Sex.com isn’t the only bizarre porny business story on my radar; Joe Francis, the founder and director of the Girls Gone Wild video series is looking like another Hiassen character on the loose; he’s robbed at gunpoint and forced to perform in a bend-over-boyfriend extortion video, has been arrested on charges of racketeering and drugs, and the LA Times profile in which he publicly sexually humiliated the female journalist on the story signifigantly raised his douchebag quotient (DQ). Now his guilty plea in using underage girls (gone wild with lawyers, natch) got him a tidy little sentence today. Snip:
“The founder of the “Girls Gone Wild” video empire was sentenced to community service Wednesday for his company’s guilty plea to federal charges of failing to monitor the ages of the women in its videos.
The company, Mantra Films Inc., also agreed to pay $1.6 million in fines for using drunken 17-year-olds in videos it filmed on Panama City Beach during spring break and failing to properly label its DVDs and videos as required by federal law.” Link.
And I caught this disturbing item on Fleshbot yesterday: much like the post I did on how McCain’s new law would extend obscenity laws to blogs (and ISP’s and hosting providers), the Techweb Blog has an excellent post on the new provisions Attorney General Alberto Gonzales wants to make into law requiring ‘adult’ sites to label themselves. Which is sensible on the cover, but peek inside and the definition of “sexually explicit” is scary-vague, and like COPA, it leaves plenty of room for non-US sites to do whatever they want. Of course, the line is that it’s “for the children”. They’ve even included “language sought by the administration that would impose fines of $50,000 to $300,000 for Internet Service Providers or others who do not report users who are downloading or accessing child pornography.” Link.
Both McCain and Gonzales’ laws want to go after hosts and internet service providers, under vague languages. Which, in online terms, is an effective means of making you disappear. Whacked!
