Entertainers rely upon many things in order to make a living: Talent, looks, and a good agent are among them, but the importance of the professional name under which they work can’t be overstated. Some stars’ "stage names" are so valuable they’ve actually been trademarked, although many intellectual property attorneys say that that extreme measure isn’t necessary unless the star wants to use his or her stage name to market products unrelated to his or her primary professional endeavor.
As in the mainstream movie industry, an adult entertainer’s working name becomes one of his or her most valuable assets. Many consumers buy or rent adult videos because a certain star of which they are particularly fond appears in the flick. Adult entertainment is marketed more for "who does what to whom and how many times" than for any other hook. When adult entertainers make personal appearances at clubs and Nevada’s legal brothels, it’s the entertainer’s name upon which the owners of the establishments bank to enliven revenues. The same is true for adult novelty manufacturers when adult stars lend their names to vibrators and other toys. For some products, the mere addition of a star’s name is the marketing magic that makes them "click" with consumers.
Master of his or her domain
It’s no surprise, then, that an adult performer’s name on a website can mean pure gold for the owner of the website, especially if the star’s moniker is also the domain name. Consumers being what they are and the Internet being what it is, it’s become common knowledge in very few years that one of the best ways to find the "home" site of any person or product is simply to type www.namehere.com into a Web browser.
For many adult entertainers, that’s where the trouble starts. Before the turn of the 21st century, adult stars were made or broken in the real world. Although most of them were aware fortunes were being made in cyberspace, for the first five years of the Web’s commercial existence, it apparently didn’t seem to many of them like it was a place they wanted or needed to be. After all, their fans were buying their products in brick-and-mortar stores, for the most part. The fans who bought in cyberspace bought from online merchants with whom the stars or their production companies had financial arrangements.
That attitude began to change in the last two years of the 20th century, when adult performers began to notice their names appearing on the Web addresses of very active sites with which they had no affiliation. Juli Ashton (www.juliashton.com) was one of the first high-profile adult stars to seek redress against the owner of such a site. In December 2004, after sending a number of unsuccessful cease-and-desist notices, she retrieved the domain name "JulieAshton.com" from a New York man after an arbitration panel found the domain name was "confusingly similar" to Ashton’s registered "Juli Ashton" trademark.
In Ashton’s case, as in most others involving adult entertainers, the cybersquatter who refused to relinquish the disputed domain name was using the website to profit from sales of Juli Ashton-themed merchandise. When he was notified of an arbitration hearing about the matter, he failed to respond and the panel found for Ashton by default. Interestingly, the same individual employed the same modus operandi with several other adult stars, and according to attorneys familiar with the cases, continues to hold an unspecified number of domains that are at best "confusingly similar" to the names of popular adult entertainers and at worst exact matches for those stars’ names.
Platinum prevalence
Seka, "The Platinum Princess of Porn," was one such victim. An adult industry icon who has appeared in more than 175 adult movies and countless magazine layouts beginning in 1977, Seka trademarked her stage name in April 1985. She also owns the copyright to between 150,000 and 200,000 images taken of her during the 10-year period she worked exclusively for Club magazine. None of that stopped Ashton’s New York cybersquatter from registering Seka.com in September 1998 and establishing an ersatz "Seka’s official home on the Web" there. When Seka herself went to establish a presence in cyberspace, she was forced to resort to OfficialSeka.com, though she says that was far from a perfect solution. "He was calling it ‘the official home of Seka’ and using images I own to promote it," Seka says with more than a little acrimony. "Literally, it was costing me money, because it was the first to come up in all the search engines. He was even selling ‘autographed’ copies of my videos! You have to wonder who was autographing those, because it certainly wasn’t me."
After an extended period during which she sent unrequited cease-and-desist letters to the cybersquatter, Seka hired intellectual property attorney Stephen Anderson, of the Temecula, Calif.-based firm Anderson & Associates (www.amesavers.net; www.domaindispute.net), on the recommendation of Laurie Holmes. Anderson had helped Holmes, widow of John "Johnny Wadd" Holmes and caretaker of his estate, recover 17 domains related to her late husband’s professional persona. He also served as Scotty Crane’s legal counsel during Crane’s battle with a cyberquatter over a domain related to his late father, actor Bob Crane.
