Thursday, Jul 12, 2007    Text size: 

The new regulations reflect changes made to 18 U.S.C. 2257 under the Adam Walsh Child Safety and Protection Act last year, legislation signed into law by President George W. Bush on July 27, 2006.

Alterations to 2257 made under the Adam Walsh Act include significant changes in statutory definition of the word “produces,” revisions to exclusions in the statute for the operation of Internet companies, and the inclusion of depictions of “lascivious exhibition of the genitals or pubic area of a person” in the type of material covered under 2257.

In the new proposed regulations, the Justice Department states that the Adam Walsh Act also “confirmed that the statute applies to secondary producers as currently (and previously) defined in the regulations.”

Also changed under the Adam Walsh Act was the requirement regarding the placement of 2257 compliance statements on websites. Under the current regulations, website operators are permitted to affix the label stating the location where the required records are kept “on its homepage, any known major entry points, or principal URL (including the principal URL of a subdomain), or in a separate window that opens upon the viewer’s clicking a hypertext link that states, ‘18 U.S.C. 2257 Record-Keeping Requirements Compliance Statement.’”

The new proposed regulations revise the labeling rule such that the label must now appear on “every page of a website on which a visual depiction of an actual human being engaged in actual sexually explicit conduct appears.”

The new proposed regulations will be discussed in depth by adult industry attorneys at Thursday’s legal seminar at the XBIZ Summer Forum in Las Vegas.