry dry. It seems Mr. Jeremy, known for his roles in such works of art as Afro Erotica 12 and Aunt Peg Goes to Hollywood, thinks such Web sites are destroying the industry and ought to be shut down. (Never mind the amount of BitTorrent traffic dedicated to sharing pornography.)

Says Mr. Jeremy:

You wouldn’t see YouTube play a full-length feature of a Steven Spielberg film. But they think that it’s just porn so they can get away with it. So now Vivid [the adult studio that's suing PornoTube] is striking back. Piracy is piracy, whether the film is PG, R or X. We deserve the same respect.

I feel for Mr. Jeremy, not in any specific sense, but in a general, “Wow, your life must suck…” sense. Good luck to him.

Ron Jeremy Takes Aim At Unauthorized Porn Broadcaster [Starpulse via TorrentFreak]

The tenets of Web 2.0 are not without their pornographic, or otherwise erotic, applications. We’ve covered PornoTube and EroShare, both of which are sites for user-generated porn. Now we’ve come across a site called Boobik? (yes, with a question mark in its name, and no, NSFW). If PornoTube is a YouTube of porn and EroShare is a Flickr of porn, then perhaps it’s best to describe Boobik? as a Twitter of porn.

To be fair, Boobik? doesn’t explicitly bill itself as a place for sharing user-generated pornography. Rather, it places the emphasis on social networking (the Facebook of porn?):

boobik is a place to meet people the sexy way.

You can get to know people through them sharing and broadcasting short experiences, thoughts and fantasies. By that we mean what they did last night, just now (hand in skirt under the desk), with whom and how many times). And don’t forget them pictures as well…

But the result, I imagine, will be mostly just to share pornographic material with others. The site’s frontpage shows a series of microblog posts, some of which contain photos with nudity. You can post text, photos, and video embeds with Boobik?, apparently of any rating level (the terms of service doesn’t preclude explicit material).

Want to share erotic thoughts on the go? You can also post to the site from a mobile phone, IM account, or email.

Thanks goes to Orli Yakuel for discovering this site.

The porn industry is finally sick of losing money to piracy and is starting to crack down on sites like PornoTube, which has just had a lawsuit filed against it by Vivid Entertainment Group.

The lawsuit is seeking $150,000 per illegal video. Vivid executive Steven Hirsch says, "We’ve decided to take a stand and say ‘no more’. Competing with free internet videos is bad enough, but competing with free versions of Vivid’s matertial is maddening" and "detrimental for the company as it tries to sell more of its content over the web."

Vivid competitor Red Light District is considering a different approach — suing individual downloaders, similar to how the music industry has been doing things. The company’s vice president said, "If it scares them enough, if it can take away 20 per cent of the illegal downloads, we’ll be doing the best that we can." 

Smut vid outfit sues PornoTube [The Register]

Previously, porn websites hosted in the United States had to keep records confirming that all performers shown on their sites were of a legal age. More recently there has been some suggestion that these requirements would be extended to all sites showing porn, potentially destroying sites such as YouPorn.com and Pornotube.com (both NSFW) who rely on user generated content and therefore would not have access to records.

A majority ruling of the Appeals Court found that “the purpose, and the legislative history of the statute make clear that Congress was concerned with all child pornography and considered record keeping important in battling all of it, without respect to the creator’s motivation” in that it impedes free speech rights.

Law.com notes that “the decision is a significant First Amendment ruling that directly implicates the controversial subjects of legal adult pornography and illegal child pornography.” For anyone in a Web 2.0 related porn business, it’s simply a sign that they have a future. See our overview of porn sites in this space here.

The latest wave of web innovation, though, was centered squarely on consumer sites. And the porn guys have adapted many of those features to create massively successful second generation adult content sites. PornoTube was the first we came across, in mid 2006. Others, like EroShare, have followed. We also mentioned Red Light District, a virtual world, in a recent roundup post.

Go2Web2 has just posted a roundup of some additional ones. Some of these have fantastic names – MegaRotic, Fantasti.cc, NippleByte, and StumblePorn, for example.

Many of these sites are little more than lead generation tools for more traditional porn sites (and if you are going to visit them, put on some protection first). But it is fascinating to see the industry try anything new to get new money in. Lots of competition and lots of money drive all of this.

• 89% of porn is created in the U.S.
• $2.84 billion in revenue was generated from U.S. porn sites in 2006
• $89/second is spent on porn
• 72% of porn viewers are men
• 260 new porn sites go online daily

We’ve covered a handful of adult-related startups here. These include a porn-specific browser called HeatSeek (that has connections to Sequoia-funded Songbird), a user-generated porn YouTube clone called Pornotube, as well as a few others like EroShare and ScrewTube.

Usually the porn industry innovates first and key features make their way to more mainstream sites. But over the last couple of years, many of the new ideas around web applications, like user generated content, video sharing, etc., went mainstream first and are now hitting the porn sites.

PornoTube offers on demand Flash videos (our sponsor Adobe will be proud I’m sure) of user uploaded pornography, including video, audio and photgraphs. The site is surprisingly well designed and has social features like rating, commenting, etc. All videos are tagged and can be browsed via a tag cloud or by straight or gay content. There are RSS feeds for various categories. Videos can also be embedded into other sites.

The site is free for users. For more technically saavy users, bittorent has long been a source of free pornography. But PornoTube, which is usable by anyone with a computer, could be disruptive to sites that are charging for similar content. I imagine PornoTube will have similar copyright issues as YouTube, however, and will have to pull that content down over time.

They even have a “beta” in their logo. Check it out, if it’s your thing.