Job Title: Chief Pornographic Identification Officer
Work Location: Beijing
Compensation: 200,000 RMB (US$32,300) yearly
Job Description: Rapid Determination of Adult Sites

Requirements:
1)   Must be familiar with the standard of adult content from around the world
2)   Must be familiar with China’s law standards regarding adult content, familiar with documented regulations
3)   Must be familiar with the standards for adult content on China’s internet and it’s service providers
4)   Regardless of gender, must be college graduate from 25-35 years old
5)   Must have a strong sense of responsibility and work well in a team

The security company who put this job advert out, Anquan Lianmeng (League of Security) said that they received thousands of applications within two days of posting. Many of which had come in from outside of the country. It’s no surprise considering the description.

Mr. Holder refuses to enforce existing federal obscenity laws against hardcore adult pornography, despite the fact that these laws have been upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court and effectively enforced by previous attorneys general.

The world’s most popular social networking site has become a top place to trade pornography, which we have reported on numerous occasions. According to reports, even child pornography is regularly shared on Facebook and women and children are trafficked on the site.

Twitter has become the new ‘micro-porn’ service with tens of thousands of porn tweets an hour. Of course, there is no way to keep this from children.

This staple of the supermarket checkout line may be as pornographic as Playboy magazine, but without the pictures.

This publication has steadily declined from a somewhat inspirational women’s magazine to a verbally pornographic “how-to” sex guide, further desensitizing young women and girls to the pornified culture around them.

For years producers of porn movies in Japan have bemoaned the lack of protection their content has received in Taiwan.

In 2010 things came to a head. The leading producers of the 20,000+ adult movies released in Japan each year warned Taiwan that if it didn’t get tough on pirates selling their content on websites and even airing it on TV, legal action would follow.

Taiwan's prosecutors said Wednesday that Taiwanese firms that use Japanese-made pornographic films to make profits online have not violated Japanese producers' copyrights.

The Taipei District Court's Prosecutors Office therefore announced it will not press charges against Elta Technologies Co. Ltd, and 10 other Taiwanese firms that the Japanese studios accused of violating their copyrights.

In a sign of how desperate they had become, the Japanese companies added that if they had no remedy under copyright law, they would sue the pirates for spreading obscene material and damaging the health of Taiwan’s children.

As crazy as it sounds this approach had the potential to work. While authorities have done nothing to protect copyrights of adult material, they do arrest people for distributing obscene material.

[T]he adult producer’s claims that the pirates were spreading obscene material and damaging children didn’t gain any ground either. The prosecutors decided that since the pirate sites displayed warnings and blocked minors from accessing their websites then there was no case to answer there either.

On information and belief, as much as 89% of the content of the allegedly copyrighted materials grew out of a multi-part series of fan fiction called Masters of the Universe based on Stephenie Myer's Twilight novels. On information and belief, this content was published online between 2009 and 2011 in various venues, including fanfiction.net and the person website of Erika Leonard. On information and belief, much or all of this material was placed in the public domain.

Moreover, their unsupported assertion that “as much as 89% of the allegedly copyrighted material is derived from previously published, public domain fan fiction based on Stephanie Myers’ Twilight novels” is both deliberately misleading and legally flawed. Defendants suggest that the Fifty Shades Trilogy is “derived from” works by authors other than Erika Mitchell. However, Defendants are in fact referring to an earlier version of the same story written by Ms. Mitchell, which they in their own improper deposition notice identified as “Master of the Universe.” ..... Defendants do not and cannot provide any legal authority for the proposition that an earlier version of Ms. Mitchell’s work is now in the “public domain.” They can hardly defend their infringement of Plaintiffs’ copyrights in the Fifty Shades Trilogy by claiming that it is substantially similar to Ms. Mitchell’s own earlier work.

It's important to note that this is not a law as such, but a report, as Engström explains:

This means that it does not automatically become law even if it is adopted, but is just a way for the European parliament to express its opinion.

