Gavin Newsom has until September 30 to sign or veto AB 1705. And if he doesn’t? It becomes law anyway. No signature required. The legislature shipped the bill to his desk on August 28, and this law should make every clip site, tube site, and UGC-heavy adult platform in California start sweating immediately. Because anyone shown in an uploaded video on one of those sites can sue for $75,000 per violation if that person did not provide written consent before the video was uploaded.
Starting January 1, 2027, before a user uploads sexually explicit content, they’ll need to hand over a verified email address and sign a statement. This isn’t just a checkbox; it’s a statement under penalty of perjury, and it is swearing that everyone in the video was an adult, consented to being filmed, and consented to it going online. Sites have to hang onto that paperwork for seven years. Lie on the form, and you’ve committed a new infraction with a new fine. It seems reasonable enough. After all, you should always have the consent of everyone involved.
Then you get to the enforcement section, and it suddenly shifts from an annoying compliance update to something much bigger, depending on how big your back catalog is. The depicted person can sue directly for up to $75,000 per violation, plus punitive damages and legal fees. Public prosecutors get their own lane too, at $25,000 a pop. And what could just be a one-time headache turns into a slow-motion financial disaster when you realize that with this new law, every single day noncompliant content stays live is its own separate violation. If a dispute drags on for a few months, the number will just keep growing. No wonder lawyers for these companies are getting worried.
Attorney Lawrence Walters explained this isn’t just California building on existing federal law. “AB 1705 is a platform-liability and pre-upload certification statute aimed at user-generated material, including questions of consent to distribution that 2257 does not address,” he said, referring to the existing federal recordkeeping regime adult producers already deal with. Translation: this is a whole new animal, not a remix. Walters called it “a new pre-publication compliance layer that must be designed, staffed, documented and defended.” He emphasized all four of those verbs, because apparently uploading a video now requires the operational muscle of a small law firm.
Attorney Corey Silverstein agreed, and explained that operators will need to rebuild upload workflows, consent documentation, uploader certifications, email verification, and record-retention procedures pretty much from the studs up. Big established platforms might just need to bolt this onto existing systems they already use. But for smaller sites, Silverstein says “the burden could be considerably greater,” which isn’t a good sign for them.
But the real question is what happens to everything already uploaded. You obviously can’t retroactively verify an email on a video from 2019. But the underlying duty to keep the site clean of noncompliant content? No expiration date on that one. “Leaving previously uploaded files displayed after Jan. 1, 2027 appears to be within the display duty,” Walters said. “There is no safe harbor for legacy catalogs, no ‘notice-and-takedown only’ defense written into the bill, and no phase-in for existing libraries.” To translate that out of legalese: your five-year-old content library doesn’t get a hall pass just because it existed before this law did. Silverstein agrees, warning operators not to assume their libraries are grandfathered in, while admitting the whole thing is murky enough that courts will probably end up sorting it out the hard way. Basically, somebody’s going to get sued first so the rest of the industry can find out what the rules actually mean.
That’s the real concern that existing sites need to worry about. “Reasonable diligence” is the standard Walters expects to eventually govern old content, and that will likely be decided case by case, after the lawsuit’s already filed, not before. So any UGC-heavy adult site with a decade of content needs to start auditing what’s actually documented and be prepared for a lot of potential litigation in the future.