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Articles by Gregory Piccionelli

opinion

Legal Reality: Taking Notice

A surprisingly large number of adult entertainment companies fail to post appropriate legal compliance, disclaimer and other “notice” statements on their websites. Many even conduct business online without providing users with adequate website terms and conditions of use. Such omissions can be costly. They can limit an online company’s ability to enforce its rights or defend itself in a civil action.

Gregory Piccionelli ·
opinion

Protecting Porn

Many countries, like the U.S., have a well-established adult entertainment industry. Some countries, like Saudi Arabia, have no legitimate adult industry at all. Such dramatic differences between developed nations are usually the result of the respective countries’ laws regulating the creation, distribution and possession of erotic materials. In the U.S., erotic materials are fully protected under our federal constitution except for child pornography and works that have been judicially determined to be obscene. In contrast, pornography enjoys no legal protection whatsoever in countries such as Saudi Arabia and Iran, whose legal systems are based on the body of Islamic religious law known as Sharia. In these countries, the creation, distribution and possession of pornographic content are strictly prohibited and violators can be subjected to terrible punishments, including amputation or even death.

Gregory Piccionelli ·
opinion

Commitment To Prosecutions

In an interview recently published by the Daily Caller, the former chief of the U.S. Department of Justice’s Child Exploitation and Obscenity Section, Patrick Truman, revealed that Mitt Romney personally assured Truman earlier this year that Romney would “vigorously” prosecute pornographers if he is elected president. The same article also references an earlier public statement issued by Romney promising “strict enforcement of our nation’s obscenity laws.” Given the very real possibility Mitt Romney could be our next president, I think it is important to evaluate his recent statements and what they might mean for the adult entertainment industry.

Gregory Piccionelli ·
opinion

Copyright Recapture - A New Era Is Dawning

When a company purchases an irrevocable assignment of the copyright in a work, such as a video or photograph, the company can rest assured that it will own the copyright and be able to freely exploit the work as it wishes, indefinitely, right? Wrong, at least under U.S. law.

Gregory Piccionelli ·
opinion

Protecting Your Assets

As the adult entertainment industry has matured and obtained greater general acceptance as a legitimate business, so to have the number of abusive lawsuits against adult entertainment companies and their principals. Where once lawsuits against adult entertainment companies were almost always brought by parties outside the industry, such as by patent trolls, and governmental entities, like the Federal Trade Commission, now actions initiated by one adult entertainment entity against another are commonplace.

Gregory Piccionelli ·
opinion

A Great Victory and Word of Caution

The adult entertainment industry’s multi-decade war against the federal record keeping and labeling statutes, known to many as the 2257 regulations, recently received one of its biggest victories in years.

Gregory Piccionelli ·
opinion

Kickstarting With ‘Crowdfunding’

There has been a lot of talk recently about a phenomenon called “crowdfunding,” a relatively new type of fundraising that relies on social media and the Internet to obtain small amounts of capital from large numbers of individuals to accumulate large aggregated amounts of capital. In recent years, Internet-based crowdfunding sites such as Kickstarter (KickStarter.com) and Indiegogo (IndieGogo.com) have been used to raise millions of dollars for many types of businesses and projects.

Gregory Piccionelli ·
opinion

5-Point Checklist for Content Producers

Online adult entertainment companies are producing their own content more than ever before. Low production costs and an international pool of relatively inexpensive professional and amateur talent have practically eliminated any meaningful economic barrier to entry into the adult content production business. As a consequence, nowadays it seems like almost every adult website is creating some, if not all, of its own content.

Gregory Piccionelli ·
opinion

A Look Ahead, Part 2

This is the second in a series of articles in which we take a look ahead at some of the issues and events I believe will be of great interest to adult entertainment businesses in 2012.

Gregory Piccionelli ·
opinion

A Look Ahead, Part I

The adult entertainment industry was barraged with a lot of legal news this year. The adult industry press reported stories about mass copyright infringement lawsuits, a new crop of patent troll lawsuits, health and safety regulation of adult content production in California, a terrible 2257 decision, a new anti-cross-sale law, and of course the adult industry world war over the any and all things related to the approval of the .xxx TLD registry.

Gregory Piccionelli ·
opinion

Patent Troll Attacks and Need for Info

Adult entertainment companies are increasingly becoming the target of patent rights enforcement. In the last year alone scores of adult entertainment businesses have either been sued for patent infringement or have received letters threatening patent enforcement.

Gregory Piccionelli ·
opinion

License to Stream

These days, it seems like barely a week goes by that I do not negotiate or draft an adult content licensing agreement.

Gregory Piccionelli ·
opinion

2257 Danger Without Obama

Recently a client provided me with an excerpt from an online blog discussing the question of whether a webmaster using explicit sexual materials provided by an affiliate marketing program had any federal recordkeeping or labeling obligations regarding the use of the materials. The laws at issue were, of course, the infamous complex set of regulations set forth at 18 U.S.C. §2257, 18 U.S.C. §2257A and 28 CFR 75, known throughout the adult entertainment industry as the “2257 regulations.”

Gregory Piccionelli ·
opinion

2257 Regs, Live Chat Performers

Lately, the adult industry’s legal focus has been on hot-button topics like online piracy, new laws regulating cross sales and, of course, .XXX.

Gregory Piccionelli ·
opinion

Your Brands and Potential .XXX Cybersquatters

The battle over whether ICANN should approve a new .XXX top-level domain has seemingly reached a fever pitch.

Gregory Piccionelli ·
opinion

Summer of Really Big Court Decisions

From time to time there are rulings in court cases that dramatically affect the entire adult entertainment industry.

Gregory Piccionelli ·
opinion

It's All About Rights

Every adult entertainment company that produces or exploits content, or operates under a brand name is in the business of exploiting intellectual property rights. In fact, it would be accurate to say that the principal product of the adult entertainment industry is intellectual property. Because of this fact, I have always strongly encouraged my adult business clients to think of themselves not only as providers of erotic entertainment, but also as business persons who create and exploit a special form of property recognized by the law, that is called “intellectual property” or sometimes, “intangible property”. A fundamental part of the process of any such creation or exploitation of intellectual property, however, is the acquisition of the intellectual property rights in the first place. And that is most often accomplished through the proper use of well-drafted intellectual property rights acquisition agreements.

Gregory Piccionelli ·
opinion

Live Cam Rules (and Regs)

Live adult videoconferencing is big, and getting bigger. Online consumers now purchase enough live cam show minutes to support thousands of regular live cam performers each day.

Gregory Piccionelli ·
opinion

Long Live the Avatars

The motion picture “Avatar” has become a global phenomenon, breaking virtually every box office record ($2 billion at the time of this writing). But in addition to great financial success, the film has also succeeded in introducing a worldwide audience to the concept of remotely controllable versions of persons in the form of avatars.

Gregory Piccionelli ·
opinion

Taking the Heat

One definition of insanity, usually attributed to Albert Einstein, is "continuing to do the same thing over and over, and then expecting different results."

Gregory Piccionelli ·
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