World News

From AVN

Officers of Sweet Entertainment Group (SEG), creators of the Sadoslaves.com videos, have been charged with obscenity in Canada, comprising the manufacture, distribution, and circulation of obscene material as well as the possession of same with intent to distribute.

SEG President Steve Sweet declined to comment to AVN.com due to the pending litigation, but a press statement from SEG's Legal Affairs Department maintained that neither Sweet nor the other three officers were taken into custody. SEG itself was not charged with obscenity.

The Crown is focusing on BDSM material (in this case, three videos featuring Lexa Lords, Naughty Nikki and Mistress Twilight) by alleging that the material in question combines explicit sex with violence or torture or that the material is degrading and dehumanizing according to the press release. The six charges did not specify which segments of the videos were deemed obscene.

Vancouver police raided SEG headquarters on two occasions in 2002, and the case is expected to be in litigation for some time. As the last Canadian obscenity decision was Regina v. Butler in 1992, prior to the proliferation of adult content on the internet, the case against the principals of SEG could be precedent-setting.

From The Globe

The first prosecution in Canada for Internet obscenity has ended in a conviction and a major fine for a Northern Ontario man who created a Web site featuring simulated killings. A jury in Fort Frances decided there was no artistic merit to a series of short films depicting semi-naked women dying in agony after being shot or knifed to death.

Madam Justice Helen Pierce of the Ontario Superior Court imposed a $100,000 fine against Donald Smith, 47, late last week and sentenced him to three years probation. As part of his probation order, he is prohibited from having Internet access. Smith must also revoke any interest in the Web site he operated.

It is the first Internet prosecution in Canada that I'm aware of, Crown counsel Christine Bartlett-Hughes said in an interview yesterday. She was extremely pleased with the size of the fine because it will rob Smith of much of his profit and deter others with similar ideas. The amount of the fine far exceeded what defence counsel Darren Sawchuk said has been the average fine for obscenity prosecutions -- $1,000.

Christine Bartlett-Hughe also said that one of the major issues in the case was whether the combination of nudity and violence depicted in the clips met the Criminal Code definition of obscenity. Bartlett-Hughes's co-counsel, Howard Leibovich, told the jury the films unduly exploited sex and violence and presented a substantial risk of harm to viewers.

According to the evidence, prospective members of Smith's Web site could pay $30 to gain access to a library of short film clips produced by Smith and his brother. The clips typically showed a predator surprising a woman showering or sun-bathing. The victim was knifed or shot at close range in the breast or genitals. Special effects were used to heighten the simulated blood and gore.

Some of the experts who testified at the six-week trial backed the defence theory of artistic merit.One witness -- a professor of film studies -- testified that the videos were relatively tame on the spectrum of violent slasher films that are available nowadays.

Edited from an article in The Guardian

The Israeli board of censors was criticised by both Palestinians and Israelis yesterday for banning a documentary about the battle in Jenin which took place earlier this year. It is the first film banned in Israel for 15 years.

Israel's film ratings board said the documentary distorted presentation of events in the guise of democratic truth which could mislead the public. It said the public may conclude that Israeli soldiers had committed war crimes. A spokeswoman for the board, said the body banned the film because it falsely depicts fictional events as truth. The movie is propaganda that represents a biased view of the group with whom Israel finds itself at war.

The one-sided board judged the documentary, Jenin, Jenin, to be a "one-sided propaganda film". The board is supposed to take decisions on the grounds of decency alone, as it did with the last film it banned - a Japanese production that was deemed to be pornographic.

The documentary director, Mohammed Bakri, an Arab Israeli, protested yesterday: It is a real shame for me because it shows that democracy in Israel is not reserved for all of its citizens. This is a clear political game that the Likud doesn't want people to see the movie. Bakri, one of the one million Palestinians living in Israel with Israeli citizenship, said he would appeal to Israel's supreme court to overturn the ban.

Most Jenin residents, unlike the Palestinian leadership, did not claim there had been a massacre but they did claim there had been war crimes, with Palestinian civilians buried alive by Israeli bulldozers. The film reflects these claims. It also shows the destruction of a large part of the Jenin refugee camp and interviews with residents claiming that there had been war crimes.

