Tuesday, November 21st, 2000

What About Chaim's Rights?

Chaim Amalek writes from Las Vegas:

1.I cannot form a cogent thought regarding circumcision and HIV, as I am suffused with rage over my inability to access your web site via this computer at a well known hotel in las vegas.

2. And speaking of Frogs, the frogs over there are trying to prevent Frenchmen from accessing those areas of Yahoo that might trigger politically impure thoughts amongst the men and women of France. You would think that with their mad cow problem, the French would focus on that instead of trying to control what their citizens see on the web. It especially troubles me to learn that this was instigated by an organization of Jewish university students. After all that the jews have done on behalf of human rights and free speech in this country (founding the NAACP, the ACLU, fighting for the rights of pornographers, making Al Gore president, etc.), it is a shame that jews should now be associated with those who would affix shackles to the minds of men. If this continues, it will spread to America, and soon Gore will prevent you and me from reading the words of William Pierce.

Samantha Sterlyng Writes About The Jews

Samantha Sterlyng writes Luke: "Well to be quite honest with you I never even knew anything about Jewish people until I came to L.A. I don't hate anyone of any particular race or creed, however it just happens to be that some of the people that I have disagreements with are of certain nationalities or beliefs."

Luke says: Would you like to come on my radio show and discuss this more?

Sam replies: "To be honest with you Luke, I appreciate the offer to come and discuss this but this IS a LEGAL matter and anything that I say can fuel the fire more. I think that no matter what I say people are going to believe what they want and nothing of what I say, I am not a Jew hater or a black hater. Several of my friends are of both cultures. I think that this got blown out of proportion due to Jon Finberg getting his feelings hurt. I think he needs to just leave it alone and let me go on with my life. I would like one day to go to your site or Gene Ross' site and not see my name followed the words Jew hater or Black hater. Maybe this day will come soon."

John Finberg writes: Luke I got a call earlier today that informed me that i may want to check your site out a bit too. When I got on it i noticed the proclamationf rom Samantha Sterlyng. Her husband has had detectives and police to their residence over this matter and the emails and phone messages were played for a detective at Van Nuys police. A copy of the case number is available while I await the results from the hate crime unit investigating the incident. Please note the final sentence in the following email the one that I recieved when i came home from a trip to San Francisco. Tell me if there is not a deep routed feeling of Jew Hating there.

Luke asks: Who called the cops on who?

John replies: I made the first contact with the police. I recieved about 3 emails and 4 voice mails all between 11 and 12 midnight the night of the 22nd of Oct all saying similarly the same thing the email said but a bit more threatening. I called and they put me through right away. I forwarded all emails and played them the phone messages. They took all the info and followed up on their own investigation Since then I have watched them go to her house and deal with the husband in the manner they normally do to make sure there is nothing that goes on again. The case is still pending but there will be closure rather soon

Samantha writes: ACTUALLY, LONG BEFORE WE EVEN WENT ON STAGE LAST NIGHT, I KNEW THAT I NEVER WANTED TO BE ASSOCIATED WITH YOU EVER AGAIN. I SAID THANK YOU WHEN YOU GOT IN THE VAN AND IF YOU WOULD HAVE TAKEN YOUR HEAD OUT OF YOUR ASS LONG ENOUGH TO REALIZE THAT YOU ARE GOING TO FEEL REAL STUPID. I ALREADY HAVE TALKED TO MARK AND MATT AND I KNOW WHAT IS GOING ON. NO ONE EVEN REALLY LIKES YOU. THEY ALL TALK s--- TO YOU, AND NONE OF THE GIRLS LIKE YOU. THEY ONLY TOLERATE YOU BECAUSE YOU THREATEN NOT TO USE THE GIRLS. f--- YOU, YOUR JUST WE WORTHLESS PIECE OF JEWISH s---. I HOPE YOU ROT IN HELL WHERE ALL OF YOUR PEOPLE BELONG!

Porner Mike Miller writes: Luke, Dont you just love it when country bumpkins talk? Lets see now, "I didnt know anything about jews till I got to LA", then I took some classes and now speak yiddish. That hillbilly also talks about "having black and jewish friends".

Okay Samatha, I can see your thankgiving table now. You sit with blacks , jews, asians its just a scene out of the "Its a small world" exhibit from Disney Land. Then everyone stands up holds hands and start singing. Then your hubby walks in, tells everyone to get in the car . . ."okay everyone, we'll going to Jim Souths office, time to pay the rent!!"

Samantha replies: Just to let Mike Miller know, I am not a Jim South girl and yes my table does look like Disney land, all were missing are the 7 dwarfs..would he and his family like to come to dinner to fill the missing seats? I think it is funny how people can make judgments on other when you haven't even met them to make your own decisions. This WILL be my last email responding to any of this s---. Hope that we can talk again on other terms.

Steve Neece writes Luke: "As for your recent story of alleged anti semitism regarding a performer and significant other,I am surprised there isn't much more among the talent.The women especially tend to be of working class gentile background as are a significant number of male performers.Considering the business practices of the generally Jewish management I could see a lot of resentment,especially from people likely to have been raised around anti semitism.Is a lot of the Religious Rights hostility to porn an unspoken anti semitism?"

