Corey Silverstein Gives Advice on New MasterCard Adult Bank Rules

LOS ANGELES—MasterCard, one of the country’s two leading credit card issuing companies, announced last week that it is putting new rules in place that appear to hand banks the responsibility for policing content on adult sites. The statement sent waves of anxiety through adult industry businesses, many of whom rely on credit card payments for large portions of their revenue.  To address those fears, the adult industry news site YNOT hosted a 70-minute webinar Monday with leading adult industry attorney Corey Silverstein, who explained the new MasterCard rules and, even more importantly, how adult businesses — including performers who create and sell their own content — can adapt to the requirements laid down by the credit card company. The company in its statement said that it had decided to take “an even more active stance against the potential for unauthorized and illegal adult content. This starts by ensuring there are strong content control measures on sites where our products are accepted.” Silverstein’s first point, however, was to remind the approximately 75 attendees who logged into the online event that the relationship between adult businesses and MasterCard is not a direct one. In fact, the credit card company does not have relationships with businesses, but with banks. “MasterCard’s relationship is not with you guys as website operators, content producers directly,” Silverstein said. “MasterCard’s relationship, who they talk to directly, are with the banks that ultimately you work through. So it’s a middleman situation. But ultimately it’s just as important because those are the banks that you respond to.” Because the new MasterCard rules affect only sites that, in fact, use MasterCard, Silverstein explained that free sites with no premium, paywalled areas, will remain unaffected by the changes. But for the large number of sites that accept MasterCard payments, “the day of you allowing user submission of unverified content is over,” the attorney said. The new rules, Silverstein explained, require full documentation of the identities and ages of everyone appearing in an adult video, including livestreams, clips or any type of adult content — and that means everyone. “MasterCard used the words specifically, ‘for all people depicted.’ What that means,” Silverstein said, “is every person, not just the person who owns the account, but every person who appears in the film, or clip, or stream or what have you — and those uploading the content.” Silverstein predicted that MasterCard’s chief competitor, Visa, would soon follow suit and announce its own, similar measures to crack down on transactions with adult sites. In December, both of the major credit card issuers declared that they would now prohibit users of Pornhub to make transactions on the site using cards from either company. “For those of you who are still not taking age verification and age verification documents seriously, guys, this should be your wake-up,” Silverstein said in the webinar. “The problem that you have now is that there is a lot of content out there online, and the website where it appears doesn’t have age verification documentation. You need to clean that content out, and you need to clean it out now.” For content producers going forward, however — including, Silverstein noted, solo producers and those who work only with spouses, close friends or significant others — even signed documents may not be sufficient to satisfy banks who decide to target a site for alleged underage content. The lawyer said that he strongly recommends an added layer of protection — video documentation. “A simple little paper may not be enough anymore,” Silverstein said. “We’re seeing lawsuits popping up all over the country. We’re seeing all of these allegations that content was made without consent, or that it wasn’t really depicting people who were over 18 years of age. So what you guys all should be doing is filming what I call a mini-verification clip. It doesn’t need to be any more than 15 or 30 seconds long. What you should be doing in having video evidence of the model signing the paperwork, holding the card up, and saying, ‘Yes, this is me. I’m here to day of my own free volition to do whatever it is. Thank you very much.’” Photo By Adult.Law Video Screen Capture