Ok but consider, e.g., movies. Yes, there are free websites, but they're not exactly legal or mainstream in the way that free porn sites are.

Yes, but movies have a much higher barrier of entry than pornography. People actually care about the production value, plot, special effects, music, etc. For porn, on the other hand, that's not the case at all.

You should be comparing porn with short form, low production value content (e.g. youtube channels) and indeed, there's a lot of free content on that category available.

> For porn, on the other hand, that's not the case at all.

Oh, not really, you just never saw a more niche production. Well obviously priorities are still different, but its far from all porn being roughly the same, even within their categories.

MPAA is just a lot more powerful than the porn industry? They don't have any reliance on these streaming sites, so they have no issues suing and enforcing copyrights.

The MPAA also has a lot less content to defend. How many theatrical releases are there a year? Now how many porn videos are released a year? I'm pretty sure the difference is orders of magnitude. This is without taking into account how much budget is behind enforcing.

Finally, it seems like there is more money in free porn than there is in free movies. This then means more incentive to keep operations going and more means to achieve that.

With movies I am looking at watching "Dunkirk", or some other specific movie, which means there are at most a handful of movies that I want to watch at any given time, whereas with porn I typically want to watch a particular type, but there are lots of any given type of movie and it really doesn't matter if they are old or not.

I think pirate movie streaming sites are less profitable, they have much larger hosting bills and the MPAA is much more effective at getting them shut down. There's also more stigma about buying porn and we've made it pretty cheap and easy to stream normal movies these days.

Movies aren't as popular as porn.