Chaim Amalek writes: "Regarding the "Samantha" - jew porner contretemps -("f--- YOU, YOUR JUST WE WORTHLESS PIECE OF JEWISH s---. I HOPE YOU ROT IN HELL WHERE ALL OF YOUR PEOPLE BELONG!") I think Steve Neece is on the money. Luke, if the only contact you had with Jews was with the jews who ran porn and you were one of the "help" would you be an antisemite? Be honest now."

Hocky writes: "I think Steve Neece hit it pretty close to the mark about anti-semitism and racism in porn being because of stars coming from similar white-bread backgrounds. But to take it one step further, we aren't dealing with highly educated people here. I think a lot of the bigotry is based on pure ignorance. While you don't often hear flat out condemnation of Jews or blacks, you get a lot of that "Well, you know how those people are..." type of comments. And when they get called on it, most porn people don't have the smarts to exert proper damage control, and often end up sounding a whole hell of a lot dumber."

Samantha Sterlyng writes: This is what one of my members has written me regarding this entire issue.

"As a side note: I have been reading about all of this Jewish stuff on the gossip sites, and I just want to say that I think that it has been blown out of proportion. I, myself, have a small but real percentage of Jewish blood in me. I am not Jewish and have no ties to any Jewish culture, but sometimes people think that I am. Anyway...sometimes people will say something when they are angry to a specific person that is not necessarily indicative of what they truly feel in general. I think that this is probably what happened here. In addition, I really don't like people trying to win arguments by accusing someone else of being a "hater". I think that this is what has been done by this person arguing with you. It is nothing more than an attempt to invalidate what you have said by trying to attach some social stigma to it and gain sympathy. I am quite sick of people using such buzz-words as "hater" of this or that to try to silence somebody else. Anyway...I understand that that is now a legal matter...so I won't ask for any reply to the issue. I just wanted you to know that I think that you are being treated unfairly."

Luke Tussles With His Rabbi

I took a class Monday night from Orthodox rabbi YA who disagreed with my hero Dennis Prager in two ways:

* Over the Shma prayer which says that you should love God with "all your heart, with all your soul and with all your might." Prager says that in Biblical Hebrew, the heart really means the mind. The seat of the intellect in Biblical Hebrew is the mind. The kidneys are the seat of emotions. Rabbi YA disagrees. He says heart means heart.

* Genesis 9:4. "But flesh with its life, which is its blood, you shall not eat." I think Prager says that this forbids Jews and non-Jews from eating meat with blood in it. Instead, you should pour the blood back onto the earth. For the blood contains the soul, and you should return that to God. Yes, in Judaism, even animals have souls.

Rabbi YA says non-Jews are not forbidden from eating meat with blood in it and this text is not the proof text forbidding Jews from consuming meat with blood.

I quote from page 47 of Rabbi Jacob Milgrom's Anchor Bible commentary on Leviticus 1-16: "[T]he blood prohibition is an index of P's concern for the welfare of humanity. In Leviticus, to be sure, all of P is directed toward Israel. But one need only turn to the P stratum in Genesis to realize that it has not neglected the rest of mankind. P's blood prohibition in Genesis appears in the bipartite Noahide law, which states that human society is viable only if it desists from the shedding of human blood and the ingestion of animal blood (Gen 9:4-6). Thus it declares its fundamental premise that human beings can curb their violent nature through ritual means, specifically, a dietary discipline that will necessarily drive home the point that all life, shared also by animals, is inviolable, except - in the case of meat - when conceded by God."

Now I need some traditional commentaries that say the same thing so that I can prove my Orthodox rabbi wrong.

By the way, the Noahide Laws are the seven laws that Judaism enjoins on humanity (the sons of Noah, as opposed to the Jews, the sons of Abraham). They are laws against murder, sexual sins (incest, adultery and homosexuality), theft, blaspheming (shouldn't deny God's existence publicly), idol worship, eating the limb of a living animal and you must set up courts of law.

Porn Vids Per Year

Patrick Riley writes on RAME: There are NOT tens of thousands of porn vids out each year. You've been listening to the industry BS when they want to show how "mainstream" they are. Depending on how you define plot there are perhaps 20 plotted heterosexual movies out each month so say 240 a year. In addition there are perhaps another 200-300 heterosexual, original-footage, non-fetish, non-trailer-park-amateur, non-compilation videos each month or to be on the generous side 3000-4000 per year.

A little tattoo on her ankle probably doesn't any more than a belly button piercing. However, as you well know that's not what most of us complain about. It's the scroll work across Violet's back, the silly wife-abuser-hubby's name across Shawna Edwards belly (now changed to one big black blob) or the Seymore across Alisha Klass's butt (now changed to a dolphin, I believe)...the list goes on and on. Particularly annoying are the boyfriend-of-the-moment's names across breasts, on biceps, and elsewhere (Obsession is a case in point)...