But the purpose of these own initiative reports are to serve as the basis for the Commission when it decides to present legislative proposals to the parliament. If this own initiative report is adopted by the parliament, it will strengthen the Commission's position if and when it wants to propose various"self-regulation" schemes in the future.

Discussions have been taking place on Twitter around the hashtag #mepblock (disclosure: I've been part of these), and an e-petition has been created, calling on European politicians to drop their censorship and to listen to their constituents as they are supposed to, instead of just ignoring them. There are still a few days before the vote next week, so there's plenty of time for further developments in what looks like becoming an increasingly heated debate.

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"At the moment, we are looking at the best technical ways to achieve this," an advisor to Jonasson told the Mail. "But surely if we can send a man to the moon, we must be able to tackle porn on the internet."

Finally, the Court is troubled by many aspects of this “swarm joinder” model for copyright litigation. Courts across the country have observed that the companies involved in this type of litigation do not seem interested in actually litigating their copyright claims. Rather, they appear to be using the federal courts only to obtain identifying information for the ISP owners and then attempting to negotiate a quick settlement.... In finding joinder improper in a similar action, one court observed:

The federal courts are not cogs in plaintiff’s copyright enforcement business model. The Court will not idly watch what is essentially an extortion scheme, for a case that plaintiff has no intention of bringing to trial. By requiring Malibu to file separate lawsuits for each of the Doe Defendants, Malibu will have to expend additional resources to obtain a nuisance-value settlement—making this type of litigation less profitable. If Malibu desires to vindicate its copyright rights, it must do it the old-fashioned way and earn it....

.... The Court fully agrees with the concerns expressed by these other judges and finds that this is yet another basis for requiring that Plaintiff litigate its copyright claim against each John Doe Defendant individually.

If the plan is backed by manufacturers, it would mean that owners of every brand new computer would be asked if there are children in the household when they are first turned on. If the user answers positively, they will be prompted to adjust their internet filters accordingly.

If parents repeatedly click OK to get through the process more quickly, the computer would automatically block access by any user to sites containing pornography and self-harm. Internet service providers (ISPs) would also be required to verify the age of the person setting the controls, so that a child can't do it.

Next up, if watching everyone I've ever met handle iTune's EULA process is any indication, you can expect roughly one-billion percent of internet users in the UK to fall into the "clicked like hell through the process" category. This would automatically turn the filters on to whatever David Cameron thinks is the appropriate level. I imagine frustrated adults trying like hell to search the internet for the answer to the age old question "Why the hell is everyone freaking out about Kate Middleton having boobs?" would then try to reset the filters, but would then click through them quickly again, resulting in only more frustration.
 

Frankly, it's also fun to imagine how this software would determine exactly what is too "quick" of a click-through, given that different people read at different speeds.

Finally, it would be interesting to hear how exactly his plan to have ISPs verify the age of the people they're likely talking to on the phone would work. We've noted previously how difficult and riddled with potential danger age verification of this nature can be, so how exactly is Cameron going to accomplish this? Unless he plans on forcing ISPs to do site visits or meet with child protection services for every account, they're still going to have to talk to their customers over the phone. Now, this may come as a shock to Cameron, but kids occasionally lie.

In the end, this is yet another move by government to wrestle away a free and open internet. Unlike some other measures, Cameron may actually believe his "for the children" trope, but the best protection of children comes from involved parents. Trying to treat the symptom rather than the problem not only won't work, but it opens the door for some truly bad inadvertent outcomes.

To the contrary, and as argued above, the “purpose” of the discovery is entirely proper: to obtain information identifying unknown Doe Defendants infringing Plaintiffs’ copyrights “in order to consider whether to name and serve them as defendants.”

If you had asked us two years or two months or two days ago if we thought that there would be a time in the near future when Securities and Exchange employees would not be regularly reprimanded for watching porn on their work-issued computers for 98 percent of the workday, we would have said absolutely not. No judgment, but in our professional opinion, people do not go from, among other things:

* Receiving “over 16,000 access denials for Internet websites classified by the Commission’s Internet filter as either “Sex” or “Pornography” in a one-month period”

* Accessing “Internet pornography and downloading pornographic images to his SEC computer during work hours so frequently that, on some days, he spent eight hours accessing Internet pornography…downloading so much pornography to his government computer that he exhausted the available space on the computer hard drive and downloaded pornography to CDs or DVDs that he accumulated in boxes in his office.”