On her birthday, April 15, 2005 – within two months of hiring Anderson – Seka recovered Seka.com when the New York cybersquatter that had plagued both Ashton and Holmes failed to respond to a summons from an arbitration panel, as mandated under the International Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers’ Universal Dispute Resolution Policy. Seka plans to rebuild her "official home on the Web" there, but for now the URL is forwarded to OfficialSeka.com.
"Traffic to my existing website tripled immediately," she says. "My income increased phenomenally. Since my website is my major professional outlet these days, that was very important to me."
In addition to regaining property she felt someone had taken from her illicitly, Seka says she also felt she was righting a wrong done to her fans. "The traffic really surprised me a bit," she admits now. "It’s flattering that my name has that much power with the fans. That’s what really made me angry about the whole thing. It’s a shame that people think they can just steal, but to blatantly go out and rip off the fans is more aggravating than anything else. Without the fans, we wouldn’t have a business. If it wasn’t for them, we wouldn’t be who we are. They don’t deserve to be ripped off."
Although she’s glad to have Seka.com under her control at last, Seka says the transition hasn’t been entirely wrinkle-free. She is determined to answer all of the email that comes into the site personally, and initially there were hundreds of messages a day from registered members of Seka.com asking why their user names and passwords no longer worked. Most accepted her explanation; many were even apologetic, and a good number joined the site they thought they were members of all along. "I’ve been trying to work with them however I can," Seka says. "Anytime someone rejoins, they get a nice little thank-you gift: a piece of memorabilia, something autographed, something I have in my treasure trove."
It’s hard to express how violated she felt by the experience, Seka says, noting, "There was a dual rape going on: of me and the fans. I have a large fan base, and I’ve always been loyal to them, as they’ve always been loyal to me. [The cybersquatter] was not only defaming the celebrity, me, but now I’ve got to take the heat for his misbehavior. The squatter doesn’t give a rat’s ass. He’s not getting hurt."
Steele-toed boot
Lexington Steele knows all too well how Seka feels. He faced a similar battle in 2004 to wrest the domain LexingtonSteele.com from a cybersquatter who was using the star’s name and likeness to sell videos and DVDs of his popular interracial movies. Most of the story is similar, but there are additional devils in Steele’s details that proved additionally vexing, he says.
"The original owner registered [LexingtonSteele.com] in June ’99, and when I contacted him about it late that year, he told me initially he was developing it for a building contractor in Texas named Lexington Steele," the multiple-award-winning performer, producer, and director says. "He said the company owed him $11,000 for the work he’d done on the site, and he told me I could buy it from him for that. At that point, I didn’t see it as a good investment. There was no indication, at least in my mind, that the Internet would be as big as it’s gotten to be."
Although Steele now admits he was wrong in his evaluation of the Net’s potential, at the time he figured the most prudent move was to register a domain name that was substantially similar to his well-known professional moniker and just get people used to looking for that name on the Web. He registered LexSteele.com, established his "official home" there, and thought no more about it until he realized how well LexSteele.com, a sister site LexOnBlondes.com, and his webmaster affiliate program SteeleCash.com were doing financially. That was in 2003, the same year Steele trademarked his stage name, partly in response to the sudden appearance of the faux "Lexington Steele home page" that sprung up almost overnight, it seemed, at LexingtonSteele.com. Like Ashton and Seka, Steele recovered his domain after its squatter failed to respond to an arbitration board’s summons—though the squatter had to be tracked through several name changes and registered addresses in foreign countries before he could be cornered. Steele received control of the domain in January 2005.
"There’s no telling how much money I’ve lost over time by not owning that site all along," he says now. "I see $10,000 a month on each site now. The website presences are solid and revenue generating."
Steele also says domain-name squatting is not the only way his professional name has been abused. "People even represent themselves as Lexington Steele on message boards and in chat rooms," he reveals. "You know, ID theft doesn’t only occur with financial information. It’s happening ruthlessly where adult stars are concerned. It’s impossible to monitor all the ways in which people misrepresent themselves as stars."