C-sections indicating motherhood are erection deflators as are canataloupe scars and bad birthmarks.

The cheapskates who run the porn industry should be putting up more money to suck in the real cutey pies and fire the old skanks. Recruit them in high school, before they get knocked up by that loser suitcase-pimp-in-training, and put them on ice if necessary.

Joe Elkind Speaks

Joe Elkind, part owner of CEN, phoned Monday night.

JoeE: "I do have a problem with this guy [JW] saying third hand s--- about JB [JoeE's partner John Bennett].

"A bunch of people [the biggest porn webmasters] for a GIA meeting and the real deal is that everybody at the GIA meeting would do anything for RJB. They're hoping the RJB team makes it because it looks bad for industry if they don't make it.

"Beside that, we're friends and we all have loyalty. Anything bad for them looks bad on us. We do a lot of business together.

"If anybody said there were jokes told about RJB, they were only funny jokes. Nothing serious."

Luke: "RB complains that the big companies have ignored his plight and even pulled traffic."

JoeE: "There are public companies [IGallery] that have to pull their traffic. If they're not going to get paid for their traffic, they have to pull it. They have to deal with a board of directors. It's not a small business. So there are some companies that have to pull their traffic.

"If you look at our exit consoles, we still have KarasXXX up and their teen site.

"The big boys have no animosity [towards RJB]."

Luke: "RB feels let down."

JoeE: "All I can say is that CEN has done their part. Period. And we've helped with their legal fund too.

"A lot of these big companies are scared. And some of them didn't want to talk by email. They wanted to talk directly with Rich and Bob so they could feel comfortable. They didn't want to send money to a place in receivership. They want to send it to a place where they can use the money.

"JB is 100% a straight up shooter. The only chuckles made about MaxCash [RJB]...maybe somebody heard something in bad taste but there's no damage being done. We need these guys to stay in business. It's not going to help us if they go out of business. It will hurt us."

Luke: "Is the GIA still going?"

JoeE: "I can't comment on the GIA. I can just tell you that all the heavy hitters met in Vegas. They [Rich and Bob Botto from RJB] couldn't come to the meeting. We wanted to get them on the phone. We had a big long talk about how we're going to start regulating our industry and making sure that we do everything according to acceptable guidelines. We're in the beginning of regulating ourselves.

"These guys who talk about double billing and s--- like that don't know what they're talking about. The only thing that some people do do is to sell another product along with another product and give them [the consumer] the option to buy it... These guys who talk through their ass don't understand the business. They're [webmaster affiliate programs] are paying $40 per signup. Somebody has to pay these big shot webmasters for all that money."

Luke: "Is CEN also being investigated by the FTC?"

JoeE: "Absolutely not."

Luke: "I know they're looking at Cybererotica?"

JoeE: "No they're not. From what I understand, Ron has already met the conditions of the FTC and had approved what he does. Unless the man is lying to all of us, that's the deal.

"When it comes to stuff like this, be careful with anonymous emails, dude. That's real bad. Make sure the guy has support, who said it and what he said."

Luke: "I sent JW's two anonymous emails to Rich Botto and RB said they were the best things he'd read on what's going on with his company."

JoeE: "If they think this is a conspiracy going behind them, then someone's pulled the wool over my eyes. Maybe I'm stupid. I was in Ron Levi's office and he swore to me up and down that he had nothing to do with it. Either he's the best actor in the world or he's telling the truth."

Luke: "It was strange that Johnathan Silverstein would leave..."

JoeE: "I don't think he needed Johnathan anymore. Now that his [Ron Levi's] divorce is done. He's settled with his wife.

"Ron needed John when he had this problem with his wife... But now he doesn't need him as much so he probably wanted to renegotiate his contract down a little. I'm sure that Johnathan was making high f---ing six figures."

Luke: "How are you and Farrah?"

JoeE: "Actually, she's doing a couple of shoots in LA right now. But no hardcore. At least she told me that she wasn't doing any hardcore."

Luke: "Are you going to marry her?"

JoeE: "As much as I am going to marry you. I don't know dude, give me a break. I am just leading my life day to day.

"The show was quiet. The only thing we did was get together and talk about what we're going to do... I was in Wisconsin in the snow for four days."

Luke: "I hear that you are looking good and healthy."

JoeE: "Yeah man, all those people who say all that s--- about me partying, they don't know what I do, dude. You don't get to this kind of level if you're a f---ing crackhead."

Luke: "Didn't you go to the World Series with RB?"

JoeE: "Yeah. And we didn't know nothing about it [the FTC crackdown]. It was me, Mike from Centerfold Gold, Mike from Amateur Index, Tony Morgan, Rich [Botto] and Jennifer from Klixxx [magazine]. We went to three World Series games and the Jets Monday Night Football Game."

Luke: "Where the Jets [RB's favorite team] won in overtime."

JoeE: "Right. Where he was punching the f---ing s--- out of me after I was beating him up in the first f---ing half.":

Luke: "Rich and Bob had no idea about the FTC investigation?"

