Verne Troyer is now a mini litigant in a a $20 million lawsuit filed yesterday afternoon against TMZ, the often stupid but rarely wrong gossip site he claims violated his rights by publishing and airing portions of his sex tape.
You know who would’ve benefited from seeing this pair of creative ads for Porn Blocker software? Clinton Raymond McCowen, who’s on trial in Florida for distributing porn that qualifies, prosecutors are arguing, as “obscene,” that nasty over-the-line definition that means whatever the hell you’re doing is not protected by the First Amendment.
(This is not to be confused with a similar obscenity trial underway in Los Angeles, where pornographer Ira Isaacs is defending his human-on-animal flicks, and where the Hon. Alex Kozinski recused himself after he was found out for posting some of his own borderline-acceptable porn on what he thought was a private web server.)
McCowen is on trial for producing group sex porn, raking in an estimated $1 million per year from 5,000 subscribers who pay $30/month for their orgy fix. (Also, prosecutors say paying the “actors” amounts to prostitution.)
What constitutes obscenity hinges on the Supreme Court’s 1973 decision, which puts forth a 3-part test to determine if material is obscene based on “contemporary community standards”; that is, does the community think the material is obscene? And to argue that it’s not, McCowen’s attorney is turning to Google — and its cache of data on your search history. CONTINUED »
Mark Ronson, retelling an innocent childhood anecdote on Britain’s The Sunday Night Project:
It’s a weird story, but I didn’t touch him. We (Ronson and Lennon) used to watch the porn channel because we were, like, 10 and, ‘Oh my God, [boobs]!’ So Michael was in bed. And me and Sean said, ‘Michael, do you want to see something cool?’ We turned the dial to the porn channel and there were strippers shaking their [boobs] around. We were like, ‘Michael, Michael, how cool is this?’ We turned around and he was cringing, saying, ‘Ooh, stop it, stop it, ooh, it’s so silly.’ We were like, ‘Michael, you have to look, maybe you’re not seeing it right, it’s naked girls!’ He was not down with the program whatsoever! I think he had really strong feminist views on porn. [Popwrap]
The good news? The flick was of the adult — as in, not child – variety.
In relaying Time magazine’s report about Japan’s elder porn industry, we missed this item from yesterday, also from Time, about how the new 36 iPhone is going to be a hot bed for porn. The magazine reports an uptick in Google searches for “iPhone porn,” even though Apple, officially, bans adult content from its offerings. So either: Time magazine really is on the cusp of cultural trends, or they’re so desperate for newsstand readers and pageviews that they’ve resorted to the same link bait as most blogs.
Shigeo Tokuda is not the actual name of a certain 74-year-old man who has suffered three heart attacks, has a wife and daughter, and is one of Japan’s biggest porn stars. It’s his stage name, and he’s appeared in over 350 films, unbeknownst to his family.
Yes, Japan is a breeding grown for elder porn, a niche that, thanks to the web, has become less stigmatized, if you also consider S&M porn to have become less stigmatized.
While Americans are excellent in churning out gay twink flicks and college-aged raunch, Japan’s exceeding in the old folks market, where demand for elder porn has doubled in the past decade.
The same country that’s built its economy on exporting electronics, then, is also propping up its $1 billion porn market with seniors. The growing niche, it appears, can be explained in this way: CONTINUED »
When Eliot Spitzer was New York’s attorney general, he went after white collar crooks and prostitutes. Now that Andrew Cuomo has taken the helm, he’s made turning the Internet into a safe playground for kids a top priority. First he went after Facebook, for allowing lax privacy policies that might let kids become the real-life victims of a To Catch a Predator episode. And now he’s heavy handed Internet service providers including Verizon, Sprint, and Time Warner, to block websites that are known to traffic in kiddie porn.
That the online newsgroups where child porn pics and videos are traded are so widely known, and that these ISPs could pretty easily identify customers who visited them, is one thing. The other thing is how Atty. Gen. Cuomo described his relationship with kiddie porn: “You can’t help but look at this material and not be disturbed.” Well, some folks can help to look at it, but that’s just us.
At R. Kelly’s child porn last month, jurors were treated to a special screening of the tape that allegedly depicts the rapper urinating on a 13-year-old girl and having sex with her.
But what if that’s actually the better of the “porn at jury duty” scenarios? CONTINUED »
Teens are sending naughty camera phone pics of themselves to friends and crushes! And then, magically, those photos get forwarded around and posted online, bringing shame and depression to their creators! [AP] But if Pete Wentz can do it …
A completely NSFW guide to reality TV fellas who’ve appeared in one state of undress or another, from Survivor’s Jeff Probst and Ozzie to Big Brother boys from around the world. [Ashton Cruz Zoo]
You can’t really blame those absurd million dollar pictorial offers made to Hollywood starlets as the reason Playboy’s balance sheet is stained red. It’s not like Miley Cyrus & Co. actually take them seriously.
