Indeed, indeed, INDEED!!!!!! Thanks, Joe --you are a true and gifted professional, and all-around nice guy who really cares.

Joe - I asked a question earlier in the thread but it was buried beneath a bunch of Johnny Clips utterly nonsensical wannabe anarchist blather so I will have to ask it again - is there a DOJ site with a comment form?

Today, Xbiz carried a report that provided this link which includes an email and a phone # to input comments ---It also seemed to be steering comments mainly to certain aspects:

https://www.federalregister.gov/arti...-requested#p-5

Sorry, Farrel, I've been scrambling to get unfinished work off my desk before Phoenix.

The notice published in the Federal Register is linked from my article. It provides an email link to Andrew Oosterbahn [email protected] who is in charge. This is part of a report he must make to the Office of Management and Budget to justify the paperwork and economic burden on the Industry and the public. Don't forget about those people sitting in front of laptops with cameras, your kinda people, Farrel, they are all covered too, and even in simulations or mere lascivious nudity, because they don't keep employment records, none of them are eligible for 2257A certification - meaning they have to comply as though it was all hardcore.

AVN Writes About the Section 2257 Notice and Call for Comments
 

AVN just published a really in-depth analysis of the legal issues on the Notice published today in the Federal Register. Mark Kernes. Excellent article.

(Now, if only I can convince them to write a much-deserved review of http:/www.xxxlaw.com !)

Their sources are Attorney Reed Lee who works in my Chicago office - and is a board member at Free Speech - and yours truly, though they never quite identify Reed's connection.

http://business.avn.com/articles/leg...aw-470386.html

This is a thread for professionals to communicate directly with an intelligent and respected attorney that is not charging anyone here right now for his time to communicate things that actually have a real business impact on many people in this industry.

Would it be too much to ask for you to take your soap box to another thread, better yet, one you can create all by your anarchist self to show your true anarchist spirit, and show the respect and courtesy of letting others get the critical information that they need to get here. There are plenty of "legal advice" threads on GFY but almost none of them are posted by a practicing attorney with an expertise in these matters.

With all due respect, thank you.

Amen. :thumbsup

LOL, The sad thing is, he's actually being serious.

This thread should be on page 12 by now but here it still sits on page 2 only do to JohnnyClips.

You should quit porn and become a comedian because your opinions are hilarious!

2257 is to protect Children, not Webmasters or Producers.

LOL

WTF are you talking about?

Do you really think that the authors of the 2257 regulations intended to have porn all over the fucking web with absolutely no way whatsoever to verify the ages of the performers?

Is that what you're telling us Bozo?
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And if an underage looking girl is spotted on a tube site with no watermark indicating where the original image came from?

How the fuck are the Feds then supposed to go about "Protecting Children" ?
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Well, if the tubemaster inserted the vidcap and the .flv on the page, or if he "otherwise manages the sexually explicit content" of the tube, they inspect his records. If he's offshore, or pretending to be offshore, they do have some more indirect options to inflict pain. They may even secure an arrest warrant that just may be inconveniently served during a change of planes at an American airport. It happened to the gaming people, and I've heard it's dreadfully inconvenient. And those rebooking charges months later are a nightmare.

It would make for bizarre content if any tube actually permitted the direct upload of whatever the browsing public chose to upload. Somewhere near 90% of it would be images of a man's generative organ, typically that of the uploader, being stimulated. Because that's not known to draw high Alexa ratings, I rather suspect that all the tube sites sift and winnow the submissions, cull, and make aesthetic determinations on what gets to hit the landing page. If that does take place, they are all subject to Section 2257 as secondary producers.

That's "how the fuck" the law can be enforced. The inspection regimen may start again at any time; there is no court order blocking it. Inasmuch as one of the loudest arguments from the Free Speech Coalition before the Third Circuit in January was that the law isn't important enough for DOJ to enforce, were I a DOJ official in charge of this, and were I a smart cookie (as some of them really are), I'd begin vigorous inspections now, so as to deprive the FSC of that argument.

i dont understand what the fed believed was the flaw with them to begin with to get this whole thing started.

i do see both sides, porn is rampant on the internet and i'd suspect probably 80% of it does not have proper documentation, but until things like the DMCA and international enforcement are worked out, i dont really see how changing these laws will help "protect children" in any way.

as we recently saw with those jcash scumbags in florida. whether there are laws in effect or not, there are still idiots that are going to break them.