JoeE: "No, it was a shock.

"What we need to do is get everybody together and not trade secrets but trade information that helps us. These guys all have their own niche in the business. There's no hiding stuff. We all need to work together."

Luke: "Does it scare you that the FTC must know so much about our industry now that they've taken over RJB?"

JoeE: "Absolutely not. There's nothing wrong with them knowing the industry.

"The whole problem with this industry is that it lets the consumer defraud the content provider. You can use your credit card and then say you don't want it. The key to this whole industry is that as soon as somebody [consumer] bitches and moans, you try to keep them by offering them free s---, and if they don't want it, then just give them their f---ing money back and ban their credit card. There's no in between anymore."

Luke: "How's ATM Billing coming along?"

JoeE: "We're working on it. It's an uphill battle. It's not the easiest thing to pull off."

Luke: "Will the GIA sue VISA?"

JoeE: "No. The GIA is just going to regulate our industry to the best guidelines possible to protect all of its members. We're going to have a membership drive and we'll take on new members and check them out for child porn and bad billing processes."

Daryl@aol.com writes on Netpond: Joe, Since you are now speaking for the industry. Can you tell us why the GIA didnt support RJB immediately? With financial aid etc? And why did Igallery pull their links, we are all corporations? I can only hope RJB doesnt take their traffic back.. I wouldn't have a link up to Igallery for all the coke in your nose ;). That company was caught 3 times with their hands in the webmaster cookie jar.

But I give you props because webmasters haven't figured out that they have created huge companys that are now f---ing them over by redirecting traffic and not paying for all memberships. It is the 90-10.. 90% of your traffic comes from 10% of your webmasters so f--- the others.

GIA will be dead from its own ego. Is RJB still in it? How about Yishai? Seems like standards are getting lowered when you let XPAYS, kings of aol spam, into it. If there was ever a need for mobilization, didn't GIA miss the boat with RJB? A friend in need is a friend indeed.

Brad Shaw writes on Netpond: GIA is too late and includes a few of the the webs biggest crooks and scumbags. IMHO it is nothing more than the big boys trying to stick together to stave off the inevitable, government intervention due to unscrupulous business practices of a few. I must say seeing that Xpays is not a part of the GIA was worth a good laugh. UAS [Mark Tiarra's United Adult Sites] failed, GIA will go the way of the UAS. Nothing personal Mark, just the simple truth.

Daryl writes to Mark Tiarra: Mark, Speaking of defunct,useless, webmaster groups. The UAS takes the cake. I thought there was a movement to oust you? Or maybe it is still coming. Please break down the post and tell me which parts are false? I love how you have this UAS and everyone wants to start another one cause yours is useless. Nice management. Don't you ever say, we don't need the GIA. I have the UAS. HAHAHAHA.. No offense but the UAS is useless, you know it and so do the other major players, thats why no one wants to use yours and all that "hard" work you put into it. (I respect you for your efforts with UAS but it has failed.)

In A Time Of Crisis, Luke Pleads For Industry Unity

Luke posted on Netpond Monday night: "Please good people. At this critical juncture in our industry, we need to pull together and stop backbiting."

Vegas Lee replies: "Luke.. who you calling "we".... you want to see us distoryed... your own words...... Pull together... only if your in the middle and we playing tug a war with your ears..... Go save someone else that likes hearing you talk out of both sides of your mouth and ass at the same time."

Luke replies: "Please, I do not want to see the adult industry distoryed. You must be confusing me with Gene Ross."

Law Student Comments On RJB Case

Bob Jones writes from the Deep South: Luke, I read the reports on your site regarding the action taken by the FTC against RJB telecom. I would like to respond to some of what's been said. I'm a law student at an ivy league law school, and thought I had something to add.

A lot of those supportive of RJB seem to be under the mistaken impression that webmasters are like blind shopkeepers; they simply take money for their service and don't have to care about who's buying. The law doesn't work that way. The days of "buyer beware" are long gone. The law RJB is accused of violating doesn't ban stealing from customers. It bans any _unfair_ or _deceptive_ practice. That's unfair from an objective point of view, not from the point of view of the webmasters.

These folks seem to think that as long as there is a disclaimer telling customers not to use other people's credit cards, and _some_ way to cancel an account, that they're not violating the law. That's just wrong. The basic rule is that if its cheaper for the website to take some precaution to prevent erroneous billing than it is for the customer to avoid being charged for something they did not purchase, the website has to take that precaution. That the website managers are technically unsavvy, that the industry is organized in a way that separates billers from site managers and makes it difficult to monitor billers, is totally irrelevant. The websites can hire better staff; they can invest in better software to handle cancellations. If websites know, or should know, that dialers are primarily being used by children, the websites need to stop using dialers. They can't just post a sign saying "no-one under 18" and think that they're O.K. To be crystal clear: The law makes it the responsibility of the seller to avoid unfair and deceptive practices, not the responsibility of the credit card holder of phone user to prevent another from using their card or phone line.

