Kevin Bacon move aside. There also seems to be six degrees of separation from Bill Clinton and blowjobs. New Jersey-based attorney Jules Zalon who repped a quartet of adult video companies in pursuit of a video pirate this past year, also happens to rep Linda Tripp's spokesperson. But that's another story.
Zalon, together with Pleasure Productions, Command Video, Vivid and VCA, teamed up to send the Wellville, Kansas-based mail order company, Po Bo Video packing. Po Bo is owned by John Fisher, a former cop. Fisher, according to Zalon, is in his seventies and claims to be living off of Social Security checks.
Po Bo Video, according to Zalon, was working off a very substantial mailing list. How the company obtained the lists whether through direct purchase or advertising, wasn't part of the actual investigation, said Zalon. "A guy who was on the mailing list called a client of mine, Howard Winters of Command Video, and said, 'Hey, I can get you stuff for $9.95.' As a result, my guy went off and made a whole bunch of purchases and harnessed a number of people whose rights were also being entrenched, to join him.
"Fisher had a fairly sophisticated operation," Zalon went on to say. "His office was a mail drop, and the information that we got was that he was using a telephone number that belonged to a guy who had been dead for several years. In any event, we made some mail order purchases and sent an investigator on the guy. Then we ran out to Topeka to file a lawsuit. The investigation, Zalon said, was conducted over several weeks with an action filed in February. "We went in with the U.S. Marshals and seized his entire operation. There were over a thousand bootleg masters. It was incredible." Matters came to a head this week when Fisher told a magistrate in Wichita that he was walking away from the case and willing to settle. Such as it is, since Fisher claimed he was "mortgaged up to here".
"This case will go off with a permanent injunction and a judgment which we believe is the maximum that we think is collectible from this guy," Zalon said. "It's peanuts. Hopefully we'll get some of the cost of the litigation back. To a certain extent these policing actions support themselves. The likelihood of him trying to do this again is questionable and, if he did, he'd go to jail."
Frank Kay of Pleasure Productions said money was never an issue in the Po Bo Case but was indicative of the adult industry's willingness to go after video pirates.
Zalon said his history in piracy issues dates back to 1980. "I rather innocently created what has turned out to be an extremely popular legal procedure called the John Doe Seizure Order," he said. "This was a way of stopping people selling bootleg merchandise on the street. Guys that were essentially unidentified and unidentifiable. They'd show up at rock concerts and with a team or a crew would sell bootleg Billy Joel shirts in the parking lot for $3 or $4 where they were selling for $7 or $8 inside.
"The consequence was they were essentially making a dollar a head at a concert. So for a 20,000 seat auditorium, they'd gross $20,000 in T-shirt sales. It's the kind of product that has a short shelf life in popularity. Get it now or it doesn't matter. It was just a way of showing you were at this concert," Zalon added.
Zalon: "I created a procedure that required a reinterpretation of the Trademark Act, the Landham Act. I was able to convince a federal judge that he should authorize the U.S. Marshals to go out on the street and grab the junk from these kids. It created a minor sensation. All of a sudden, I was being called by everyone under the sun. I was running around the country representing all kinds of rock groups. The procedure was quickly modified saw we could use it against general business premises. And that procedure became, essentially, without much change, the Trademark Counterfeiting Act of 1984.
"Ultimately we started going against stores not only for rock n' roll merchandise but recordings. I did a lot of work with CD's; some work involved videos and, eventually, someone called me up and said, 'I hear you do a lot of anti-piracy work.' I started representing big distributors of all kinds of videos, general fare, adult. It didn't matter as long as it was legitimate. Once you do one or two, the word gets around, I guess. I've handled several seizures, a few against stores. Stores can be real sitting ducks. If they're selling bootleg merchandise, you send someone in, they purchase it, then you file a lawsuit. Getting a source is more difficult. This guy [Fisher] was operating with a very substantial mail list."