From The Register

Honduras has issued a blanket ban on all violent videogames and toys, which is set to come into effect next June - giving retailers in the country a six month grace period to clear stocks of the games from their inventories. Among the banned games named are Resident Evil, Shadowman, Street Fighter, Turok, Perfect Dark, Quake and Doom.

The move comes in reaction to rising levels of violent crime in the country, much of which is blamed on youth gangs known as "maras". Given that Honduras is one of the poorest countries in the western hemisphere, with 53 per cent of the population living under the poverty line, we're really not sure how influential games and toys are in the criminal scene in the country

I sometimes wonder why the US doesn't introduce Sharia law and have done with it. Some Americans clearly have a hankering to impose extreme punishments for issues that in other more tolerant countries are simply matters for privacy.

From Yahoo News

The Supreme Court reopened a homosexual rights issue recently, agreeing to decide a case that asks if it's unconstitutional for states to punish same-sex couples for having sex. Justices will decide if Texas violated the rights of two men convicted, under a rarely used state law, of having intercourse.

The Supreme Court has struggled with how much protection the Constitution offers in the bedroom. The court ruled 5-4 in 1986 that consenting adults have no constitutional right to private homosexual sex, upholding laws that ban sodomy. The latest case gives the court a chance to overturn that decision and strike down sodomy laws in Texas and 12 other states.

I think most Americans would be shocked that there are still laws like this on the books, said the Texas men's lawyer, Ruth Harlow. She said the latest census found more than 600,000 households of same-sex partners in America, including about 43,000 in Texas.

Richard Ackerman, an attorney for the California-based Pro-Family Law Center, said he worried that the case might energize efforts to recognize same-sex marriages. He also said that states should be given leeway to protect the public from the spread of diseases like AIDS.

The court will consider: Is it an unconstitutional invasion of privacy for couples to be prosecuted for what they do in their own homes? Is it unconstitutional for states to treat gays and lesbians differently by punishing them for having sex while allowing heterosexual couples to engage in the same acts without penalties?

Sodomy is considered abnormal sex, and in some states that's defined as anal and oral sex. Nine states ban consensual sodomy for everyone: Alabama, Florida, Idaho, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, Utah and Virginia. In addition, Texas, Kansas, Missouri and Oklahoma punish only homosexual sodomy.

States argue that the laws are intended to preserve public morals. They are rarely enforced. We don't believe there's any fundamental right to engage in sexual conduct of this kind. There's a long-standing shared cultural belief that the conduct is wrong, William Delmore III, an assistant district attorney in Texas, said.

John Geddes Lawrence and Tyron Garner were arrested in 1998 in Lawrence's apartment, jailed overnight and later fined under Texas' Homosexual Conduct Law, which classifies anal or oral sex between two men or two women as deviate sexual intercourse.

The Supreme Court was told the convictions would prevent the men from getting certain jobs, and would in some states require them to register as sex offenders. They were arrested after police responded to a false report of an armed intruder in Lawrence's apartment, called in by an acquaintance of the men. Police entered the unlocked apartment and found the men having sex. Lawrence and Garner were fined $200 after pleading no contest to misdemeanor charges.

Over the past decade, state courts have blocked sodomy laws in Arkansas, Georgia, Kentucky, Montana, and Tennessee. A Louisiana appeals court recently upheld that state's 197-year-old law banning all oral and anal sex.

The Supreme Court's 1986 decision, Bowers v. Hardwick, involved a challenge of Georgia's law, which carried a maximum penalty of 20 years in prison for anyone who engaged in sodomy.

From AVN

Two Finnish cable channels have been served notice to stop airing free pornography to late-night audiences.

If they want that, they can get it on the pay-per-view channels, said Markku Tuomola Managing Director of Helsinki Television, which regulates broadcasts. He acknowledged that the public uproar to keep the porn on equaled the one to take it off, but the ones that do not like the shows are most active.