Further, it appears from the complaint that RJB was not just failing to take precautions, they knew _exactly_ what they were doing. Apparently they had the highest rate of erroneous credit card charges of anyone in the world. For each person who noticed the charge and complained, there must have been many people who got erroneously charged and never noticed. (The usual statistical rule is that for every person who complains, ten people don't.) They were using billing methods advertised for their ability to get children to spend money. They were changing merchant accounts each time they were threatened with having the previous account closed for fraud. And they were hiding their identity on the credit card and phone bills.

Anyone who has ever tried to cancel a web porn account, or who tried to identify who was charging them from a credit card statement, knows that the industry puts great effort into making it hard for people to cancel. Some examples:

Nearly all require you to remember which credit card you used, and provide no way of helping you find out. If you have more than one credit card, there is just no way to cancel. It would, of course, be extraordinarily easy for the sites to permit cancellation by username and password.

Consider the popular ccbill service; unless you remember the credit card you used, there is no way to cancel an account without entering every credit card you have. And you never receive notice that the account has been cancelled. I've tried cancelling accounts through ccbill (after the first disaster I kept a record of which credit card I used for each site) and had the billing continue!

Consider Evil Angel's site for instance. A few months ago their cancellation page listed several e-mail addresses to send a cancellation message to. Every single address bounced, saying that the address did not exist. There was literally no way, from looking at the information on the website, to communicate the message that a user wants to cancel.

Almost all of the sites obfuscate their ownership. Try running traceroute or whois on some of them! Many are hidden behind multiple shadow companies and domain names.

None of this, of course, is new for the porn industry, as anyone who got home to find a portion of the tape blank, or the sound missing, or a different tape in the box, knows. Of course the companies will replace them if you complain; but who complains?

It's amazing to me that the industry fails to recognize how much business they lose because of their reputation for dishonesty. Perhaps it is a collective action problem; a few bad apples spoil it for the bunch. Maybe. But if so, then FTC action like this is exactly what the industry needs to shake out the dishonest players and permit the honest ones to build a reputation for trust. The industry has certainly proven that it can't police itself.

A final comment: One thing consistently strikes me when reading comments and interviews by people in the industry. This industry must be made up of the absolutely most self-centered, irresponsible, maleducated, poorly behaved people on Earth. They apparently steal from each other constantly; not one has a sense of responsibility to each other or to their customers. Each e-mail from them posted on your site or on usenet demonstrates less integrity than the previous, as each one inflicts a new wound on the English language. One description keeps coming to mind: A total lack of class.

KimmyKim from CCBill writes on Netpond: OK, Ivy League (or perhaps your school is just covered in ivy), I will respond. There are an awful lot of suppositions and reliances on words like appears and apparently in your statement, which first off would lead me to believe that you haven't gotten much past the first month of law school, or you would understand that any time a plaintiff goes to make a case they include any and every possible or potential charge, claim or grounds to support their case. To do otherwise would be negligence on the part of the lawyer filing the suit.

That said, I am now going to address the part of your diatribe that includes the company that I represent, and I am going to be very clear and distinct about it, none of this apparently appearing to answer your claims...

"Consider the popular ccbill service; unless you remember the credit card you used, there is no way to cancel an account without entering every credit card you have. And you never receive notice that the account has been cancelled. I've tried cancelling accounts through ccbill (after the first disaster I kept a record of which credit card I used for each site) and had the billing continue! "

Bulls---. How is that for an answer? Your lack of knowledge of how our system works is crystal clear, so clear that if you want to email me your user name and password to any of our sites, your real name, state and zip code, or any other information that would allow me to clearly identify you, I will make sure that any memberships to any and all sites we process for are cancelled by the time you get out of class in the morning. Fair enough?

As far as the education level in this industry, count yourself among lawyers and truly Ivy League educated, and think about the irresponsible, ill-thought, and absolutely worthless email you sent to Luke.

DragonKing writes on Netpond: Kimmy... You took the words right out of my mouth!! It must have been while you where kissing me ~ There's alot to be said about censorship and birth control with living examples like that. We need to geniced and eradicate these 'next generation' Newbies who have no f---ing clue what they speak about.

Anyone who never experienced a 14k modem or less should unplug their cable modems and attatch static thread to their virgin 56k's to see what it used to be like to work online. We used to walk uphill Bothways in snowstorms with cardboard on our feet because our shoe money went on bandwith.... Dam I need to Kick somebody!!! Times like this I wish I where married!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Bob Jones writes on Netpond: Response to Kimmy from ccbill: I absolutely believe that you could do that, Kimmy. That's precisely the point. You _could_, or rather the webmasters could, make it very easy for people to cancel accounts. Instead they/you make it very, very hard. Try looking at the cancellation pages of a few of your customers. I mean it! Just try opening an account, and then cancelling it without writing down which credit card you used. Try figuring out if your cancellation worked, or if you would continue being billed. Pick 10 sites at random and give it a shot.

I'll bet that, more often than not, you'll find precisely the "unfair" and "deceptive" practices that got RJB into trouble. If it were not for laws like the one RJB is being sued under, webmasters would have no incentive to make it easier for people to cancel; perhaps the lack of enforcement of basic laws like contract and unfair trade practices is the reason for so many of the industry's poor practices.

