LOS ANGELES — Adult content producers and affiliate promoters celebrating an easing of burdensome regulations that made clerical errors felonies while risking the privacy and safety of performers may wish to take a sober look at the lack of finality they are facing.
Saying “the pro-pornography lobby has a strong offense,” National Center on Sexual Exploitation Executive Director Dawn Hawkins recently reached out to anti-porn activists with a fundraising plea aimed at establishing a war chest for the purposes of overturning the industry’s recent court victories — specifically in regard to the 18 U.S.C. §§ 2257 and 2257A federal record-keeping requirements.
“The Free Speech Coalition, a deceptively-named pro-pornography lobbying group, claims it has spent more than $1 million since 2005 to fight 2257. This massive offensive played a role in tipping the scales in favor of the porn industry and against human dignity,” Hawkins says, asking, “Why would the porn industry want to overturn this regulation?”
Answering herself, she believes the reason is to protect itself “at the expenditure of other’s safety.”
“As pornography distributors increasingly rely on low-cost pornography producers around the globe with little oversight, they faced an increasing liability,” Hawkins explains. “Instead of upholding the protection of minors, they put their own legal and financial interests first .... Now, minors are at-risk for being sexually exploited by the pornography industry without any mechanisms in place ensuring their safety.”
Of course, this impression is countered by the reality that legitimate players in the industry support efforts by the Association of Sites Advocating Child Protection (ASACP) with its 22-year-long legacy of proactive protection for children online. Highlighted by its world-renowned CP Tipline, which has processed more than one million reports of suspected illegal imagery and its Restricted To Adults (RTA) meta-labeling system that works with a browser’s free parental controls to protect children everywhere from exposure to billions of age-restricted web pages, ASACP is the pinnacle of corporate responsibility and at the forefront of efforts to bring workable age verification to the internet.
A nonprofit organization, ASACP is only able to carry out its mission of keeping children out of and away from adult-oriented material through the generosity of the industry’s leading companies. To learn how you can help protect your business by protecting children, email tim@asacp.org.
To help continue its battle for producers’ freedom from overreaching and unfairly applied regulations, the FSC has launched a 2257 lawsuit donation page here.