While Finland is a more sexually-permissive society, nevertheless Finn officials noted that 245,000 households with children needed to be protected. Most of the broadcasts aired after 11 pm, angering the host of Pornostara: So the complaints must come from one or two bad parents who are not looking after their children well enough, because they should be in bed by the time my show goes on the air, said Sami Hernesaho

At first impression I feel this may be a reasonably sensible route to go.

President Bush took a day off from war mongering on Wednesday and signed a bill intended to make it safer for children to cruise around the Internet. An Internet domain free of adult material has been set up. Web sites with an address such as www.example.kids.us would have to certify they are free of sexually explicit material, hate speech, violence or other content not suitable for children younger than 13.

It will function much like the children's section of the library, where parents feel comfortable allowing their children to browse, Bush said.

Links to outside Web sites would be banned, and features such as instant messaging and chat rooms would not be allowed unless they could be certified as safe.

Lawmakers in Congress had hoped to authorize simpler addresses such as www.example.kids, but backed off after witnesses said it would be difficult to require the international body that controls domain-name policy to set up a .kids domain alongside the likes of .com and .org.

Bowing to a threatened retail boycott, New York-based Acclaim Entertainment on Monday said its video game BMX
XXX will not contain topless nudity in the version to be released for Sony's PlayStation 2 later this month. Wal-Mart Stores and Toys R Us wereamong a group of big retailers that said they would not carry the game because it included "strippers, pimps and raunchy language." The PS2 edits were "done with good taste and in humor," such as the decision to place the title "BMX XXX" in black lettering over the tops of the previously nude women, Acclaim CEO Gregory Fischbach told Reuters. Versions of the game for Microsoft's Xbox and Nintendo's GameCube will not be edited.

From The Irish Times

Detailed personal data on every Irish citizen's phone and mobile calls, faxes, and e-mail and Internet usage will be retained for up to four years under a new Department of Justice Bill.

The Bill, which is being drafted and which the Minister McDowell, hopes to implement by next spring, requires that personal electronic data be retained for two to four years. At present, data may only be retained for a short period, exclusively for billing purposes - generally, three to six months - and then must be destroyed.

We have serious concerns that this  is treating everybody as a potential suspect in a crime, said Malachy Murphy, e-rights convener with the Irish Council for Civil Liberties. This would also appear to go against the European Convention on Human Rights, which has explicit protections for citizen privacy.

Data produced by digital networks can be highly revealing, while 3G mobile phone networks, with phones which regularly broadcast their location back to the network, will provide information on where a person is standing to within a few metres. The legislation could also demand that Internet service providers store information on all the individual web pages a subscriber has visited over four years.

It is understood that Department officials failed to consult any organisation other than the Garda Síochána in preparing legislation which would in effect overturn existing EU data protection directives. The Bill would also run counter to data protection provisions within the State's E-Commerce Act 2000 - considered essential for creating a supportive e-commerce environment where businesses and consumers can trust how their private information is stored and handled.

Officials within the Department of Justice are understood to be seeking a legal regime similar to that mandated by Britain's controversial Regulation of Investigatory Powers (RIP) Act.

In Britain, aspects of RIP are being rewritten after strong opposition to the initial Act from the House of Lords, the business community, privacy advocacy groups and the British media. The British government had to withdraw additional legislation dealing with the same areas of data retention as the Irish Bill after this provoked widespread outrage and anger.

The RIP Act was incredibly controversial when passed, but that was nothing compared to the opposition to data retention, said Ian Brown, director of British policy for the Foundation for Information Policy Research (FIPR). Creating a huge database that is lying there for years is a huge invitation for government misuse, much more for hackers, blackmailers, criminals and others. Ian Brown said Britain and the Republic have been under pressure from American surveillance agencies such as the CIA and FBI to loosen protections on data privacy.

The Department of Justice did not respond to questions about the Bill's details.

A French government commission looking into broadcasting standards on Thursday recommended a ban on the display of violent or pornographic images before a 10.30pm watershed, and fines for channels that contravene.

The commission, which was chaired by philosopher Blandine Kriegel, found that there was a direct link between the broadcast of violent scenes and the behaviour of young people. The short-term emotional effects of exposure to televised violence are reactions of fear, anxiety and distress. In the long term frequent exposure to scenes of violence desensitises the spectator who grows accustomed to violence.

