[RonTheLogician]

Originally Posted by danielle_ftv

I am not in Ghana...nor have I ever been there. I also don't have a Yahoo messenger ID. You have been scammed my friend.

Hey Dani,

The biggest headache facing you as a media producer in today's world is copyright violation by individual consumers (and potential combines of same). Let's not rehash this old problem.

But above we see an example of a different important problem - the ease with which existing practices allow nefarious commercal entities to usurp your identity, diverting customer income away from you, and diminishing your brand reputation as well. You probably know about the million-dollar judgement which FTV won in Nevada during late 2011 against an infringing competitor. Alas, I fear your operation is so small that discovering and litigating against a foe like that is all but impossible for you.

Yet it would not take a huge amount of effort to re-arrange things so that the would-be customers of people in your position could be reliably protected against scams, at the cost of only a minimal amount of education and diligence to them, and a bit of money to their providers.

When non-trivial e-commerce emerged in the 1990's, I was never afraid to save significant money by buying from small retailers in far-away places within the US about which I had never previously heard - because I always did my homework first! The Internet let me verify that the Secretary of State in its federal state venue knew of its existence, and how long. It also let me see if the BBB had anything interesting to note about them.

And over time new Internet tools for protecting myself emerged. Third-party reputation engines collected consumer ratings and war stories about countless thousands of teeny e-commerce firms, and retail aggregators like eBay and Amazon did so in-house as well.

The bottom line is that, in all my years of online purchasing, only once have I ever had to use my decisive veto power as a credit card user to (successfully) repudiate (in a timely way, of course) an incompliant Internet purchase. Today, by and large, buying online is a consumer's paradise, as you know, you Amazon addict! (Um... forgetting about stolen credit cards given the stupid low-tech system the US is still using today...)

Unfortunately, that is not always true for some online industries, like yours. The problem is that commercial activity is so limited for many firms that they fly under the radar of the aforementioned auditors.

I think now that your industry has matured, it is time to create an organization at least a little like SAG-AFTRA to protect erotic entertainers. It could help with vocational education, as well as looking out for important health, safety and legal issues. This includes the issue at hand, protecting your stage identity against theft. Of course it would be not a litte ironic were SAG-AFTRA itself to do so, given that former US Attorney General Edward Meese's boss was once this group's president!

Perhaps the AVN/AEE congolmerate might serve as a reasonably trustworthy agent for helping to defend industry producers and players - and their customers - against scams based on the theft of identity, by serving as a reliable, central registrar. Might a wealthy and potentially grateful beneficiency of the industry - like your old boss Rob - be kind enough to make some time to lobby for something like this - and earn the gratitude of the industry's people?

It would work this way. An industry participant - firm, player, agent or whatever could, for a reasonable fee, register with said registrar by reliably proving identity and receiving credentials which let that party subsequently inform the registrar of the vehicles that party will use for interacting with the public, including Internet media like Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, Blogger, Tumblr, Youtube, Pinterest, or whatever-the-heck next - for publication on the registrar's well-known web site. Payment of a reasonable annual fee could fund the reliable stewardship of the maintenance and update effort, including a budget for marketing this free service to consumers. An important aspect of this service would be that the actual identity and other personal details of industry particpants could be shielded from the general public, something which is often desirable, given the historic hatred and even persecution suffered by the industry and its workers. Such shielding is much more problematic, to say the least, were common vehicles like Secretary of State records and those of the Net's Domain Name System exploited for similar ends.

In closing, I'll mention that I recently learned something about protecting anonymity which might well be of great interest to you. I will describe it in a Private Message on this web site I hope you'll take the time in your busy schedule to read.

Best,
RtL