Hot Money · Pushkin Industries

Episode 4: Playboy vs. Rusty and Edie

June 21, 2022·40 min·3 clips

Rusty Hardenberg lost his Playboy lawsuit precisely because he tried to moderate content — the ruling established that screening uploads makes you a publisher and liable for every image.

Start in Ohio. The narrator drops the roots of modern social platforms into a plain Youngstown shopping plaza, beside a toupee store and a furniture shop. It almost sounds like a joke, until the show gets to the family run computer business in the corner and its possibly huge archive of digital adult material. That little office matters because the reporters connect its bulletin board habits to tube sites, where other people's content could later make money at scale. Then Rusty remembers the FBI raid. He comes home, sees unfamiliar cars, and finds men in FBI jackets outside the family garage. Agents take computers, servers, records, and hardware while the family faces allegations about illegally distributed software. By the early 1990s, Congress, the FBI, and the press were treating cyber porn like a legal problem nobody had quite contained. Rusty says the business was gone for two and a half years. The memory still lands hard. Edie would not talk to the reporters, and the episode links her silence to the damage of that day, including the sleepless nights that followed. Still, the board comes back. Backups, new computers, and the same shopping plaza office get Rusty and Edie online again. Then Playboy enters. Hugh Hefner sees Playboy images moving around as unpaid digital copies, and a lawsuit from his mansion makes copyright the next fight.

As heard by us

A dry, exact account of how porn, moderation, and the early web collided in Ohio.

Hot Money returns to a suburban shopping plaza in Youngstown, Ohio, and finds the early internet tucked beside a toupee store and a furniture shop.

Read the full review in PlayNext →

Why you'd press play

Want the Ohio origin story behind online porn power?

Read the full recommendation in PlayNext →

Listen to the show on

Apple Podcasts Spotify

Play clips from this episode More from Hot Money