AdultBizLaw.com - Fattorosi & Chisvin

According to the Star Tribune, Starbucks recently decided to resurrect its original bare-breasted mermaid logo, much to the dismay of the Christian group, “The Resistance,” who is calling for a national boycott. The logo, based on a 16th Century Norse woodcut, will be on Starbucks cups for at least a few more weeks and will be the permanent logo for Pike Place bags of coffee. According to the Christian group, the logo “has a naked woman on it with her legs spread like a prostitute,” and that “the company might as well call themselves Slutbucks.” We didn’t even know that mermaids had legs. More, inside…

The article says,

The image is a less-revealing version of what the chain used for many years, starting when it first opened in Seattle in 1971. That original logo was resurrected in its Northwest outlets for a time in 2006 to mark the chain’s 35th anniversary.

Company spokeswoman, Bridget Baker said the newly revived logo was “modified a bit [from the original] based on feedback” from Starbucks customers during its 2006 appearance. “We feel it’s appropriate,” she said. Howard Shultz, Starbucks’ founder, said in his book, “That early siren, bare-breasted and Rubenesque, was supposed to be seductive as coffee itself.”

We seriously doubt this logo is obscene enough to deter anyone from their morning cup. From what we know of coffee drinkers, still photos from German scheissen porn wouldn’t separate them from their hot liquid crack.

“Nobody in their right mind would want to do that. You’d have to be desperate/damaged/strung out on drugs to do that.”

This argument gets used a lot by people who are against porn, prostitution, other kinds of sex work. And those of us who have actually been in sex work and not loathed it (or who know people who have) tend to counter simply by offering counter-examples: raising our hands, pointing to ourselves and each other, saying, “Me. Over here. Did sex work. Liked it (or didn’t hate it). Not a basket case. Case closed.”

But I think there’s a core assumption underlying the argument, one that makes it hard to argue against merely by offering boring old evidence. And it’s an assumption that doesn’t just apply to sex work. It’s an assumption that gets applied to all kinds of sexual variation … and not with very happy results.

The assumption is this:

“Everyone must like — and dislike — the same sexual things I do.”

“If other people do sexual things that I don’t enjoy,” the thinking goes, “they must not be enjoying it either. And there must be something dreadfully wrong with them for them to do sexual things that are so obviously not enjoyable. They must be troubled, crazy, under coercion.”

Read the entire article here

It is one of the most implausible hook-ups on the internet - a popular Christian dating website, BigChurch.com, is now part of the online family of the Penthouse Media Group.

Its raunchy bedfellows in the porn company’s cyber publishing empire include other dating sites such as AdultFriendFinder.com (”the world’s largest adult sex and swingers site”) and Bondage.com (no explanation necessary).

The financially-struggling Penthouse group recently moved into the social networking world after its old core magazine business was undermined by the explosion of pornography on the internet.

But a series of other Christian websites are highlighting the marriage between the pious and the promiscuous in an effort to woo the devout away from the BigChurch embrace.

Read the entire article here

Fans of sexuality-themed books should consider it required reading to pick up a copy of the candid, groundbreaking book, The Happy Hooker. It is, simply, a breathtakingly frank, unabashed account of one free-thinking Dutch woman who took New York City by storm in the 1970s, becoming its most infamous madam.

Her daring and insight into people is astounding, and her intellect and business sense would make any for-profit business proud. Your heart rate will quicken from reading certain passages, and the timelessness of her story could easily be set in today’s context, with meaning.

Women, in particular, have no good reason to hide their heads in the sand anymore about the opposite sex, if they know what’s good for them. The book is engrossing and, pardon the pun, hooks you from the very first sentence.

As fate would have it, I had a fortunate turn of luck in being able to interview The Happy Hooker herself about that time in her life. What follows is our exchange about the chapter that propelled her onto the world’s stage, and a naughty one at that.

Read the entire article here

Jeffrey Kilbride and James Schaffer started their spam business operation in 2003 after buying lists of email addresses, with each address representing a payout if its owner joined the X-rated site.

The two men are the first subjects to be prosecuted under US anti-spam law for launching a sustained attack, which caused 1.5 million complaints from people flooded with links to porn.

They were convicted on Friday of charges including conspiracy, money laundering, fraud and transportation of obscene material after a three-week trial in Arizona.

But Kilbride was handed down a longer sentence of 72 months, because he tried to prevent a witness testifying at the trial, Department of Justice officials said.

Both men were charged under the Controlling the Assault of Non-solicited Pornography and Marketing (CAN-SPAM) Act by sending spam messages using bogus headers and domains.

Federal prosecutors suggested the men went to great lengths to avoid detection: after CAN-SPAM took effect in 2003, they relocated their operation abroad, remotely accessing servers located in Amsterdam.

For their finances, the pair used bank accounts in Mauritius and the Isle of Man to receive and funnel the proceeds from their operation, which amassed $2m (�1m) in four years.

And on their e-mails, the name of a fake internet domain name was listed, seemingly created by staff at Shell Corporation in The Republic Mauritius.

Despite making it appear their business was located Europe, the men were e-mailing their victims from Phoenix, with help from three other named co-conspirators.

Kilbride and Schaffer were fined $100,000 and ordered to pay $77,500 in restitution to AOL. A federal judge also ordered them to jointly forfeit $1.1 million, their estimated haul from the operation.
Spammers sentenced to five years under anti-spam law

A new report finds porn filters at public libraries are blocking legitimate research, while still allowing plenty of smut to slip through. However, the study’s conclusion is not stopping the San Jose City Council from taking a second look at digital censorship.