But Playboy’s parent, Playboy Enterprises, saw a loss of $3.1 million on revenue of $87.5 million in Q1 of this year; in Q1 of last year, Playboy earned $1.4 million on revenue of $85.4 million. The print magazine is blamed for much of the downturn, but only 20 percent of the company’s overall dollars come from advertising. [NYT]
So blame XTube, PornoTube, and all the rest of the free porn video sites that are stealing Playboy’s niche. Always the first to conquer an industry, porn is now seeing the premium digital space it carved out for itself taken over by free offerings, though CEO Christie Hefner refutes that explanation: “There isn’t anything different about the fact that people can access explicit sexual content on the Internet because they could access it in other forms before.” Adds the Times: “She noted that Penthouse and Hustler were introduced in the 1970s; that explicit videos became available in the late 1980s, fueling the sales of VCRs; and the advent of satellite television in the early ’90s gave people still another option for spicy movies ‘in the privacy of your home.’”
All true, but none of them were free.
So what’s a scantily clad girl to do?
Take a look at what competitor Penthouse is doing. That magazine is finding success in Christian dating sites. CONTINUED »
Hugh Hefner generously announced today that naked Miley Cyrus would be nakedly “welcomed in [his] magazine” full of naked ladies—when she’s of age, of course. [Us] This isn’t the first time that the doddering coot, or his kin, pulled such a stunt, knowing full well the offer would get a write up in the gossip columns, but that the starlets would never agree. Below, a look back at some of the million dollar deals, made by creepy old men, and Joe Francis, that never were. CONTINUED »
This video from Inside Edition shows how an Inside Edition anchor hides from his Girls Gone Wild subscription by producing a segment about the nefarious porn company which keeps sending him DVDs he totally didn’t request. [BWE] It kind of makes you wonder: Why didn’t The Insider’s Pat O’Brien blame his alcoholism on a beer company that refused to stop sending him free cases?
Jimi Hendrix joins the lengthy list of celebrities with sex tapes on the market. And the good folks at Vivid Entertainment have even posted a trailer of the tape (perhaps NSFW), which includes testimonials from women who have slept with him verifying that the penis you see in the video belongs to the rock legend. In this era of questionable authenticity, we appreciate the extra effort.
Porn producer Michael Lucas apparently had a run in with the law last month: “A resident of 244 W. 23rd St., Michael Lucas, 36, was arrested on Sat., March 15, after a neighbor told police the defendant slapped and scratched him. Witnesses said Lucas broke several items in one of the apartments of the building and cut himself on the arm by the time police arrived.”
If imitation is the highest form of flattery, what does that make plagiarism? We don’t know, but Michael Lucas probably does, because his Barack Obama bashing column has more than a few similarities with Ann Coulter’s “Throw Grandma Under A Bus,” which she published on March 19, two days before Lucas’ piece.
How did Joe Francis score his release from jail over child abuse charges stemming from his alleged “adult” filming of two 17-year-old girls? By exposing Florida state attorney Steve Meadows showing child porn to ABC’s Nightline, he claims.
Meadows, who was running as much of a media blitz as Francis and his attorney Roy Black, was all too pleased to publicize his drawn-out capture of the Girls Gone Wild chief.
Which is why, when Nightline’s Martin Bashir (of Michael Jackson fame) came calling, Meadows had the tapes ready to show off. That was a mistake: If the footage of the 17-year-old girls was enough to get Francis to plead to a felony count (but not register as a sex offender) then it’s enough to make exhibiting the tape for TV news types just as illegal. (So the story goes, only law enforcement authorities can view child porn, and only under the auspices of an investigation. Remember Kurt Eichenwald?)
For his part, Francis denies ever seeing the tape.
Though the obviously-bias Martin refused to testify against Meadows, invoking privilege, as to whether the attorney showed him the tape, the clip below shows the Nightline anchor has a thorough understanding of exactly what’s on the tape, including the size of the girls’ breasts. CONTINUED »
Is posting a nip slip of Disney cash machine (and 15-year-old) Miley Cyrus technically child porn? Maybe, which is why we’re sort of grossed out about linking to the blog showcasing it. So we won’t.
Let’s say you worked at a paper that had gone through four senior editors in three years and the general state of journalism was like your toilet after a big cup of coffee. And let’s say you lived in Los Angeles. And how about we quit the hypotheticals and say you work for the L.A. Times?
Well, then Jim O’Shea’s departure couldn’t have felt good. Because when he was ousted, he either was supremely bitter or incredibly honest—or maybe a little bit of both—and basically said the whole Times operation was crap. You’re probably interested in another job, but resigned to the fact that finding a new position at a paper on par with the L.A. Times is next to impossible.
But fear not, Sam Zell, owner of the Tribune Co., came in to make everyone feel better by talking smack on O’Shea, saying “[O’Shea] pissed all over the company where he worked for over 30 years.” But lest any reporters would take issue, Zell won them over by encouraging porn watching at work as long as masturbating and sexual harassment didn’t get in the way of deadlines.
What a kidder. But seriously, your jobs are not secure.
Coutorture founder Julie Fredrickson, who shot to Internet notoriety for this unscheduled Anna Wintour interview, sold her fashion blog network to PopSugar.com publisher Sugar Inc. back in October. The dollar figure that was paid to Fredrickson, who remains with the company, wasn’t disclosed. But it couldn’t have been that much — since she seems to be trafficking in hidden porn links on her personal blog. CONTINUED »
Editorial Director
