Command Video, Pleasure Productions, VCA, and Vivid scrapped any rivalries temporarily to make a video pirate walk the plank. The four companies joined forces to send Po Bo Video, a mail order company, to Davy Jones's locker post haste.
A few months ago, acting on an investigation triggered by a New Jersey attorney representing the four video companies, U.S. Marshals seized the entire Po Bo Video operation, finding over a thousand bootlegged adult video masters. The attorney, Jules Zalon, tells Gene Ross that Po Bo owner John Fisher - a former police officer - told a Wichita magistrate last week he was willing to walk away from the case and settle.
Zalon says Fisher's office was a mail drop and that his telephone number "belonged to a guy who had been dead for several years." Zalon and the four companies sent an investigator out when they discovered that.
Pleasure Productions says the issue in this case wasn't money but the willingness of the adult video industry to stop video piracy.
Zalon has been involved in fighting intellectual piracy for several years. "I started representing big distributors of all kinds of videos, general fare, adult. It didn't matter as long as it was legitimate," he tells Ross. "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."
