World News

An up'n'coming Scooby Doo film has offended the US censors (the MPAA) who have ordered the removal of a lesbian kiss.

A Louisiana appeals court on Thursday upheld a lower court's dismissal of a lawsuit blaming the Oliver Stone film Natural Born Killers for a young couple's interstate rampage that left a store clerk paralyzed, the studio that made the film said.

The Louisiana Court of Appeal said Natural Born Killers, a  film about a couple on a killing spree, was entitled to First Amendment freedom of speech protection because nothing within the movie advocated or incited viewers to commit violent activity, said the film's maker, Warner Bros.

We are gratified by the court's unequivocal ruling that subjecting   provocative speech to civil penalties would be unconstitutional and would pose a grave danger to free expression, the studio said in a statement.

The lawsuit was first bought against Warner, a unit of media conglomerate AOL Time Warner in 1995 by the family of Patsy Byers, a Louisiana store clerk who was shot in a robbery attempt by Sarah Edmondson.

Byers was left a quadriplegic after the 1995 shooting in Pontchatoula, Louisiana. She died of cancer two years later, but her family decided to proceed with the lawsuit.

The initial ruling to dismiss the case came in March 2001.

Plaintiffs attorney Joe Simpson said the Byers family has not yet decided if it will appeal the case to the Louisiana Supreme Court. I don't know if we're going to go any further or not I have to consult with the other attorneys. My vote now would be to stop. In my opinion, it's hopeless to go any further.

Just days after announcing its return to the Web, Film88.com, a site that let users stream newly released Hollywood movies for $1, has been shut down through actions taken by the Motion Picture Association (MPA), CNET News.com reported.

The site originally operated out of Taiwan as Movie88.com and offered whole movie downloads for $1, but was shut down by Taiwanese authorities and its ISP after a request from the MPA. The site operators then relocated to Tehran, Iran, where U.S.
copyrights are not recognized. However, its content was delivered via servers in the Netherlands operated by TrueServer, which took the site down after receiving a request from the MPA. We worked with the ISP in the Netherlands, who did what the overwhelming majority of ISPs do, and prevented piracy from continuing on their service, Mark Litvack, vice president and director of worldwide legal affairs for anti-piracy for the MPA, told CNET News.com.

A note on Film88.com now states, We feel sorry for our contractor whose proxy/caching was blocked because of somebody's reaction. (Without Court Order AGAIN!!). Our site is READY now, but we got [sic] to wait for few hours for our new lines to take place.

From EE Times

A recent story in the electronics industry trade publication EE Times reported on the efforts of Chinese and Taiwanese DVD player manufacturers to develop a proprietary DVD disc format, in order to evade paying royalty fees to companies such as Philips, Sony and Matsushita, which hold patents on the original DVD format. A Chinese standard called Advanced Versatile Disc (AVD) and a Taiwanese standard called Enhanced Versatile Disc (EVD) both aim to offer greater media storage capacity than existing DVDs, but another admitted objective is to avoid the $15-$20 royalty fee on each DVD player manufactured and sold in China and Taiwan.

The mayor of Provo, Utah, disbanded a city film board that has kept score for 25 years on the amount of sex, violence and profanity on movie screens around town.

The nine-member Provo Media Review Commission has reviewed more than 5,000 films since 1977, when Looking for Mr. Goodbar  caused a stir in conservative Provo and led to the board's appointment. Members did not pick or pan movies. They simply noted the types and amounts of sex, profanity and violence on screen. Using a review form and tickets paid for by the city, commissioners screened almost every movie that played in Provo.

The board's reviews were posted online and attracted 65,000 Internet hits a month.

Mayor Lewis Billings said he was cutting the board to help balance next year's $129 million city budget. The board's portion was $6,500 a year.

From Ananova

A Pennsylvania man has won the legal right to work and sit in his back garden while naked.

Charlie Stitzer from Pleasant Gap was found guilty of indecent exposure and disorderly conduct in February 2001 after a neighbour complained about him. But the conviction was overturned with three Superior Court judges ruling he could go nude on his own property. He appealed the indecent exposure conviction after being sentenced to two months probation, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette reports.

On summer evenings he would garden or relax without any clothes, saying it was too dark for his neighbours to see him. The judges said Mr Stitzer wasn't exposing himself in a public place or drawing attention to himself. The complaining neighbour was too far away to be offended, they added.

While Mr Stitzer says he will still take his clothes off at night "if it gets hot enough", state prosecutors say he could be prosecuted for disorderly conduct.

From The Times

When the landmark pornographic film Deep Throat came out in 1972, Linda Lovelace said: I did it because I love it. But a decade later, the porn star-turned-protester told a Senate committee: Every time somebody sees that movie, they're watching me being raped.

Linda 'Lovelace' Boreman died in April aged 53 from injuries suffered in a car crash after an improbable career that saw her metamorphose from icon of the 'sexual revolution' to darling of the feminist movement. Her entire porn career lasted about two weeks when she was 21.

Lovelace rode a wave of celebrity. In the tumult of the early Seventies, she made another, non-pornographic, film titled Linda Lovelace for President. But she disappeared from public view for several years, re-emerging as an ardent critic of pornography who insisted that she had been coerced into making Deep Throat.

In an autobiography, Ordeal, she claimed that Charles Traynor, her then manager and later husband, had forced her into pornography. During Deep Throat, she had to apply make-up to conceal bruises from beatings. The film made $600 million, but Traynor was paid just $1,250. She received nothing. Lovelace filed for divorce in 1973, asking that Traynor be enjoined from annoying, harassing, bothering, molesting or striking her. He dismisses her charges as ridiculous.