Some very interesting observations here :)

The cynic in me says that if inspections are resumed the DOJ will go after the low hanging fruit, i.e the mom & pops who duly post their physical locales and such but who are not in strict compliance.

Moreover, by giving the tubes a pass the Feds hurt the industry as a whole and I rather suspect that they're very much aware of this.

QUESTION: By the mere act of removing watermarks, in and of itself, do tube site owners, in your opinion, forfeit their "user uploaded" status and thereby their exemption from 2257 regulations?
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Of course.

But they can be counted on to deny that they do that, asserting that it was uploaded in that condition.

Just by selecting what uploads see the light of day is enough to "otherwise manage the sexually explicit content" and any kind of selection process at all that delays the appearance of uploads for review is enough to call what they do insertion on a web page. There are arguments they can make about CDA and copyright, but I think that, given what the selection process actually appears to be, in breaking the hearts of all those male masturbators whose submissions are routinely deleted, the tubemasters lose and face prison time if 2257 survives.

And BTW it's not some magical "user uploaded status"; they lose their argument that they are a _mere host_. They do that, too, in many other ways by their promotional activity, especially in using videocaps from the submissions.

Porn was already all over the web before 2257 with no way to verify the age of performers.

Joe, I believe you can find a client at https://gfy.com/showthread.php?t=1062582 lol

I've had exactly that model pitched in my office many times over a decade.

Um...2257 pre-dates the web.

Just sayin...

OK my bad :1orglaugh

Well, orchestrating the prerequisite sting operation could certainly be accomplished easily enough.

I still question whether the DOJ would be so motivated given that the tubes are effectively decimating the industry however.

Then again, if the tubes drive all of the mom & pops out of business, prosecuting the big players alone would be a far more costly proposition.


Interesting.

It would be nice if some tort lawyers were to explore that latter avenue right now.
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There is at least one civil suit in the queue right now that touches on 2257 related issues.

And that's all I'm going to say about it. ;-)

Cool :thumbsup

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Good morning!

Good Morning!

Just arrived in Phoenix, and have been up for 48 hours except for some brief naps on the planes. Booked at the last minute and had to endure Chicago to DFW leaving at 7am today, DFW to Orange County, CA of all places, and then a third hop from Orange County to Phoenix. But I'm here! Legal Seminar Friday at 1pm, and client meetings booked solid each day. No sightseeing at the Minerology Museum, Old State Capitol, or Tent City on this trip, and that out door nighttime choir recital over at the Mormon Temple way west on Broadway in Tempe is just out of the question again this year. If you don't see me at the Mission Palms, you'll find me at Fileberto's drinking that agua di tamarindo.

I was so delighted again to arrive at the Barry M. Goldwater Terminal in PHX!

Thanks for looking out and keep us updated. 2257 regs have been very good for business by lowering cost.

Can you explain this comment a bit? I'm not sure I understand how 2257 regulations have lowered costs for businesses.

From where I sit, the burden of compliance with 2257 has actually increased over time, and the expense of complying with it has gone up, accordingly.

A law I could once comply with through use of nothing more than a file cabinet now requires a manner of cross-referencing that simply isn't possible in an analog system. Now, you pretty much have to store your records in digital form, within a database that permits you to cross-reference all the various pieces of data you have to store, from all known aliases of the performer to each and every depiction of that performer that is subject to the statute.

How has 2257 lowered your costs? Do you mean that the more recent changes to the regulations (like clarification that it's acceptable to have a third-party like an attorney serve as your custodian of records) have lowered the cost of compliance from where it was in, say, 2005?

Amen to that

Here is why GFY should require posters to all have legitamate sigs. So we all know who the idiot really is. Altho this guy is prolly 18 or 19 years old and posting from his bedroom in mommys house. OR 50 years old, hasnt been laid in 20 years....posting from his bedroom in his mommys house.

Except for the fact that site owners (all site owners) would then have to have records of the scenes they use, therefor pirate sites would not exist on US servers or any country the feds wanted to swing their big dick in.