I'm not in the practice of responding to each little detail of posts, but your comment about negligence by an attorney just requires it. First, my disclaimer: I'm not a lawyer, I have not taken the bar, and so I am definitely, absolutely NOT giving anyone any legal advice. Second, it is true that it is common practice to include as many _claims_ as possible in a complaint, but not as many _facts_ as possible. Alleging specific facts in a complaint can cause a suit to be dismissed if the facts turn out, after discovery, otherwise, even if they still show the defendant to be liable. Attorneys avoid alleging facts in complaints; and alleging specific facts, without a basis for them, is cause for sanctions against the attorney. (Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 11, if you want to look it up.)

My original post was in response to a number of e-mails sent to luke in defense of the ethics and business practices of RJB. It's purpose was to add a little counterbalance, and a little common sense, to a lot of delusionary rhetoric by the industry.

Alien from SinCityFilms.com replies: Attn Law Student On l-keford. Is everything just perfect in your world little wanna be lawyer? Ya think that America's many mainstream companies are totally on the level? You think that "Main stream" business men really do not do the things you see here in our industry? You think mainstream business men don't f--- one another over? Well let me know when a porner dumps Toxic Cum into your rivers by the ton. Let me know when a porn company completely obliterates a rain forest for f---en hamburgers. Let me know when it becomes illegal to charge $1.50 sometimes to use a god damn ATM machine. Let me know when the friggin the telco companies stop prank calling houses soliciting there extra low budget plans. Let me know when the well educated can count a f---en vote... Tell me when will they stop thinking about putting a god damn projected billboard on the face of the moon for all citizens of earth to see. ). Let me know when children watching extreme violence on TV comes to an end...

Most of us came from a god damn trailer park with nothing, and utilized our uneducated ass's to become something and make our mark in mankinds most ancient and vital industry. We prove the system wrong, the system that say's everything is perfect little men, the system that says if you make to much money your not gonna have it for long, and to boot for all our labor we are often damned for our success... The Adult Net runs the f---en web with nearly 60% of it's populous searching for sex every day at one point or another. The adult networks are the finest in the world handling millions of unique interests and utilize the spectra of web technologies. Our efforts are what drive the technologies in the mainstream to perfection while relaxing the populace at large. Most importantly our industry causes no direct destruction to the earth. The adult industry is entertainment and as such everything we do is revealed almost. Now if you don't mind we are in a time of duress and change so step away and read your law book dad bought ya...

Tony Testa from Videosecrets.com writes: Luke- I just read the letter you posted by "Bob Jones" and I would like to respond to some claims he made.He made many claims which are false/erroneous, so I'll just go in order that were made.

"If websites know, or should know, that dialers are primarily being used by children, the websites need to stop using dialers. They can't just post a sign saying "no-one under 18" and think that they're O.K. To be crystal clear: The law makes it the responsibility of the seller to avoid unfair and deceptive practices, not the responsibility of the credit card holder of phone user to prevent another from using their card or phone line."

How is a website supposed to know if children are accessing it or not? Parents who do not put blocks to adult sites on their computers that their child uses is as bad as a parent that does not put locks on their liquor cabinet and then blame liquor companies when their child gets drunk. One main reason that websites use credit cards for age verification is that in MOST cases you have to be 18 or older to receive a credit card. Therefore any minors who use their parents credit card are committing credit card fraud, plain and simple. And it is not MY fault their children steal their credit card info and use it to gain access to an adult site that they should have blocked in the first place. I do my job as an adult webmaster to follow the law, they should spend time being better parents.

"Further, it appears from the complaint that RJB was not just failing to take precautions, they knew _exactly_ what they were doing. Apparently they had the highest rate of erroneous credit card charges of anyone in the world."

I highly doubt that. For some reason I am willing to bet Paypal has more chargebacks. But what Bob here is not mentioning is chargeback ratio, which, my understanding, RJB stayed under the 2.5 % ratio that VISA issues.

"For each person who noticed the charge and complained, there must have been many people who got erroneously charged and never noticed. (The usual statistical rule is that for every person who complains, ten people don't.)"

And how many that complained are actually people who used the service and decided not to pay when they received their bill? That is called consumer fraud and it the most common form of credit card fraud committed.

"They were using billing methods advertised for their ability to get children to spend money."

I never once saw or heard anyone who sold dialers make this claim. Please Bob, show some proof.

"They were changing merchant accounts each time they were threatened with having the previous account closed for fraud. And they were hiding their identity on the credit card and phone bills."

It is not uncommon to change merchant accounts. Especially when banks like to hold on to your money 6 months after your last dispute comes in. This is not done with the consumer in mind but the bank's interest-the make money on the interest they get by holding on to webmasters' money. What would be fair is money owed back to webmasters plus interest.

As for "hiding" their identifies on statements. It is considered "discrete" billing." Otherwise an angry wife might dispute a charge that her husband made to view hot hunks. Its funny when you work in billing/customer service and get phone calls in which this is the case.