She became friends with Gloria Steinem, the founder of Ms Magazine, who visited her regularly with other feminists to determine what had really happened during her pornographic ordeal. Andrea Dworkin and Catharine MacKinnon, the anti-pornography campaigners, joined Ms Steinem in trying, unsuccessfully, to sue on Lovelace's behalf. She did, however, air her case in public hearings in Minneapolis and before the US Senate.

Thanks to Ralf

Have you heard about the situation in Germany? Because of the school massacre in Erfurt there are plans to ban all 18 rated videos and DVDs over here. Our Bundeskanzler said We don't need that dirt!. They also want to ban video games, especially Counter Strike since this game was found in the killer's home. In addition, there are plans to control the internet in such a way that all providers have to filter web sites that the government don't want the citizens to see.

The most unbelievable thing: The murderer in the Erfurt massare had bought his weapons legally since he was a member of a "Schtzenverein" (shooting club). The minimum age you have to have to enter such a shooting club has recently been changed - from 12 to 10 years!

I think I'm gonna leave Germany. This Big Brother shit really goes too far.

From perfect10.com

A preliminary injunction granted to Perfect 10 Magazine by United States District Judge Lourdes targets web sites who use material from magazines. Judge Baird issued an injunction against Cybernet Ventures and related websites, preventing their "Adult Check" network of over 300,000 affiliated websites from displaying Perfect 10's photos or photos of "Complaining Celebrities". In its ruling, the Court stated that Perfect 10 had a strong likelihood of establishing that Cybernet Ventures, which advertises itself as an age verification service (AVS), has vicarious and contributory liability for the conduct of its 300,000 affiliated websites.

According to Perfect 10 Magazine owner Dr. Norman Zadeh, over the last five years, thousands of websites have been created by  scanning images from Perfect 10, Playboy, and virtually every other magazine, We intend to shut down the vast majority of the thousands of 'celebrity porn sites' by stopping the relatively few companies that bill for them and profit from their illegal activities. We pay for our content and can't fairly compete against entities which steal theirs.

By Reuters

The annual US "Big Brother Awards" are presented to government, corporations and private individuals who allegedly have done the most to threaten personal privacy.

Privacy International, a London-based activist organization made up of privacy experts and human rights organizations from dozens of countries, presented the awards at the annual Computers, Freedom & Privacy conference here this week.

The "Worst Government Official" award went to U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft . Privacy International said the top U.S. law enforcement officer is responsible for a massive increase in wiretapping of phones and other electronics and for the imprisonment without charge of as many as 1,200 people in the United States after the Sept. 11 attacks on America.

The "Worst Corporate Invader" honor went to Larry Ellison of Oracle, the leading maker of database software, for his advocacy of a centralized, Oracle-run government database that could be used as a national identification system.

Other awards included "Most Invasive Company," "Most Appalling Project" and "Lifetime Menace." The award is a golden statue depicting a jackboot pressing down on a human head.

The "Most Appalling Project" honor went to the Enhanced Computer Assisted Passenger Pre-Screening (CAPPS) project, a preflight screening of airline passengers set up after of the Sept. 11 attacks. The advocacy group argues this amounts to discriminatory treatment of passengers based on race or certain consumer behaviors.

Privacy International singled out technology developers on the project, including HNC Software, a maker of fraud detection tools; Acxiom, a collector of business and consumer data; and Equifax, a credit information agency.

From www.homecinemachoice.com & Yahoo

Copy-protection technology included on Sony Music artist Celine Dion's new CD: A New Day Has Come is causing European users' computers to crash when inserted into CD-ROM drives, according to an article in The Hollywood Reporter. Sony included Key2Audio CD copy-protection technology developed by its Austrian Sony DACD unit on discs released in Germany and some other European countries. The discs include a warning both on the jewel case and on the actual disc that the CD will not play on a PC or Mac. The CD will probably cause a system to crash, but it will not alter anything, a Sony spokesdroid said. Sony reports that over 10 million CDs containing Key2Audio technology have been released thus far, mostly in Europe.

Apparently the new system stops them playing on some dvd players as well. For instance, the new  Jennifer Lopez CD on the otherwise excellent Arcam FMJ DV27 DVD player skips straight through all the tracks and then stopped. Arcam has confirmed  that it is aware of the issue, but says there is little it can do if CD  manufacturers continue to abuse the Red Book authoring standards in the way  the Jennifer Lopez and Celine Dion discs do.

BMG Entertainment, one of the five major record labels announced recently that it will begin to place copy-protection technology on promotional CDs it releases in the U.S. Promotional CDs are copies of new releases that are generally sent to radio stations, music journalists, retailers and others before they go on sale to the public. BMG did not provide details on which copy-protection technology would be included on the CDs. BMG labels including Arista Records, RCA Music Group and BMG Music Canada will begin distributing the copy-protected discs, which will be labeled to inform recipients of the added security that prevents songs from being "ripped" onto a computer and further distributed over the Internet. Secure digital files of the songs will be included on the CDs allowing playback on PCs, however, as well as the transfer of the album onto a secure portable player. We are confident that these real world, non-commercial trials on promotional CDs will provide valuable feedback as we continue to monitor technological developments, said Pete Jones, president and CEO of BMG Distribution. Ultimately we hope to arrive at a copy management solution that offers consumers the experience the artists create and deserve reward for.