US Sex Sells News

The new OUYA Android-powered gaming console due out this June could be the first system that allows porn.

Engadget reported that company CEO Julie Uhrman wants a quick approval process for games that will screen for intellectual property infringement, malware and excessive pornography.

But according to Gaming Blend, that leaves a loophole for developers to create moderate porn --- a first for the gaming world:

This is probably the first game console where the approval process allows for moderate porn. Heck, it's the first time I've heard of an approval process for a game console that even says porn is okay so long as it isn't excessive.

Harry Reems was the stage name of one of the most active and popular pornographic actors of the 1970s and star of the 1972 cult classic, Deep Throat. He died on March 19, 2013 at the age of 65 from pancreatic cancer.

Reems's famous appearance in Deep Throat led to his arrest by FBI agents in New York City in July 1974, and indictment in June 1975 on federal charges of conspiracy to distribute obscenity across state lines.He was convicted in April 1976 with 11 other individuals and four corporations. His conviction was overturned on appeal in April 1977, because his activities in making the film occurred before a U.S. Supreme Court ruling on obscenity in 1973 (Miller v. California), and Reems was granted a new trial. The charges against Reems were dropped in August. Reems's defense claimed that he was the first American actor to be prosecuted by the federal government merely for appearing in a film, and he received considerable support from established Hollywood and New York celebrities during his trial.

Here's a small selection from his 189 appearances listed on iafd.com

Amazing Dr. Jekyll	1975
Butterflies	1974
College Girls	1976
Deep Throat	1972
Deep Throat 2	1986
Deep Throat 2	1974
Devil in Miss Jones 1	1973
Forced Entry	1974
Grafenberg Spot	1985
Loose Ends	1985
Meatball	1972
Memories Within Miss Aggie	1974
Sex Wish	1976
Sometime Sweet Susan	1974

Universal Studios has completed a settlement with the makers of Fifty Shades of Grey: A XXX Adaptation .

According to a court filing, Smash Pictures will make a payment of a confidential sum to payoff the lawsuit and will also consent to a permanent injunction that will prohibit the distribution of the XXX Adaptation.

Smash Pictures and James Lane (aka Jim Powers) thought the story was a natural adult movie, so they made one. Smash exec Stuart Wall told a newspaper, Since they are going to make a mainstream [film] of the books too, dabbling in the adult world, we're choosing to go with a XXX adaption which will stay very true to the book and its S&M-themed romance.

Slapping a parody tag onto the title wasn't enough to keep Universal from protecting its rights. Along with Fifty Shades Ltd., the copyright owner of the original material, a lawsuit was filed in November that called the XXX Adaptation a willful attempt to capitalize on the reputation of the book.

For the first time, a massive data set of 10,000 porn stars has been extracted from the world's largest database of adult films and performers. I've spent the last six months analyzing it to discover the truth about what the average performer looks like, what they do on film, and how their role has evolved over the last forty years.

...Read the full article

Meet the man trying to bust porn's greatest myths

See article from telegraph.co.uk

John Millward's latest research project, Deep Inside: A Study of 10,000 Porn Stars and Their Careers, has been compiled using information from the world's largest database of adult films and performers, over the past six months. He talks to Dr Brooke Magnanti about his findings and motivations.

...Read the full article

Girls Gone Wild , a US softcore porn company that specialises in videos featuring girls partying on Spring Break, has filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection citing debts of $16 million.

The L.A. company said in a statement that it was seeking reorganisation and that the filing would not affect any of domestic or international operations of Girls Gone Wild.

The company was put into difficulty when creator Joe Francis was last year ordered to pay Wynn $40 million in damages for defamation and emotional distress. A Los Angeles jury found that Francis had falsely claimed that Wynn threatened his life over a gambling debt.

The Anti-porn campaigners of the AIDS Healthcare Foundation have announced that Assemblymember Isadore Hall III hasintroduced Assembly Bill (AB) 332, which would change the California's Labor Code to require that adult movie actors use engineering and work practice controls when performing sexual acts in adult movies.

Specifically, the bill would create a new Section:

An employer shall maintain engineering and work practice controls sufficient to protect employees from exposure to blood and any potentially infectious materials. Engineering and work practice controls shall include, but are not limited to, the following:

Provision of and required use of condoms and other protective barriers whenever acts of vaginal or anal intercourse are filmed.

Also under the definitions section of the bill, the diseases which the protective barriers are to be effective against include not only HIV/AIDS, gonorrhea, syphilis, chlamydia, [and] hepatitis, but also genital human papillomavirus infection, and genital herpes, both of which can be transmitted by any bare-skin contact between an infected person and a non-infected person. Hence, it would appear that the only way to prevent transmission of all of the listed diseases would be for performers to attempt to have sex while wearing full-body hazardous material ( hazmat ) suits.

Last November, Universal Studios had a trademark infringement lawsuit against Smash. Smash had produced the Fifty Shades of Grey: A XXX Adaptation of which had caused a lot of problems for Universal studios. The said film would cause problems with the actual film adaptation of Fifty Shades. Universal's legal claim stated:

Plaintiffs ask this Court to enjoin the marketing, sale, and distribution of Defendants' infringing adaptation of the Fifty Shades Trilogy, a quickly and cheaply produced pornographic work that is likely to cause Plaintiffs irreparable harm by poisoning public perception of the Fifty Shades Trilogy and the forthcoming Universal films.

