[Las Vegas Weekly]- In all of the 50 or so adult films he directed, Ira Isaacs always used the alias Josef K, a character from Kafka’s The Trial who is prosecuted without knowledge of his crime.

The name seemed appropriate to Isaacs. In the back of his mind, he always thought he would get prosecuted for his films. So when that day came in 2007, it was no surprise. He was charged by the Department of Justice with multiple counts of distributing obscene material.

“I always saw possibly the irony that I might be in a trial finding myself the character in that book,” he said.

The 57-year-old pornographer, who is based in Los Angles, had been producing films since 1999 on the extreme spectrum of the adult industry, so much so that he calls his videos shock art rather than porn.

His films include bestiality, simulated violence and scat.

The trial was put on hold not long after it began. Alex Kozinski, the judge presiding over the case, declared a mistrial after it was revealed that he had pornographic photos on his personal Web site.

Issacs was targeted for prosecution by The Obscenity Prosecution Task Force, a section of the Justice Department formed in 2005 to go after pornography the agency believed to be obscene.

The agency charged Isaacs with four counts of using an interactive computer service to sell and distribute obscene films on DVD, two counts of distributing obscene DVDs, and two counts of failing to label sexually explicit DVDs with the name and location of the custodian of records containing age and identification information for performers in sexually explicit films. The maximum penalty for each count is five years in federal prison, according to a press release from the Department of Justice.