While the influx of free and low-cost video has hurt the sale of pornographic videos, the chief executive of the Penthouse Media Group remains so bullish on the sex-related entertainment industry that he is investing $500 million in a group of social networking sites.

Marc Bell, chief executive of Penthouse Media, said the company had acquired Various and its subsidiaries as part of a plan to expand its reach. Various operates more than 25 networking sites and says it has a member base of more than 260 million consumers, about 1.2 million of them paying subscribers.

The combined revenue of both companies is projected to be $340 million in 2007.

Variouss most popular Web site is Adultfriendfinder, which describes itself as a personals community for swingers and sex. But Various owns a variety of other social networks like Italianfriendfinder.com, Gradfinder.com and Bigchurch.com, which offers to help users “meet people who share the same spiritual beliefs as you.”

“For now, we are holding on to everything,” Bell said. He said the goal was to provide consumers, particularly 18-to-34-year-old men, with a wide variety of sex-related offerings in magazines, in videos and online. “The rationale here is, its an online world,” Bell said.

After filing for bankruptcy protection, Penthouse was purchased in 2004 by PET Capital Partners, a group of private investors that includes Bell.

Since then, Bell and his team have revamped the magazine, turning it from what he describes as an “XXX” publication into a more lifestyle-focused magazine that is “where you go when you graduate from Maxim.” The company also started making sex-related movies aimed at couples.

TOKYO: Sharp Corp. said Wednesday that it was suing Samsung Electronics because the Korean firms liquid crystal display modules and LCD TVs infringe on its patents.

It is the latest in a series of legal tussles among Asian technology companies as they increasingly focus on intellectual property to survive fierce competition.

Sharp, the worlds No. 3 LCD TV maker behind Samsung and Sony, said that it had asked Seoul Central District Court to award it compensatory damages and to prohibit the production and sale in South Korea of the products concerned.

Samsung officials were not immediately available for comment.

The three patents named in the suit relate to brightness, response speeds and viewing angles of LCD panels, Sharp said.

The company filed a similar suit against Samsung in August.

Before the announcement, shares in Sharp closed down 0.3 percent at 1,959, or $17.58, largely in line with the Tokyo stock markets electrical machinery index.

Just south of Los Angeles, there is a small city called Paramount where houses have all but stopped selling.

Its a city of bungalows and manicured lawns, far enough from downtown to have long been affordable to working-class families. But as home prices rose ever higher in other parts of Southern California, Paramount became all the more attractive - and prices eventually soared there as well.

By last year, the typical house sold for almost $500,000, up from $200,000 in early 2003.

Many of those sales depended on adjustable-rate mortgages with tantalizingly low initial payments, and now that those mortgages are much harder to get, there arent many buyers willing and able to pay $500,000. Yet sellers in Paramount have not adjusted to the new reality by cutting their prices very much. Instead, the real estate market has frozen.

Last weekend, Luis Perez and his wife, Hilda, held their fourth open house since putting their apricot-colored stucco home on the market in August. They have reduced the price once, by about 5 percent. They still havent received a single offer.

Since the summer, only about three homes a week - including houses and condominiums - have sold in Paramount. In the third quarter of this year, only 30 homes changed hands, down from 134 in the third quarter of last year.

That 78 percent drop is bigger than the decline in any other ZIP code in the United States, according to an analysis by a research firm called DataQuick Information Systems. The biggest declines can generally be found in moderate-income towns on the outskirts of major metropolitan areas, where adjustable-rate mortgages had become the norm. In more affluent areas across the Northeast and California, the declines have not been so big.

In parts of Florida, Arizona and Nevada, home sales have fallen more than 60 percent over the last year. In several ZIP codes in Californias Inland Empire, east of Los Angeles, the decline is greater than 70 percent.

But no other place can match Paramount, the capital of the great home sales bust of 2007.

This year has been filled with predictions that the bottom of the real estate cycle was oh-so-close. In January, Donald Kohn, the vice chairman of the Federal Reserve, said that housing starts “may be not very far from their trough.”

They have since fallen an additional 21 percent and are well below where they were for most of the 1970s. In recent weeks, some Wall Street analysts hopefully guessed that the mortgage-related credit crunch was entering its final phase.

Instead, the giant bank UBS, in need of cash, sold nearly 10 percent of itself to the Singapore government this week.

But the standoff between buyers and sellers in Paramount helps explain why we are still a long way from the bottom of the cycle. No matter how big a mortgage rescue plan the federal government puts together, no matter how much further the Federal Reserve cuts interest rates, the worst housing slump on record is going to continue into 2008 and probably beyond. The slump cannot end until home prices come back in line with economic reality.

For decades, real estate values rose at roughly the same pace as incomes. Whenever prices got a little ahead of incomes, as they did in the late 1980s, they would quickly settle back down again. The recent boom was different: In just six years - from 2000 to 2006, even as incomes were growing slowly - the average home nearly doubled in price.

Nationally, home prices have fallen only 5 percent from their peak early last year, according to the SP/Case-Shiller Composite Home Price Index, the most accurate of the well-known measures. Instead of selling at reduced prices, sellers are holding out, hoping that the good times will somehow return. Paramount is simply an extreme example.

“We got to a point in this area where the values far exceeded the capability of the median family,” said Gary Endo, a real estate agent with Duke Associates in Paramount. “So people created a loan to bridge that gap. All they did was create a problem.”

Endo added: “Were going through that transition where sellers cant accept that prices are falling. Theyre still caught up in this idea that their property is worth more than it is. Its just strange.”

Perez, who is 43 and works as a machine operator, bought his house for $380,000 six years ago. He later refinanced his mortgage and took out a home-equity loan. As a result, the interest rate on his new mortgage reset in October, causing the monthly payment to jump $1,400, to $4,000.