…to living a porn-free existence at l’office.

Several Securities and Exchange Commission staffers responsible for monitoring the markets and exchanges broadly misused computer equipment to download music and failed to properly safeguard sensitive information, a report has found.

The report also found that the staffers failed to protect their computers and devices from hackers, even as they were urging exchanges and clearing agencies to do just that.

Although no breaches occurred, the staffers left sensitive stock exchange data exposed to potential cyber attacks because they failed to encrypt the devices or even install basic virus protection programs.

The report says the staff may have brought the unprotected laptops to a Black Hat convention where hacking experts discuss the latest trends. They also used them to tap into public wireless networks and brought the devices along with them during exchange inspections.

[T]he full report... details an even broader array of problems, from misleading the SEC about the office's need to buy Apple Inc products, to cases in which staffers took iPads and laptops home and used them primarily for pursuits such as personal banking, surfing the Web and downloading music and movies.

Rymer found that the office did not have any planning or oversight into its purchases of computer equipment. From 2006 through 2010, the office got permission to spend $1.8 million on technology devices.

The other issue is whether this nominal climbdown was part of the plan all along. After all, it's a standard tactic to make totally outrageous initial demands so that anything less seems almost reasonable by comparison. Or perhaps this was Plan B: try to push through ISP filtering as Plan A, and if that fails, drop back to "limited" censorship.

Since it seems unlikely that those who fought against the general censorship plans will be able to muster much support for the idea of not blocking child abuse sites, the key question now is whether it will be possible to stop this approach turning into precisely the kind of ISP filtering that the Australian government claims to have abandoned.

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Q: When its as easy as typing "the name of the movie" + torrent into google and getting at least a dozen sites that have the torrent. How do you deal with piracy of your videos?

PA: Good question!! We are investing heavily in live and social aspects of our products and then integrating them together. I.e. in the future you will join divinebitches.com, and that gets you the material, but also live shows with models, interactivity on their blogs, etc.

“News that the boy accused of killing Jessica Ridgeway is addicted to pornography will come as no surprise to law enforcement agents with experience in sexual crimes,” says Patrick A. Trueman, president of Morality in Media and former chief of the U. S. Department of Justice Child Exploitation and Obscenity Section in Washington, D.C.

“Pornography consumption causes addiction and leads many, children included, to sexual violence. It’s high time the U.S. government took the issue of pornography seriously again and began vigorously prosecuting the major producers and distributors of hardcore pornography.”

“We do not know and may never know exactly how much influence pornography played in these two crimes, but sexual crimes by minors do not happen in a vacuum; porn is almost always a significant contributing factor,” Trueman said.

“When the U.S. Department of Justice gave up enforcing federal pornography laws, it gave up on our children. Now addiction, sexual experimentation mirroring scenes from violent porn videos, as well as sexual violence are all too common among children. Child-on-child sexual crimes, once unheard of, are also on the rise. The porn industry is directly responsible for these trends and the harm to our nation’s children. But law enforcement officials, such as U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder, who refuse to enforce anti-pornography laws, designed to protect children and society from sexual predators, bear much responsibility also,” he continued.

The latest juvenile crime data from the Bureau of Justice Statistics indicates that arrests of juvenile sex offenders declined by about 25% from 2000 through 2009. That would mesh with a decline in child sex abuse committed by adults, as well as a decline in the overall juvenile crime rate.
But data from New York City, Florida and elsewhere indicates that the prevalence of child-on-child sex hasn't dropped noticeably.

Eighty-eight percent of homemade pornography, including videos and still images, finds its way onto porn sites, often without the owners’ knowledge, a new study from Britain’s Internet Watch Foundation (IWF) has found.

