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I'm not in favor of censorship. I am opposed to the exploitation of children and animals for financial gain. I'm not going into the cat bullshit anymore. If you can't figure out what that was really about you're bullshiting yourself.
I'm one of the few people on this board that actually did get censored. Maybe the only one. I've been in this business for 20 years so it was bound to happen sooner or later and we knew that going into it.
I was there at the very beginning of the phone sex biz. Pioneered a lot of the stuff in that industry. Of course the downside to being the fucking pioneer in any biz is you are sailing in uncharted waters and the lead ship. So you never know what lies ahead.
When I got into that sector of adult there were no laws on the books yet regulating obscenity via telephone lines and computers.
Our attorneys told us some advice about what we could or shouldn't broadcast, but it was pretty much meaningless.
After seeing the huge call volume we could do, we said fuck it, let's go balls out, push the edge as far as we can and make lots of money. At the time it was all just recorded fantasies. Pretty lame looking back now, mostly moaning and groaning, orgasms, fucking and sucking sounds. But guys loved it and we did millions of minutes a month with it.
Of course to generate millions of minutes you have to do large scale advertising. We ran full page ads and tons of little ads in all the major adult print mags. The Net hadn't been invented yet so at that time the print mags were still the best place to do your marketing.
The downside of course is we stuck out like a sore thumb and we're an obvious choice for the conservatives to go after.
So the government we found out started to make surreptitious recordings of all our phone sex broadcasts. We got a C & D from the AG, and 24 hours to shut down all our operations or be hit with $75,000 per day obscenity fines.
Looking back I think these prosecutors just made up half the crap they said they could nail us with and we probably could have fought it on technicalities, because they were using non-applicable obscenity laws and applying it to telecom systems.
After saying oh shit now what, we decided it would cost us millions to fight it and of course we didn't want to push it inadvertently into a worse hostile direction since they were at least giving us the opportunity to shut down and have nothing more happen in terms of fines or prosecution.
So we shut down.
The ironic thing we sat there thinking now what, this sucks. Then we had the brainstorm, and said fuck it, lets just figure out creative programs for mainstream audiotext, there's no competition at all. And that's what we did, and we ended up making even more money in mainstream than from adult.
So it sucked to get censored. We lost millions of phone sex revenue we could have had going forward, but all turned out for the better in the long run.
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