Steele’s not amused or flattered by the phenomenon, and he issues a warning to those he views as out-and-out thieves: "The greatest mistake a lot of people have made is regarding me as ‘talent,’" the Manhattan native who spent six years on Wall Street before becoming a porn star says, an edgy tone in his voice. "If there’s a great white shark in this ocean, it’s me, and I’m hunting. I’m the most dangerous commodity in this business. For those that want to fuck with me, you should know I’m watching."
Boom to bust and back
Prior to 2000, the virtual land rush was at a fever pitch as speculators snapped up every domain name that might conceivably become valuable at some future date. The more mercenary among them even squatted on names of well-known companies and individuals who were a bit slow off the line at the beginning of the race, hoping to sell the names to their targets for tens or even hundreds of times what the speculators paid for them.
After the dot-com bubble burst, the pace of speculation slowed markedly, until such things were hardly mentioned at all in the popular press. Recently, however, there was a resurgence of interest in domain-name speculation, as evidenced by the flurry of activity to buy domains related to what speculators thought might become the name of the new pope. The Vatican lucked out when the registrant of BenedictXVI.com decided to point it to a charitable organization and said he’d transfer it to the Vatican if the church wanted it. Other Benedict XVI-related domains were not so graciously handled. At least two less-desirable names were offered for sale to the highest bidder by the speculators who registered them.
Research indicates a renewed interest in the buying and selling of potentially popular domain names as a business model. Consolidated data from three independent companies that track the domain-name marketplace shows the volume of domain-name transactions rose more than 300 percent from 2003 to 2004. Currently, the average resale price of dot-com domain names is $9,700, according to DNJournal, Domain-Spiegel.de, and Sedo.com.
The reason?
"A domain name's importance emerged as a valuable element of an organization's brand, and the numbers validate this trend," Matt Bentley, CEO of Sedo.com ("Search Engine for Domain Offers"), told E-Commerce Times in May. According to Bentley, more than 67 million new domain names have been registered worldwide within the past year, and more people than ever before are renewing domain names, even if they don’t post a website at the spot. New peaks in Internet traffic are driving the trend, Bentley noted.
He won’t get any disagreement from Gary Kremen, owner of Sex.com, the subject of perhaps the most infamous domain hijacking in the history of the Net. "Domains are only worth whatever traffic their owners can get to them," Kremen says, noting that in his case, the court found that Sex.com was worth about $40 million during the six-year span it was in the possession of usurper Stephen Cohen. "[Domain names of popular stars, products, and catch phrases] are very valuable because they get picked up by search engines based on relevancy, which adds to their traffic."
Kremen’s $40 million judgement stands as an unusual feat in the annals of domain-name recovery. Most stars and companies aren’t interested in making up for money they didn’t have a chance to earn because their domain names were held by squatters. Their primary interest, according to attorneys who specialize in the area, is in getting their names back—as much to protect their reputations and images as for future revenue generation.
Don’t get fucked.
One reason adult stars have been reluctant until very recently to engage in public battles, even when they have an ironclad case in their favor, is the nature of their profession. In a world that seems to be leaning more to the ideological right all the time, "porn star" isn’t an occupation to which some officials are sympathetic. That’s not the case with the International Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers’ Universal Dispute Resolution Policy process, however. In the final analysis, "It doesn’t matter why you’re famous," says Holly Pranger, principal of the San Francisco-based Pranger Law Group (www.prangerlaw.com) and the attorney who represented Steele in his quest. "Compared to three to five years ago, people are much more savvy about the Internet" and how mountains of money are made there. "Adult entertainment is a billion-dollar industry, and these domain names are worth a great deal of money. The entertainers who have worked hard to create the recognition and goodwill associated with their performer names should have the right to control how those names and trademarks are used.It is an atrocity that these porn squatters wrongfully profit from them, and they should be stopped."
The best way to maintain control and ensure that unentitled others don’t profit from a performer’s hard work is advance planning. "Seek a trademark on your name if it will be used to market goods and services," Seka’s attorney Anderson advises. "A trademark has greater lattitude than anything else when it comes to domain disputes. When you register a domain, consider also registering various permutations, like .com, .net, and .org."
Steele is a believer. "One hundred percent of individuals who participate regularly in adult video need to own their own names online," he advises. "Lost revenue online can be more than they ever imagined. Even if a person plans to do nothing with the website, I recommend they register their names immediately. Their names are lucrative, and they want to be sure they’re the ones making the money from them."
