Tuesday, Jan 15, 2008    Text size: 

The four newly elected members of the board are attorney Eric Bernstein. of Eric Bernstein & Associates, Theresa Reed (“Darklady”) of YNOT.com, Steve Toushin of Bijou Video and XBIZ Publisher Tom Hymes.

The sitting board members elected to serve another term were Board President Jim Everett of the Everett Group, Board Treasurer Joy King of Wicked Pictures and Nellie Symm-Gruender of Passions.

The rest of the FSC board for 2008-2009 will include attorneys Jeffrey Douglas and Reed Lee, Mara Epstein of Evotum, Lynn Swanson of Topco Sales, Mark Kernes of AVN, and NakedSword/Cubik Media’s Tim Valenti.

Unsuccessful in their board election bids were new nominees Paul Morris of Treasure Island Media, Tom Stewart of Sportsheets and Bill Gardner of Hot Desert Knights and sitting board member Greg Shearer of White Tiger Releasing, who was not elected to an additional term.

Douglas told XBIZ that the new board is going to be faced by a familiar set of issues, including 2257, content piracy and the possibility that the proposed .XXX TLD may resurface in some form.

“In the next 12 months, there’s likely to be more litigation around 2257, and the Utah CPR [Child Protection Registry],” Douglas said. “There’s also a lot of work to be done on training and educating producers and webmasters regarding protecting themselves from content piracy.”

Douglas said that the FSC also plans to do considerable work in the area of “media relations,” citing a need to “narrow the gap between consumption of adult and the perception of adult within the public debate.”

“Narrowing that gap matters enormously in terms of limiting the government’s ability to prosecute — and to persecute — adult producers,” Douglas said, adding that the more that can be done to demonstrate that public acceptance of adult entertainment is growing, the less active the government will be in pushing ahead with enforcement of obscenity laws.

Douglas said the FSC also will “continue to engage in lobbying as broadly as we can,” including efforts to lobby the national government, as well as California’s state legislature.