On pornography, the report said that the visual representation in a brutal or repeated fashion of pornographic scenes at too young an age can create an emotion capable of influencing the normal development of the brain and leaving a lasting imprint on a person's conception of sexuality. Receiving a crude and brutal image in the brain of a child... has as much effect as sexual abuse.

Jean-Jacques Aillagon, the culture minister in France's centre-right government who set up the Kriegel commission, said its report was welcome but we must not make television a scapegoat for all the ills of society. Kriegel added: Banning all representations of violence would be absurd. What we are doing is rejecting a delight in violence.

The report said that a 1989 decree banning television violence between 6.30am and 10.30pm should be properly enforced, and that a dispensation that allows channels to show four films a year normally prohibited to under-12s before 10.30pm should be removed.

Resisting pressure from conservatives for an outright ban on televised pornography, the commission instead said tighter controls such as a double-encryption system should be made general, and that viewers should have to ask explicitly for a pornographic channel when they subscribe.

It called for a re-organisation of the country's classification system, noting that France has much more liberal standards than most of its neighbours. Of 102 films shown in cinemas between 1997 and 2000, 62 were granted general release certificates in France, as opposed to only 29 in Britain and 16 in Germany, and the category was a major factor in the time the films were later shown on television.

The powers of the broadcast watchdog, the Higher Audiovisual Council (CSA), should also be enhanced so that it can monitor the new rules and impose financial penalties when they are flouted, the report concluded.

The Malaysian Film Censorship Board banned another 31 film productions from public screening in September this year. 23 movies, several episodes of a popular television series, five documentaries and an advertisement. They are said to contain elements not suitable for public viewing, contrary to the provisions under the Film Censorship Act 2002.

The banned English movies are Stolen Summer, The Sweetest Thing, Tales from the Crypt: Demon Knight, Saturday Night Fever, Sculpted Buns, Hips and Thighs, Pet Sematary, The Mist of Avalon, The Score, Spider's Web, The Warriors, China Town, The Guru, Vampires: Los Muertos and Noah's Ark.

Also banned are television series The Geena Davis Show (Yr 1) Ep. 2, and eight episodes of Xena - Warrior Princess. Banned Chinese movies are Underground Express, The Reincarnation of Golden Lotus and The Era of Vampires, while the Korean movies are The Uprising, Volcano High School and Greenfish. Other banned movies are Anak Pontianak (Malay), Plus 2 Tingkatan Enam (Tamil) and Badai Laut Selatan Ep. 1-6 (Indonesian). The banned documentaries are Not So Tough Aerobics, Tough Aerobic Mix, Standing Legs Firm Parts, WWE Divas Presentation (English), Taiwan Fon Yue Tan Mit (Mandarin), while the sole advertisement is Hook On (English).

It is an offence to possess, distribute, sell, rent and screen the prohibited productions and offenders risk a fine of between RM5,000 and RM30,000 and/or a jail term of up to three years, or both, upon conviction. Those found guilty of promoting banned productions risk being fined between RM1,000 and RM10,000.

Since when are sex toys illegal?

A Texas woman who sells sex toys has been charged with felony obscenity after White Oak police found some of her wares in her car during a traffic stop

The arrest report describes the 17 items as "obscene materials and obscene devices," but Police Chief Nutter Smith said the items were mostly lotions and objects defined in a dictionary as having the shape and often the appearance of the male genitalia, used in sexual stimulation.

How illegal is that? Prosecutors will have to decide when White Oak investigators forward their findings to the district attorney's office sometime in the next week, Smith said.

Kathleen Grubbs, a distributor for Slumber Parties Inc., calls the charge, which carries a maximum penalty of two years in jail, "kind of ridiculous."

State law appears a little less forgiving: It's illegal to "wholesale promote" obscene materials or devices. Texas statute says an obscene device is a simulated sexual organ or an item designed or marketed as useful primarily for the stimulation of human genital organs. The law allows investigators to  assume that anyone with six or more of the items is intending to promote them.