Stay Clean From Porn Marshals!
  Written By Titmowse

Starting a new venture is exciting and even a little scary. The anticipation is even more intense when you know you're involved in something that has been proven to be successful.

You who are new to the adult Internet know that you have found the one area of Ecommerce where money has actually been made. It's easy to fill your head with visions of yacht parties populated by gorgeous models and slobbering admirers. You've probably spent your millions in your fantasies in countless ways and countless times.

Hold your horses there cowboy. Before you go riding off onto the trail with your herd of busty porn stars, you better stop off at the sheriff's to make sure that marshals won't be hunting you down and stringing you up in the middle of the night.

Have you taken the proper steps to make sure your adult site is in compliance with the law? Sure, you may have licensed content from providers and are applying it to your pages within their terms of service, but the law doesn't just stop with legally obtained content.

Sure, I think porn is good and you think porn is good, but a hell of a lot of other people in this world think porn is evil and many of them work in law enforcement. Before you go riding off into the sunset, you might want to read this little checklist of things you can do to protect yourself from the long arm of the law:

Warning Page:
A warning page is a special page you put at the front of your adult site, usually this page would be your index.html page. On a warning page you would post a bit of text that warns potential visitors that your site contains adult content and is forbidden to minors or those who live in areas where viewing adult content is illegal. Sure, your site may have a domain name that explicitly infers porn but nevertheless, a warning page tell surfers and law enforcement types that you only want adult aged visitors within the realm of your web.

Parental Control Filter Links:
NetNanny, Cybersitter and ICRA are all companies that offer parents a way to protect their children from viewing content that is beyond their age. You as an adult webmaster, would visit the sites of these companies and add your page to their database of websites. In turn the filtering software the companies provide would disallow its users to accidentally open up your adult page in a keyword search or direct type in. If you sign up with these filters, you would then add direct links to their sites on your warning page. That allows parents a chance to go to the filters companies and download their software and it once again tells the powers that be you are and honorable adult webmaster.

US Federal Law 18 USC 2257 Compliance:
This law basically concerns the adult webmaster when it comes to the age of the models contained within their sites. You have to be able to prove that your models are of legal age even if you did not make your content. If you've purchased your content from a legitimate adult provider, one of the things they will give you along with your images or videos is a statement of compliance. They have to have on file their model's ID and signatures on release forms. If you have a site that features teen content, then you are probably dealing with models that look underage but are not. You are strongly advised to make sure you get content that has legal aged models not just to protect you, but to protect younger girls or boys from the devastating exploitation of child porn.

There other things you should check into to make sure you are operating within the limits of the law, but the above mentioned are pretty much mandatory. You should also make sure you live in an area where it's legal to even run a porn site. Some places will allow softcore but not hardcore. Some places make it illegal to sell marital aids such as vibrators within their borders. You should also make sure your are hosted at a server that is adult friendly and that you are incorporating sponsor programs that allow their product to be sold from adult websites.

Wearing the outfit doesn't make you a cowboy and believing in the goodness of sex doesn't make your site legal. Cozy Academy suggests you mosey on over to our Legal Industry Primer lessons and learn a little about the laws affecting adult pages. You can also check out our Resources area in the Webmasters section to learn more.

Sure, you want to be a cowboy or a porn mogul, who doesn't? Just make sure that before you set off on your journey into this exciting territory, you won't have to be looking over your shoulder for an angry posse.