Kayden Kross Pens Impassioned Anti-Piracy Op-Ed for IBT

CYBERSPACE—Writer/director/performer Kayden Kross brought her word crafting skills to the International Business Times over the weekend with an op-ed piece laying out in stark detail the toll porn piracy has taken on the adult industry since she entered it 10 years ago. Headlined "Start paying for your porn, or I will stop making it," the piece breaks down the ways in which free dissemination of adult content through torrent and tube sites has caused the business to shrivel to a mere shell of what it was in 2006. "In order to stay profitable, the remaining studios have mostly survived on drastic budget cuts and cornering niche markets," Kross wrote. "Production days very commonly run 12 to 16 hours, and many crew jobs are cut to make a budget work—jobs like catering, makeup, lighting, sound, art direction, and most of the camera crew. ... This may sound like an argument for empathy for the adult industry, but it's not. It's an argument for the economy. These are jobs that were once filled, that a decade ago created very decent living wages for a very large group of people. They had families and roots in the community." While this is a fairly rote complaint many in the industry have voiced before, Kross uses it as build-up to her key, less-often-stressed point about the larger issue at play in the perpetuation of porn piracy: "The bigger battle though, now, is the battle against the entitlement that has been taught to a generation of porn consumers," she put forth. "The attitude, because our work has been stolen and freely distributed in such large amounts, is that porn should be free. "But porn should not be free," she continued. "Not unless the needs of the people working to create it are also met for free and a system of free resources stems back further from there. We do not live in that world, though. We live in a capitalistic world. If an industry dies because of a restriction in demand, that is a natural evolution in a capitalistic market. But if it dies because of blatant theft, then there exists a flaw in the pattern of laws and enforcement of the governments designed to uphold the system." Read Kross' full IBT op-ed here. The prolific Kross was also recently tapped by Nylon to contribute a regular advice column aptly named "Porn Star Advice." Read her latest installment here.