Adult entertainment producer Vivid Entertainment has filed a lawsuit against PornoTube, a YouTube clone for the porn industry.

From the Los Angeles Times:

The suit is apparently the first of its kind in the adult film industry, which has done a better job than the major Hollywood studios in finding ways to profit from putting entertainment products on the Internet.

But in the last year or so, the rapid increase in consumption of all manner of videos on the Web has in some ways hurt the porn producers more than the mainstream companies because consumers of adult fare often get what they are looking for in clips of five minutes or less. Free short clips are easy to find on the Web, undercutting the established porn producers, which earn most of their money from long-form videos.

“We’ve decided to take a stand and say ‘no more,’ ” Vivid co-Chairman Steven Hirsch said. “We will go after all the free sites.”

Like the movie industry, the porn industry is facing declining DVD sales due to the spread of user-generated content on the Internet. In an article for Portfolio, Claire Hoffman writes how the industry is dealing with sites such as YouPorn and PornoTube.

In recent years, competition from the internet had cut deep into the porn studio’s revenues. DVD sales, once Vivid’s financial bedrock, were down almost 50 percent since 2004, and the proliferation of cheap Web-based videos was stealing market share from the company, which specializes in high-end sex films. Vivid and its top rivals—Wicked Pictures, Evil Angel, Digital Playground, Red Light District, Penthouse Media Group, and Hustler, to name a few—had lately been getting an unwanted glimpse of the overnight crisis that the file-sharing revolution brought to the music industry and Craigslist brought to newspaper classified ads.

The adult entertainment is a $12 Billion industry.