YouPorn stiffs the pros

Porno king Steve Hirsch, the man who brought a multi-billion dollar industry to California's San Fernando Valley, is being ruined by his own success.

Hirsch, 46, made porn mainstream, developed his own Hollywood-style studio system with the Vivid Entertainment Group, and groomed the first international porn-superstar Jenna Jameson (pictured on page 3). At its peak, San Fernando was pumping out videos and DVDs worth $12bn a year. That is more than all the Hollywood studios combined.

But so much porn unshackled lust from shame and the customers took Jameson's bestseller How to Make Love Like a Porn Star a little too literally. Her sales, and those of Vivid's rivals, have plummeted by 50 per cent as the fans make 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