Porntifications

Posted by mikezillion at January 26th, 2008

52 ABC Television affiliate stations face a proposed fine of $1.4 million for showing a 2003 episode of NYPD Blue in which a woman’s butt was exposed and displayed for several seconds. The fine is based on the assumption that a butt is a sexual organ. Challenging that assumption was the basis of ABC’s classically Disney-esque defense to the charge, but that argument was rejected.

I say this is great news for butt sex. Finally, a mainstream endorsement. Huzzah!

Posted by mikezillion at January 24th, 2008

It’s so much easier to blame piracy for declining DVD sales. The fact is, the decline comes from the availability of cheaper, more consumer-friendly options for casual viewers. Folks are no longer required to pay the “souvenir” price for a physical DVD just to see what your movie is like. If they really like it, they will still buy the DVD. But trying to make your DVD’s increasingly difficult to copy is only going to frustrate legitimate customers, and it won’t make the determined pirates blink twice.

Posted by mikezillion at December 26th, 2007

I truly appreciate living in California. Our Supreme Court just verified what we all knew already; malls are public places, and the public has a right to express itself according to the legal protections of the First Amendment in any mall. “A shopping mall is a public forum in which persons may reasonably
exercise their right to free speech,” said Justice Carlos R. Moreno, summarizing the 4-3 majority ruling. In the case which raised the issue, a San Diego mall was ruled to have violated the First Amendment rights of protesters handing out leaflets inside the mall.

Yes, my next trip to the mall may be disrupted. I think that’s a small price to pay for freedom of speech. I despair to think one day I might be so old and crotchety that my concern over personal discomfort could interfere with my sense of the importance of free speech.

My next question: what about public places online?

Posted by mikezillion at October 27th, 2007

It’s looking more sensible in legal land. Secondary producers may be able to breathe easier now that the U.S. Court of Appeals has declared the 2257 record-keeping requirements overbroad. One of the reasons that this is exciting is that it establishes a legal basis for distinguishing between illegal child pornography and now-legal adult pornography. Once you get a foot in the door, the sale is half made.

Posted by mikezillion at October 17th, 2007

I don’t generally object to the notion of typosquatting (apart from the fact that it is illegal in the United States). The practice involves registering a domain that a user might type in accidentally when misspelling the intended domain name, and using the space to market products that might be relevant to visitors of the intended site. It seems to me that it could be a slightly sleazy but perfectly legitimate form of targeted advertising. Where it gets creepy and sick is when folks target terms clearly aimed at children, such as “Teletubbies,” and put adult content on domains with minor spelling variations. I thought John Zuccarini got the hint from his $164,000 fine in 2003, but the Federal Government apparently wants him to stop using his typo domains to market non-adult products as well. The law is the law, until it is challenged and changed in a free market.

Posted by mikezillion at June 1st, 2007

The Second Life community is reeling from a blog post warning that the service will not tolerate certain taboo activities on its site. Among these is role-playing of sexual interaction involving minors, even when both role-players are actually consenting adults.

This is getting into a sticky area, and I don’t envy the folks at Linden Labs, who run Second Life, their responsibility. I’ve visited Second Life a few times (and no, I’m not going to tell you my alias there) and as far as I can tell it’s equally easy for a minor or for an adult to log in and play around as either a virtual minor or a virtual adult. This being the case, I don’t see that they have any choice but to impose reasonable limitations on the activities of their members.

Make a site that’s limited to adult members, and make sure that all the members are adults, and then we can open this discussion again. Of course, I might still side with the folks who want to impose similar limits on what’s acceptable in virtually public adult-only spaces, but at least then the discussion would be worth having.

Posted by mikezillion at May 23rd, 2007

The webmaster (and S/M bondage master) of a kinky slave-oriented site is facing 30 years in jail for exceeding the consent of a woman who is portrayed on the site. He claims to have had model releases and letters from the woman offering unlimited use of her image, not to mention her body. But the unlimited consent offered by the woman was revoked along the way. The webmaster’s appeal, based in part on the private and consensual nature of their relationship, has been denied due to the commercial aspects.

Posted by mikezillion at March 23rd, 2007

I’m not sure how I feel about this one. I didn’t like the wording of the Child Online Protection Act one little bit, but I did support the objectives. Now an 84-page ruling from U.S. District Judge Lowell Reed in Philadelphia has decreed the proposed law unconstitutional for two key reasons: the wording was sufficiently over-broad to have a chilling effect on free speech, and the approach was not the least restrictive and most effective method available.

I have to agree. Any law banning all speech which is considered “harmful to minors” in a given medium leaves much too much room for interpretation. On the other hand, kids just aren’t mature enough to be exposed to some of the adult themes in legitimate pornography. That is a concern we all need to take into consideration when we make any information public. The judge in this case recommends use of modern filtering technology as a more appropriate technique. While flawed at best, filtering technology does allow publishers to use their good will and best judgment to tag information. What the filtering companies do with the tags is another issue….

Posted by mikezillion at February 23rd, 2007

Titan Media estimates that illegal file sharing online has cost it as much as $30 million in lost revenue. More than three million Titan titles were downloaded illegally last year according to p2p spider research. The company usually charges between $2.99 and $9.99 for its video-on-demand downloads. (They charge as little as $14.95 for unlimited online streaming.) Titan does report a remarkable 80 percent compliance rate from the 318,000 cease-and-desist letters they have sent out.

My question, as always, is whether you can really make a direct comparison between potential sales volume without the marketing value of piracy, and actual download volume when the content is free. Titan’s proposed solution is to move past DVD and toward services which provide digital rights management for downloads. I guess if there’s no other way to watch Titan’s fantastic titles, consumers will follow. Or they’ll get more creative.

Posted by mikezillion at February 17th, 2007

This is a cute PR trick at best. My secret fantasy lover Michael Lucas had the good sense to recognize the ridiculousness of a lawsuit filed on Thursday, seeking to stop the sale of “La Dolce Vita Part 1″ and “La Dolce Vita Part 2″ because the names of the gay adult films allegedly infringe on the trademark of the 1961 classic “La Dolce Vita” by Federico Fellini. I agree with Lucas on this one; nobody is going to confuse one of his films for Fellini’s–although with Lucas’s reputation, I don’t doubt his versions will become timeless classics of gay porn. But the last time I checked, you couldn’t copyright a title, or claim a trademark against a commonly used phrase. Should I check again?