Defendants' crude pornographic portrayal of the erotic elements central to the Fifty Shades trilogy fails to capture the unique and delicate balance of provocative sex, emotional romance, and self-deprecating humor that has resulted in a worldwide literary phenomenon. For consumers who view the 'XXX Adaptation' in lieu of reading the books or watching the 'Fifty Shades' films, or for those who simply learn of the 'Fifty Shades' trilogy's existence in a hardcore porn format, the reputational damage to these already-controversial erotic novels and films is immeasurable and irreparable.

With the bidding war continuing, the legal finances are said to border on $3 million and more. Fans of the books better not give more value to Smash's' crude film adaptation and wait for Universal Studios to make sense out of the book.

LodgeNet, a major distributor of adult entertainment through its hotel cable TV network, has filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection..

US nutter campaigners will be well pleased, they have been campaigning against hotel room porn for quite a while. Unfortunately for them it probably just means that people are downloading or bringing their own porn.

LodgeNet said that fewer hotels used its services --- 1.5 million currently, down from two million in 2009 --- and guests ordered fewer pay-per-view movies. For years LodgeNet has been under threats posed by laptops, streaming Internet TV and portable devices. But prior to the boom of portable electronics, the hotel room was a virtual monopoly for cable TV suppliers. One of its most lucrative areas is porn. Analysts back in 2011 speculated that about half of the company's revenue came from adult entertainment.

Fred J. Lincoln, legendary director of over 400 features including Maneaters , The Goddaughter 1-4 , Lingerie Busters and the notorious A Formal Faucett , a send-up of then-famous actress Farrah Fawcett, died last night at the age of either 74 or 76, depending on which birthdate one believes.

While the cause has not been officially determined, friends of Fred's noted that he had recently been suffering from emphysema and heart disease, having survived several previous heart attacks.

Fred had a long and storied history in adult, from the late 1960s in New York City where he was the talent booker for live sex and S&M shows for the Times Square theater Show World, to his pivotal role as the villain Weasel Podowski in Wes Craven's horror classic Last House on the Left (1972), to his brief ownership to the famous New York swing club Plato's Retreat, to his first adult feature, Souperman , for VCA in 1976.

Lincoln worked for just about every adult production company in existence at the time, including some fetish-oriented fare like the Dresden Diary and Defiance series for Bizarre Video, and often he was the first director to work with some now-famous actors.

Fetish porn producer and distributor, Ira Isaacs, has been sentenced to 48 months in federal prison and fined $11,000 at federal court in Los Angeles. After serving his sentence, Isaacs will be subject to three years of supervised release.

Isaacs attorney Roger Jon Diamond indicated that his client will appeal the ruling to the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.

Isaacs was found guilty in April 2012 on five counts of violating federal obscenity laws over the distribution of Mako's First Time Scat, Hollywood Scat Amateurs #7, Hollywood Scat Amateurs #10 and Japanese Doggie 3 Way.

It was the third obscenity trial for the distributor and producer, who all along contended that the works he had been charged with have artistic value and can't be deemed obscene. The first two ended with mistrials.

Update: Appealing

29th January 2013. See  article from  xbiz.com

The attorney representing Ira Isaacs has filed an appeal on behalf of the fetish filmmaker and distributor with the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.

Attorney Roger Jon Diamond filed court papers with the 9th Circuit claiming that Isaacs is entitled to an appeal to have his convictions and sentencing tossed because the jury in his case was improperly instructed, his own testimony was restricted and thus a violation of due process, and because he faced double jeopardy after two earlier trials on the same offenses ended with mistrials.

Two major US porn producers have taken legal action to try to overturn a law requiring porn actors in Los Angeles County to wear condoms.

Vivid Entertainment and Califa Productions say the measure violates the guarantee of free speech in the US constitution's First Amendment.

Condom usage is a big issue to porn producers as a sizeable proportion of viewers choose not to buy porn withy condoms.

Steven Hirsch, founder of the Vivid Entertainment, told AFP:

Overturning this law is something I feel very passionate about.

I believe the industry's current testing system works well.

The measure was pushed for by the anti-porn nutter group Aids Healthcare Foundation (AHF), which said claimed it would shield actors from HIV, even though the current regime extensive testing has done a remarkably good job at keeping the problem at bay.

Adult production companies have threatened to move out of California because of the requirement, but there are other issues. A 1988 ruling by the California Supreme Court prevented producers from being prosecuted under anti-prostitution laws, and only one other state - New Hampshire - has a similar ruling.

The porn industry has been left out of the US system designed to counter file sharing.

US broadband companies will soon be sending out warning letters when their customers are detected by file sharing surveillance.

The porn industry wasn't approached about participating in Copyright Alert System, said Joanne Cachapero, communications director of the Free Speech Coalition, representing the US adult trade. CAS not inviting her industry was a significant oversight she said.

U S porn producers, writers and performers are set to increase production in Britain due to a crisis in Los Angeles where councillors ruled that all porn stars must wear condoms in sex scenes.

Studios are worried that the sight of condoms in adult films will dramatically hit the fantasy appeal of the material. The move has prompted porn chiefs and mainstream stars to threaten to relocate to the UK and elsewhere. A source in Los Angeles revealed:

Talent is leaving town as they are worried that this could be the end of the porn business. Britain and other territories have great porn set ups ready to go, and the cash to offer talent good wages. They will benefit from this and will see bigger demand for their product. And there are no rules on condoms in the UK. At the moment Britain has high production values, but focuses more on small web stories.

Diane Duke, chief executive of the Free Speech Coalition, the trade association for the US porn industry, said:

The government can't compel an industry to create a product for which there is no demand. And that's what would be happening here in Los Angeles, and it just doesn't make sense.