Smut vid outfit sues PornoTube
The Register Desktop Support Seminar - Live & Online 11th December (10am PST) — A major producer of adult videos yesterday filed a lawsuit in Los Angeles federal court against YouTube clone PornoTube for "allowing its users to post videos that include copyrighted material".
Context & Ripple Effects
By December 2007 the user-upload model had become the dominant shape of online video — YouTube alone logged 213M visits in October and had just raised its file limit to 1GB — and the adult industry had cloned it quickly, with PornoTube running studio content alongside amateur uploads. As TorrentFreak noted in its same-day writeup of the filing, Vivid even went after one of its own customers over a posting, underscoring how little distinction these sites drew between licensed and lifted material.
The lawsuit lands at a sensitive moment for UGC platforms generally: YouTube opened ad revenue sharing to all creators on December 10, the day before this suit was filed, and days earlier had pulled Richter Scales' popular 'Here Comes Another Bubble' parody over a copyright claim. Rights holders are now testing whether the legal shelter big platforms rely on extends to their adult-video imitators.
First-order effects
- PornoTube must defend a federal copyright suit in Los Angeles and decide whether to lean on takedown-based safe harbor protections or settle and license Vivid's catalogue.
Second-order effects
- Other adult tube sites running studio footage face the same enforcement template, pushing them toward filtering, licensing deals, or removal of commercial content to avoid being next.
Third-order effects
- If rights holders find clone platforms easier targets than the major UGC services, litigation becomes a routine revenue-and-leverage channel for content owners, forcing every upload site to build licensing or filtering infrastructure as a condition of operating.
The trend: Copyright holders are moving from complaining about video piracy to litigating platform liability directly, starting where defendants are smallest and least able to fight.