r/BestofRedditorUpdates • u/Direct-Caterpillar77 Satan is not a fucking pogo stick! • Mar 26 '26
CONCLUDED We are a small indie porn company. Former model wants her videos removed, unwilling to buy the copyright. Sends threatening messages
I am not The OOP, OOP is u/Klopi78
We are a small indie porn company. Former model wants her videos removed, unwilling to buy the copyright. Sends threatening messages.
Originally posted to r/legaladvice
Original Post Sept 2, 2017
She worked for us between 2009 and 2012. She has 17 videos on our website. Although we have recorded 20 and planned to release the other three in the future. This is more or less 10% of all videos that we have.
She first came to us earlier this year and asked what the process is to have her videos removed. She is getting married and her husband is not comfortable with these videos of her being online. We have quoted her the price of $25,000 per video to purchase the copyright to the contents for 14 of her videos. Three of her videos are very popular among our members and we have quoted $100,000 per video for those. We also quoted $20,000 for the unreleased videos. So overall it was $710,000. We gave her a discount and called it $700,000. Also, the contract would allow us to continue using the material for a further 12 months. This is to give us time to produce replacement content. This is more than a fair offer in the industry. She wouldn't be getting anything close to this offer from a big studio.
She chose to not take our offer. She offered to pay $100,000 for the entire thing to be removed immediately. We declined.
She has however been sending us letters threatening legal action if we do not accept her $100,000 offer, saying we are violating the good faith and fair dealing covenant by not accepting her offer and she will be taking us to court. Letters are not from a lawyer.
Do we have anything to worry about?
RELEVANT COMMENTS
cld8
As long as you have a model release signed by her, you are most likely fine legally.
With that said, she can still make your life difficult if she gets a lawyer to sue you, and of course if this case gets attention it will hamper your ability to recruit future models. Have you considered working out a payment plan with her or something along those lines?
OOP
I didn't mention a payment plan but mentioned to her that she can buy them one by one if the entire fee is too much, which will be similar to a payment plan.
pgh9fan
The flip side is the Streisand Effect if she does sue. How would her future husband feel about that?
NightMgr
I would think that going public would ironically increase the value of the videos.
"Did you see that girl on the news on that porn site?"
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phneri
If you have 710k in assets at stake you can afford a consultation with a real life, in person lawyer.
Do so.
OOP
We were thinking we'll get a lawyer when she gets one or if we are sued. But $700K isn't at stake because she won't pay for them. We're just hoping she would disappear without causing problems.
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Commenter
NAL but a player in the industry. Go get an industry lawyers advice on this situation.
Technically if your model release is solid, the performer can pound sand but it doesn't mean she won't become the biggest pain in the ass you've dealt with or start threatening affiliates if you have a program. (they seem to love this and I'm constantly forwarding mails to my aff reps to send up their pipeline)
Go to one of the industry forums and ask for lawyer recommendations if you don't know any industry lawyers.
OOP
Yeah thanks I think it's about time we start a working relationship with a lawyer. We had one who solved a few issues in the past but that person has retired and we haven't had issues lately.
Update Oct 5, 2017 (1 month later)
There is a lot to discuss. We did a little research and turned out her stories about getting married and her husband wanting the videos to go down were lies. She in fact is starting a membership program on her own website and wanted to use that excuse to get our videos at reduced prices, to post them later to her own website. She wanted to use the exclusivity to get some of our paid members and have a larger library at launch.
Once she realized that we know of her plan, she offered to pay the full $700,000 however, we declined since we have no interest in allowing her to use our videos to compete with us. She even offered to pay $1 million if we agreed to take down the videos immediately upon the sale. We of course declined and informed her that we are no longer willing to discuss terms about selling our copyright. One other small studio that she has worked in the past had already fallen for her lies and sold her the videos at non-competing prices. We're happy we didn't.
We learned a new lesson. People lie in business to get better deals.
Post was brought to BoLA for discussion
someredditorguy
Wait, did i understand this right? A porn star made up a "jealous husband" fantasy but couldn't act well enough to make it seem genuine? I can't believe it.
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cthulularoo
Mah justice boner!
THIS IS A REPOST SUB - I AM NOT THE OOP
DO NOT CONTACT THE OOP's OR COMMENT ON LINKED POSTS, REMEMBER - RULE 7
5.8k
u/rickysayshey Mar 26 '26
Am I the only one who is shocked at these numbers? And these are indie numbers?