A hearty welcome to www.risingstarpr.com AdultFYI’s new site sponsor.

from www.frcblog.com – This week CBS online reported that Playboy is getting out of the pornography business.

According to Jim Edwards of Bnet, the whole commercial porn industry is tanking. He cites Playboy’s losses of $15 million last year on revenue of just $55 million (down 9 percent from the previous year), as well as the declining revenues of other companies and cable pay-per-view porn.

Wouldn’t you just like to gloat? I sure would. That reaction might be misplaced.

As for Playboy, while it will no longer actually make pornography, CEO Scott Flanders [pictured] says the company is moving into “brand management,” licensing its name and logos. So it could survive and thrive yet.

And the assumption from every quarter is that the hits to this vile industry are due not to some beneficent cause but to the glut of free porn on the Internet and elsewhere. It could be even worse than that. My friend Donna Rice Hughes, who heads Enough is Enough, believes it’s not quantity but content: the big industry leaders can’t compete with the type of deviant hard-core material that is now available on the Internet.

I hope she’s wrong. Whether it’s big porn syndicates tied in with organized crime or “mom and pop” amateurs dumping more and more deviant material on the Internet, the heart of the issue is still the same. As Bruce Taylor, the nation’s most experienced porn prosecutor, told PBS: “It’s still the same industry. These are a bunch of pimps who make hardcore porn […] by hiring people, turning them into prostitutes, and then distributing illegal obscenity.”

The problem is the same, and so is the solution. These people are violating long-standing federal obscenity laws. Prosecute them and convict them. It’s deceptively simple. Enforce the law, and the Internet porn industry will decline.