If 2257 would have been written better AND enforced, like I said, we would not be in the situation we are in right now were everyone has to suck pirate cock to get poor converting traffic. And that is not an opinion, it is a fact. And it is not hilarious. It is a solution to a problem that plagues us all.


No shit?

Good thing the tubes have warning pages and are 2257 compliant, to protect the kids from exposing them from pornography and to make sure they don't publish scenes that involve minors. 2257 is working out like a dream for them.

Every tube has to manually approve every video that is loaded to it. Every single scene gets looked at and manually added or denied. The bigger tubes usually delete those with watermarks on them. It boggles my mind how anyone could even try to deny they are not cherry picking content, as that is how the scripts function. Each and every scene has to be added, queued, and published. It's a multi-step process. Every one of them is completely guilty, with many of them outsourcing uploading to the Philippines.

I honestly don't understand how some of the industry lawyers have not eaten these sites alive yet. Or are you all on Manwin's payroll?

Personally, I have zero faith in 2257 but I hope they bring the hammer down harder than any hammer has every dropped before. It's time the porn industry got its diaper changed and the shit removed.

To clarify, I should've said "my business". I do agree with your statement regarding 2257 regs.

My cost of doing business was lowered because the industry went into a panic about 2257 and started doing things such as sending out unredacted model releases and IDs to people that they were doing business with i.e. secondary producers. Since I had online stores adult companies were sending me stacks of model releases. I reviewed the model releases and saw that guys that I was paying $500 to were getting $200 from larger companies. Women that I was paying $1,000.00 to were getting $500 from the same companies. I was paying top dollar no questions asked. I even received the records for adult.com with 2,269 section 2257 records. Armed with the knowledge, I was able to hire talent at a much lower cost as well as clean up my own 2257 files. I had IDs that were sent via fax in my files. I replaced them with the better copies received. Saved me the trouble of hunting down people to fix paperwork.

Indeed, moving forward with increased production volume, 2257 has become more burdensome.

This thread does not belong on page 2.

Ok, back to the top ;)

Interesting read......

1. It's hard for me to understand why anyone would think that model releases are among the kind of documents that a secondary producer must maintain under Section 2257. Unless it contains other required information, e.g. date of production since the last amendments or alias names, it would actually be a crime to keep a release in the compliance records.

2. On the other hand, as a producer, I would never risk liability to the model by publishing any images for which I didn't possess a copy of a release executed by the model, and which seems, after a good and directed reading, to protect me in all the uses of the images that I intended, in just the manner in which I intended to use them. I'd want to assure, too, that the language protected me from allegations of the invasion of her privacy. I'd want to assure that I had the freedom to describe her in the manner I intended. At last count, fourteen states required that an effective release of the right of publicity must be in writing, and California requires some very special language for releases. Without that document, the original producer - and the model/performer - have your gonads in their hands.

I don't think people read what they were sending out. There were multiple pages for each model. The releases included more information than I would ever want anyone to know.


Where may I find current information on the language required by California?

The California Civil Code.

Hello Joe. We discussed 2257 for cams so many years ago and I see we are still into a mess.
I can surely see controversial the topic of a tube with user(?) uploaded clips of unknown name, country or age people, having no any 2257 doc or info who made these clips, where, in what year, who the people there and how old at the time.
Still for live cam sites it seems not enough to have the 2257 documents that demonstrates the first day the person streamed on that site he/she it was already 18, so the date being when the cam model registered on site, to be matched with the birth date and signature of same model for agreement with site. It would be obvious that for all the next streams of the same person, such person was still over 18 and not going to become underage with time. So I register Irina on day 1 she was 18+, next days and years when you see Irina live she is still 18+, this looks logic.
No, they do want every next live video stream to be kept recorded on servers forever with a different 2257 index, so let's assume you have 50+ live HD streams 24/7 going, this fills a largest HD within 2 days, soon you will grow data storage costs worth $10,000's (hardware+manage+custom software) which may be more than the profit or feasibility of a small cam site economy. Keeping all recorded forever also conflicts with some Eropean privacy laws, and in general if yuo comply 2257 in USA you infringe somewhere else.

Words of wisdom :pimp