their own porn and beam it to the bedrooms of the world via the web.

To make matters worse, enthusiasts put clips of the professional stuff on 'file-sharing' sites so everybody gets it free. So Hirsch (above) and his confreres are being socked with the same crisis that file-sharing brought to the music industry.

At the top of the free-porn heap is YouPorn, an 'adult-rated' copy of the runaway hit YouTube. All you have to do is type YouPorn.com and everything imaginable, straight, gay, home-made and studio, simply pops up on the computer screen.

YouPorn already gets more hits than CNN.com and the weather channels, and while Vivid's own tease-and-pay website is ranked 5,061st in 'adult' sites, YouPorn is number one. An investigation by Portfolio, a business magazine, found YouPorn getting a whopping 15m 'unique' visitors a month, which