Porn Strategy: Share and Snare

The porn industry is learning a lesson the music industry refuses to hear: Piracy doesn't have to be a dirty word.

As recording industry officials sing dirges over a 2002 music-business sales slump and press ahead with lawsuits against file-sharing network platforms such as Kazaa, pornographers see an opening.

"You can't beat them, so you ought to join them," said Exploit Systems CEO Scott Hunter. "These are your most valued customers, the people who come specifically into your arena and say they want X, Y and Z. This is the most inquisitive, most important community possibly in the history of business."

Hunter's company has developed software that helps content providers put their legitimate versions of material being pirated onto the file-share networks in such a way that it overwhelms the pirated versions of the same material.

The software also influences the search engines of Kazaa, Gnutella and Limewire so that if a user searches certain keywords, they'll be more likely to find the legitimate version of the file they're seeking and download that.

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