"Anyone who has ever tried to cancel a web porn account, or who tried to identify who was charging them from a credit card statement, knows that the industry puts great effort into making it hard for people to cancel."

This is untrue. Anytime I had to cancel an account I was able to. I might have had to convince the people I was owed money (which I was) but I have always been able to find a phone number or email address to cancel. I know here at Videosecrets.com we print our phone number and email address on all credit card statements and many times the banks mess up the descriptors and we also have customer service people working 24/7 to take all calls, even on holidays. I have many photocopies of statements customers where nice enough to fax so I could so the banks just how bad they were screwing up.

Personally I think "Bob Jones" is a bitter customer. If what he said was true most if not all adult sites would be out of business, and the "fact" that he is a law student at an ivy league school does not mean or prove a thing. Maybe "Bob Jones" should take a look at honest adult sites like www.videosecrets.com or www.danni.com before making absurd claims.

Luke writes Bob Jones: Dear Sir, you have offended the good people of the adult internet. Perhaps you should apologize?

Bob Jones replies: In the first place, every piece of information I got about RJB's practices I got from the complaint posted on your site. The FTC alleges specific facts that make out a very clear case against RJB. Government lawyers are not in the habit of alleging facts in civil complaints, or asking for receivership, without a substantial basis in investigation and evidence. The government is so reliable in litigation that legal scholars compare the rate of suits filed by the government to those filed by individuals in a field to measure the rate of frivolous suits. So, I just put no stock in the argument that, as a matter of fact, RJB didn't take the actions alleged in the FTC complaint.

Most of the responses posted on your site fit into two categories: 1) We're no worse than any other business; and 2) It's the customer's fault.

The first argument is very easy to deal with. When companies spill toxic waste, they get sued, just like RJB. And they almost always lose. There are many, formerly large, companies in America who owe so much, they are now owned by their victims. Manville is just an example. Exxon paid damages for the Valdez spill that are truly astronomical. It is true that banks and telephone companies are quite abusive of their customers. This is because every aspect of their relationships with their customers is regulated by the federal government, as part of a set of laws for natural or near-monopoly industries, and the government does a terrible job of regulating customer service. (One of the motivations for the disasterous 1996 Tellecom Act was that with greater competition, the government could stop regulating them so closely, and service would improve. Of course it didn't turn out that way.) But neither engages in deceptive practices and gets away with it; in fact, the government sued overly-aggresive new telecom companies quite often in the 90s, and put many of them out of business. And those legal protections don't apply in most industries, like this one.

I believe fully, as one poster said, that many in the industry came out of "uneducated trailer parks." And the question I put is: What makes the poster think that growing up without an education in a trailer park provides a sufficient ethical basis to run a multi-million dollar company with international sales and millions of customers? A lot of people seem to view internet porn as a get rich quick scheme, instead of a responsible business. That was the point of the last paragraph of my original post; these people (many, not all) simply don't know how to behave as ethical business people, which is why they get into so much trouble so often.

(I refer you, for instance, to Annabelle Chong's non-payment for services rendered at great length, also based on information from your site. Would the introduction of some law, like the law of contract breach, not improve the industry?)

The second is the interesting one, and the one that motivated my original e-mail to you. The law (see my disclaimer in a previous post about not giving legal advice) makes it, very clearly, not the customer's fault. It can't be the customers fault, because the law makes it the _responsibility_ of the site. If the site has a billing system (dialing) that they know, _or_should_know_ has the major purpose of letting children access it, the site needs to stop using that billing system. It just doesn't matter if the parents should have done more---its the company's responsibility. The same is true of other practices; if the site's marketing scheme, or its billing methods, encourage (or fail to discourage) fraud, the company needs to stop marketing and billing that way. This is how the law works, it assigns fault only after it assigns responsibility, and the websites have some responsibilities.

There's an old story I heard in school that I think is relevant here. At one time, ConEd had a very high rate of power outages in poor areas of New York. They blamed the customers, and claimed that if they had to put in the effort to prevent the outages, they would go out of business. The city said, essentially, "bulls---" and passed a regulation fining ConEd every time the poorer areas had an outage. Miraculously, when the government allocated the responsibility to prevent customer abuse to the company, the customer abuse ended. The outages ceased within a month. And rates didn't go up a dime.

Now, I just don't believe that RJB's billing problems originate with fraud by customers. Consider the sheer numbers involved. It appears (again from the FTC complaint) that this involved hundreds of thousands of erroneous bills. Some of these (again from the FTC complaint) involved credit cards that can't have been stolen from their parents by kids. Consider the ones that were never activated, torn up years earlier, and so on. It very well may be that RJB didn't steal these cards; it doesn't matter. They were doing something that caused an extraordinary number of people to be defauded, even if some of those people were parents defrauded by their kids. Isn't it precisely an "unfair" practice if a company organizes its business in such a way that large numbers of people get defrauded, even if the company didn't defraud them itself? But again, I doubt it. The fraud rate appears to have accelerated once RJB became aware of the FTC investigation. This is also the likely reason the FTC requested a preliminary injunction freezing the company's assets: The FTC probably feared the owners would cash out and dissipate their assets to make a judgement against them futile.

