God bless the Bitch Button! How else would porn studios be able to contact us about the supposed “slander” of their employees?
Case in point; Ryan Haxton’s employer out in Arizona, Thexis, L.L.C., sent us the following email very patiently requesting that we stop talking about their employee lest they take legal action (believe us, we’re sick of this story and we’ve been trying to stop talking about him for months). Here it is in full:
To Whom it may concern,
As you know with any job you do you need to be protected. Porn is no exception. In order to protect Ryan Haxton I demand that you remove all his names, blogs and associations with Ryan Haxton and/or Porn names Jayden Taylor and Caden Boyd. We own all rights to these porn names. This site has slanderd Ryan Haxton and has caused him undue stress . We ask for all content to removed by Sunday April 19, 2009 from your site before we pursue this further in the court of law. You will be fully liable for any losses that our company suffers due to negative publicity of our porn employees.
Sincerley ,
Thexis, L.L.C.
Interesting, no? We think that it’s nice that Ryan’s company is willing to go to bat for him, it shows that it’s not all smoke and urine mirrors, and there’s still some heart in the porn industry. But do they have a leg to stand on here? Or can they really hang us out to dry without a pot to piss in?
Thexis can’t be all wrong here — it’s true that employees have rights that need to be protected… in the workplace. So shouldn’t Ryan have been wearing protective eyewear to prevent pink eye? Or maybe a protective mask to prevent second-hand smoke inhalation?
Now we agree that Haxton’s porn aliases are probably trademarked in some way, but his name is obviously his (unless he sold that too), and isn’t intellectual property. Besides, is Disney going to come down on us if we write a website claiming that Mickey Mouse sucks (or gets peed on, for that matter) — and where would Disney stand legally if those statements were actually true? Forgetting of course that Mickey is a cartoon…
Where does the line get drawn concerning internet censorship? You guys have proven to be a pretty legally savvy group — what do you think?
We wonder what the World Intellectual Property Organisation, or for that matter, the ACLU have to say about all this…
VN:F [1.9.3_1094]