The decision was unanimous. The San Jose Open Government Committee voting to have the City Council take up the porn filter issue next month.

Supporters say the city’s libraries have become a magnet for men viewing pornography and exposing themselves.

“A problem for our city if we can’t have our libraries be a safe environment where our children can go,” said City Council member Pete Constant.

Constant tells KCBS the newest filters are much more adaptive to the needs of the public.

“We can also have the ability to make sure that certain medical sites, things that are related to anatomy, but not pornography, are permanently unblocked so that people don’t have to run into that again in the future,” said Constant.

But information on how to get around filters and find bad sites is readily available online.

Ultimately the porn-filter debate might be all for nothing since the city doesn’t have the money to pay for it. The filters would cost up to $400,000 a year, at a time when libraries are already being closed on Sundays due to budget cuts.

Pornography is too graphic for the Blu-ray disc player because it may be too graphic even for the porn industry. Over the years it seems that x-rated material has seen distribution over just about every possible medium but it may just be that the Blu-ray disc player is just too real for the industry.

The problem is that the Blu-ray is so realistic, it’s almost like being there. In magazines and on video cassettes, the industry found that not every wrinkle was visible and the little imperfections were more hidden. Not with Blu-ray, even taking steps like camera angles and lighting effects still reveal more than the “artists” want to reveal. Little things like razor burn and other imperfections still stand out.

Instead the industry will be using the HD-DVD format because it’s not quite as good graphically as the Blu-ray. One of the other reasons is that Sony has stated that in keeping with a longstanding policy, it would not mass-produce pornographic videos on behalf of the movie makers. That will also slow down the industry a little bit. But some wonder if either format might be a little too real for the typical viewer.

The x-rated industry has stated that there will be no porn DVDs for the Blu-ray disc player, so does this spell the doom of the Blu-ray?

A coalition of Christian groups are asking the Marriott hotel chain to remove adult movies from their rooms or make it more difficult for guests to access them.

The Colorado Springs-based Focus on the Family is among the groups who made their case to Marriott International at a meeting in Washington, D.C., this week. Focus on the Family senior vice president of government and public policy Tom Minnery says the company promised to forward the groups’ concerns to its franchise owners, who will respond in July.

Minnery says pornography feeds prostitution and sexual abuse and that the coalition of Christian organizations, known as the Arlington Group, also suggested that hotels make guests request the movies at their front desks instead of from their rooms.

A new law criminalizing possession of extremely graphic images has been passed in U.K. as part of the latest Criminal Justice and Immigration Bill, and conviction by the statute will be punishable by up to three years in jail, according to the U.K. Ministry of Justice. The Ministry stated, “Material covered will include necrophilia, bestiality, and violence that is life threatening or likely to result in serious injury.” Under the new law, criminal liability now extends from the producer, who was responsible under the 1959 Obscene Publications Act (OPA), to the consumer.

The law’s change was spearheaded by a person related to a British murder victim. Half a decade ago, Jane Longhurst 31, a teacher from Brighton, England was murdered. When investigators found the killer and studied the crime, it emerged the murderer was compulsively accessing extremely graphic adult-content oriented websites with such names as, “Club Dead,” and “Rape Action,” that specialized in selling images of women being abused and violated.

After the sentencing of Graham Coutts, 39, from Hove, Sussex, who received at least 26 years, Jane’s mother Liz, began working to get the laws changed. Liz’s mother is from Berkshire, and her demand for a change in the law was backed by Reading West MP Martin Salter, as she waged a three-year campaign to ban violent online images and movies.

The Ministry of Justice stated that the law was crucial to battle against easy Internet access and sale of such violent obscene images. The Ministry stated that such material “can be accessed in the UK from abroad via the internet. Legislating in this area will ensure that the possession of such material is illegal both on and off line. This Government will always seek to close gaps in the law caused by misuse of new technologies, such as the internet, which allow existing controls to be avoided.” The legislation covers real photography and also images not photographed, such as moving images, and files or data able to be converted into pictures.

Read the entire article here

There’s no doubt sex sells in Las Vegas, but you expect to see ads for adult films in the back of a magazine — not splashed across town. But a Las Vegas-based company has done just that, taking their advertising out of the seedy underbelly of the city.

And these ads aren’t offering girls — they’re asking for them. You’ve probably seen the billboard on I-15 or lining the Strip — co-stars needed, the billboard says.

Wanna make $500? Well, if you call the number on the sign, you’ll know pretty quickly what this gig entails.

Company Voicemail: “We’re looking for people interested in auditioning for an adult production company.”

For $500, you’ll have to get naked and aroused on-camera.

Company Voicemail: “For both one-time ‘Hey, I’m in Vegas, let’s do-something-daring work’ and those interested in making this the start of becoming the next big porn star.”

Adult video company, Bait & Tackle Motion Pictures, has been shooting in Las Vegas for a year. Industry veteran and owner Justin Clouse admits he’s playing on the down economy and people hard up for cash — and counting on the Las Vegas image.

“The benefit of using locals is they’re here, we don’t have to fly them in. We don’t have to bring them back if they go on and do more work. The benefit of using tourists is they’re here and they’re ready to throw caution to the wind,” said Clouse.

Read the entire article here