The War on Porn Regular Updates about the Assault on The Adult Industry
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In the current legal and regulatory climate surrounding online adult entertainment, it feels like it’s a rare day when those of us who work in the adult industry get to celebrate a development that breaks in our favor. This week we were granted such an opportunity however, following a federal judge’s decision holding that an adult website operator domiciled in Spain can’t be sued for failing to comply with Kansas’ age verification mandate.
While there’s more to the decision than this aspect alone, the crux of the court’s decision is a holding that the company and website involved, Pump Lab SL and SuperPorn.com, simply don’t have sufficient “contacts” with Kansas to support the court exercising “personal jurisdiction” over Pump Lab.
In the decision, U.S. District Court Judge Holly Teeter noted that “visitors from Kansas represent 0.086% of the website’s visitors,” and “does not have employees in Kansas, does not own or lease real estate in Kansas, does not conduct business in Kansas, is not licensed to conduct business in Kansas, does not pay taxes in Kansas, and does not have employees in Kansas (or who travel to Kansas).”
If you’re thinking it sounds like Pump Lab truly has fuck-all to do with Kansas, you’re right – and that fact is what sank the attempt to haul them into a Kansas court to face repercussions for alleged failures to comply with Kansas law.
If only to temper my own enthusiasm a bit, it’s important to note that the other recent decisions I’ve hailed as good news for the adult industry were also authored by Judge Teeter, which means it’s possible they’ll all be overturned on related appeals. I doubt that will happen though, mostly because none of this is happening in a vacuum.
If a judge in Teeter’s position in these cases were to hold that citizens of Kansas can haul a foreign company into court based on connections as flimsy as the ones at play in the Pump Lab case, that ruling could ripple out into disputes between U.S. consumers and foreign companies in a broad swath of business sectors nowhere near as controversial or disfavored by the government as porn is – inevitably touching on areas of international commerce the government wants to encourage and see prosper.
The other thing to note here is these sorts of decisions are highly fact dependent – and facts will vary greatly from case to case. As Judge Teeter observed in a previous decision dismissing a case filed under the relevant Kansas law, finding that the defendant’s CDN usage in that case was irrelevant “does not mean that a website owner’s use of a CDN is never relevant” and “does not mean that a website owner’s use of a CDN could never show purposeful direction.”
The same can be said of the lack of sufficient contacts with a jurisdiction like Kansas. Another, otherwise, similarly-situated foreign defendant certainly could do business in a way that creates sufficient contacts in the state for the court to exercise jurisdiction – which would change everything, obviously. At that point, the case would turn on other issues entirely, issues which very well might break against the hypothetical online adult company in question.
So yes, today let us celebrate Judge Teeter’s very rational and measured decision in the cumbersomely titled case of Q.R., a minor, by and through Jane Doe v. Pump Lab, SL – but let’s do so with clear eyes about what the decision does and doesn’t mean for the future.
