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Diane Duke in her recent interview with DirtyOldMen.tv discussed the origin of the Free Speech Coalition.
What Duke didn’t stress hard enough is the fact that Free Speech never accomplished what it set out to do from the very beginning, which was to create a war chest that would help defendants in the industry with their legal bills.
“It started as a legal defense fund,” Duke pointed out.
“The founders who put this together had an idea that they were going to put together a fund that would be an emergency fund- a war chest so to speak in case that the industry was attacked by government regulations or if there was a very conservative administration that went after the industry, we would be able to fight back.
“But what happened with that is a lot of people really thought of it as ‘my’ legal defense fund so individual companies who would get sued by local municipalities or whatever were contacting the Legal Defense Fund or FSC back then in the days of 1991. They soon realized if they [FSC] were to follow up and get involved in all these legal issues, that their budget would run out in a matter of months.”
[This is not how it was first explained and sold to the industry. The industry was told, specifically, that Free Speech would set up a war chest, take donations and dues, invest them - much like a retirement account- and allow the campaign chest to build up that way to pay legal fees. It never happened. Of course, Duke was not around at the time to be held responsible for that fiasco.]
“Then they wanted to change it from a Legal Defense Fund because that wasn’t what they were doing anymore, to Free Speech Coalition,” continued Duke.
[Nobody knows, nobody asked and no one seemed to care where all that Free Speech money disappeared to, but I’ve got a real strong hunch.]
“We’d be more of a support mechanism for something that impacts all of us like a 2257- that would be something that the organization itself could look at litigating. But individual litigation we don’t get involved in,” continued Duke.
“We do support, do attorney referrals and sometimes we work with the First Amendment Lawyers Association to do amicus briefs; but, for the most part, for smaller litigations we’re here on an advisory capacity.
“Now we’ve evolved into a Trade Association – we do litigation as a last resort; but we’re doing lobbying efforts- nationally, internationally, statewide.”
According to Duke, probably one of the worst things to come down the pike for the industry was 2257.
“A horrible record-keeping regulation,” comments Duke.
“We in the industry have no problem checking peoples’ IDs. We want to make sure we have people of legal age in our videos. But this would require producers to get the IDs of the performer, which is fine; they have to fill out a special 2257 document that has every name the performer ever worked under, every video they’ve ever performed in.
"It all has to be cross-referenced then these records have to be kept separately from any other records for that video. This has to happen for every single video.”
“As a performer you have to give all that information again and again and again,” Duke went on to say.
“The paperwork is astronomically ridiculous.”
Aside from the burdensome secondary producer requirements which he brought up, show host Colin Rowntree asked Duke if this weren’t all an invasion of privacy?
“Doesn’t this risk leaking peoples’ personal information out into the world?”
“It’s a difficult choice,” Duke answered, noting that with all the privacy issues out there, to make such information readily available is questionable.
“The thing that’s really frustrating is that this is not one of those violations where if you screw up, you have to pay a fine of $1,000. This is jail time- five years of jail time. And the jail time isn’t for having an underage person in your video. You can have a video of all 65 year-old people and still go to jail for mis-filing.
“And you have to be there-,” Duke added.
“You have to have hours posted 9 to 5 when you’re going to be there when the FBI can come in without advance notice and check your records. That has to be posted on the outside of your building- the custodian of records.
“Our industry is made up of a small number of businesses. So we’re not talking 200 employee businesses. We’re talking mom and pop shops. If the custodian of records is their home, they’re going to have to be there or have someone be there during that time and the FBI can come into their home without any announcement.”
Rowntree, himself a secondary producer, also pointed out that in content deals with countries like Canada, the UK, Germany or “God forbid” Japan- “it is a federal crime in those countries to disseminate that information to anybody. It’s completely forbidden. So you’re landlocked As a secondary producer you could just refer the person to where they could inspect it- like Belgium.”
No more.
