Attorneys Greg Piccionelli, J.D. Obenberger, Matthew Collins and Eric Bernstein and Steve Workman each took turns offering great degrees of legal advice on Thursday over the burning-issue matters facing online adult companies.
The issue of piracy led the way, with the attorneys telling content producers that the best way to protect their content from tube site thievery is through copyrighting their materials.
While it take some cash up front, the attorney each agreed, copyright registrations are worth it, particularly if there is intentional infringement.
“It is difficult trying to tell the clients to wage a fight … they want the fight, but they don’t want to engage in the battle because of what people will say on the boards,” Bernstein said. “And some say, well we are getting traffic from the [infringing site], so at least we’re getting something from it.”
Piccionelli said that 99 percent of adult industry businesses don’t register their material and that they “have an exponentially better lever to battle a copyright if they are registered.”
The panel also weighed heavily on previous and future Justice Department’s obscenity prosecutions, recommending to webmasters that the best way to confront possible problems is to engineer ways to make the site seen as “taken as a whole.”
“You need to design your site as a singular work,” Piccionelli said, “and to create standard operating procedures without screwing up your business model.”
As for the Obama administration’s stance on obscenity prosecutions, Obenberger was frank.
“We’ve got more to worry about,” Obenberger said. “Obama is not getting rid of the [obscenity] task force. The three members of the task force are emboldened because they know he’s afraid of getting rid of them. He thinks that the Bible thumpers who value the task force will vote for him another term.”
“There’s more obscenity prosecutions than there were four years ago,” he said.