Finally, several people have responded to my factual statement that sites engage in deceptive practices and make it very difficult to cancel. I encouraged Kimmy to take a look at her customers' cancel pages, and I continue to encourage her to do that. I know some sites are better than others about this, but the problem is pervasive in the industry. Consider my original, and undisputed, comment about how the cancellation page at Elegant Angel (at least before the site remake, when I had my account) contained only dead e-mail addresses. I don't think anyone who's gone to these sites can honestly claim that they don't make it very difficult for people to cancel. And this isn't merely discreet billing. If the companies wanted to, they could easily create some means that kept the line item on the bill discreet, and still let people figure out who billed them.

Since the point obviously was missed in my original message, I'm not oposed to porn on the web. In fact, I'm highly in favor of it. :) But I think many of the players need a hard lesson in how to conduct a responsible, ethical business. And I think some legal action might be just the thing to provide that lesson. Instead of complaining that the government is out to get them because they're in porn, they should take a hard and objective look at their own practices.

Mark Tiarra from UAS.org writes on Netpond: A few business have gone ahead with practices that put the industry where it is and quite a few more scumbag webmasters trying to find ways to cheat partner programs also created chargeback problems that didn't have anything to do with ethical webmasters. The point of an org like the GIA is to make sure the 98% of the good people don't get crushedbecause of the 2% of the scumbags. And also that no one gets crushed by Visa because no one stood up and pointed out that the problems aren't all to be blamed on webmasters but have also arisen for other reasons (like people running mass CC loads through partner programs as I mentioned above.) Without some kind of org (and it has to be made up of the top dogs that everyone uses as their sponsors) trying to establish ethical guidelines, NO ONE benefits from being the stand out.

Brad Shaw replies: Mark, I as well as the lawyers that have advised me strongly disagree with the stance I saw the GIA take against VISA. I will withhold further comment on what I saw in the meeting out of respect to those who invited me. The inclusion of such people with little business morals such as Xpays will reflect on your organization.

Max Hardcore's Junior College Schoolgirls

Phillip writes: Luke: Last night I watched Max Hardcore's "Hardcore Junior College Schoolgirls 15." I'd never seen his work and figured I'd see what all the fuss was/is about. I'm still not sure. Based solely on this video, I'd have to say Max Hardcore is a punk-ass bitch. The girls he gets are ugly and flat-chested, his dick is the size of my thumb, and as for the legendary mistreatment of said girls?where was it? I grabbed this tape expecting tears, beatings, hatred and vituperation...I got nothing. None of the above. Sure, he talks a good game, calling the women cunts and cocksockets and whatnot, but he's clearly out of his depth trying to portray himself as some kinda rapist-with-a-camcorder. You wanna see women get a beatdown? Check out Rocco's "Animal Trainer" tapes. In "Animal Trainer 2," Rocco drills some Italian f----pig in the ass, in a standing position, while slapping her and spitting in her face, for the better part of twenty minutes. That's what I'm talkin' about! Rocco is the king of intergender wrestling; Max Hardcore is for sexually-frustrated high school gym teachers, and that's all I have to say about that.

Child Porn On Ebay

Abu writes: Luke, I just sent the following report to eBay's "Safeharbor" which is their department that is supposed to handle such problems, but they don't. I will keep you informed of their response.

The following auctions are all child pornography, which is illegal, and copyright violations which is also illegal.

Auction #503294484 - This Cd contains Traci Lords images and movies. Tracy Lords was a minor when she made 99% of her movies. She only has one legal film. It's also a copyright violation at that.

Auction #503294952 - The same as #503294484

Auction #504745458 - Same as above auction, same seller with a different username

Auction #504745699 - Same as above

Auction #504722954 - This "Two hour tracy lords compilation tape" is also Child pornography, and a CLEAR CUT copyright violation.

Auction #503272662. This CD also has some of the Tracy Lords child pornography and is also a copyright violation. In fact, check out ALL the auctions by this seller.

Auction #503273116 - The same as #503272662

I will be more than happy to contact the FBI if you won't do anything about it.

JulieRage.com

Julie Rage writes: This is the official announcement of the launching my personal web site julierage.com. A site for where my fans and I can meet each week and interact with each other. The site carries lots of exclusive pics just for my fans. You will also find here a large free section to give you an idea of what I'm all about. Each week we I will personally host a free chat session where we can talk to each other, as well with other Julie Rage fans. Then for my exclusive members I will host a Topless chat where we can get to know each other even more. Finally, I will get down and dirty for my members on the hot and nasty Live web cam show. Here is where I let it all hang out for you. My site also features a complete filmography, an in-depth bio and some sexy free games for you to enjoy. After a two year retirement I'm back, and just as hot as ever. I'm ready to show you what being "The Rage" is all about. Looking forward to seeing you there.