The study analyzed more than 12,000 sexually explicit images uploaded by young people and found that the great majority of images had been stolen and published to what the organization calls, “parasite” websites.

The trademark lawsuit in U.S. District Court in Manhattan said the sale of hardcore and exploitive pornographic DVDs and related goods is tarnishing Ben & Jerry's Homemade Inc.'s name by creating an association with pornography. It said the claims arise from the distribution and sale of a series of DVDs containing "exploitative, hardcore pornographic films" featuring titles and themes based on "well-known and iconic" Ben & Jerry's ice cream flavors as well as packaging that contains key company features such as a grazing cow, green grass and large white puffy clouds.

It identified some of the X-rated names similar to its own as "Boston Cream Thigh," "New York Fat & Chunky" and "Peanut Butter D-Cup." Ben & Jerry's has ice cream flavors titled: "Boston Cream Pie," "New York Super Fudge Chunk" and "Peanut Butter Cup."

[E]ven if every single U.S. producer is shut down, wouldn't foreign sites happily take up the slack? It's not like Americans have some great irreproducible national skills in smut-making, or like it takes a $100 million Hollywood budget to make a porn movie. Foreign porn will doubtless be quite an adequate substitute for the U.S. market. Plus the foreign distributors might even be able to make and distribute copies of the existing U.S.-produced stock — I doubt that the imprisoned American copyright owners will be suing them for infringement (unless the U.S. government seizes the copyrights, becomes the world's #1 pornography owner, starts trying to enforce the copyrights against overseas distributors, and gets foreign courts to honor those copyrights, which is far from certain and likely far from cheap).

The U.S. spends who knows how many prosecutorial and technical resources going after U.S. pornographers. A bunch of them get imprisoned. U.S. consumers keep using the same amount of porn as before.

Nor do I think that the crackdown will somehow subtly affect consumers’ attitudes about the morality of porn — it seems highly unlikely that potential porn consumers will decide to stop getting it because they hear that some porn producers are being prosecuted.

The government gets understandably outraged by the “foreign smut loophole.” “Given all the millions that we’ve invested in going after the domestic porn industry, how can we tolerate all our work being undone by foreign filth-peddlers?,” pornography prosecutors and their political allies would ask. So they unveil the solution, in fact pretty much the only solution that will work: Nationwide filtering.

It’s true: Going after cyberporn isn’t really that tough — if you require every service provider in the nation to block access to all sites that are on a constantly updated government-run “Forbidden Off-Shore Site” list. Of course, there couldn’t be any trials applying community standards and the like before a site is added to the list; that would take far too long. The government would have to be able to just order a site instantly blocked, without any hearing with an opportunity for the other side to respond, since even a quick response would take up too much time, and would let the porn sites just move from location to location every several weeks.

Finally, the government can go after the users: Set up “honeypot” sites (seriously, that would be the technically correct name for them) that would look like normal offshore pornography sites. Draw people in to buy the stuff. Figure out who the buyers are. To do that, you'd also have to ban any anonymizer Web sites that might be used to hide such transactions, by setting up some sort of mandatory filtering such as what I described in option (2).

Then arrest the pornography downloaders and prosecute them for receiving obscene material over the Internet, in violation of 18 U.S.C. § 1462; see, e.g.,United States v. Whorley (4th Cir. 2008) (holding that such enforcement is constitutional, and quite plausibly so holding, given the United States v. Orito Supreme Court case).

How can the government's policy possibly achieve its stated goals, without creating an unprecedentedly intrusive censorship machinery, one that's far, far beyond what any mainstream political figures are talking about right now?

Ms. Hansen demanded that Ms. Barker pay money to settle the lawsuit or she would be identified publicly as having downloaded pornography and would be subject to hundreds of thousands of dollars as a judgment if the suit went forward because there were multiple downloads. Numerous individuals on the Internet report receiving a phone call from the same telephone number as that provided by Ms. Hansen to Ms. Barker with a demand that they pay money to settle a lawsuit against them.

Ms. Barker refused to pay any money because she did not know what BitTorrent was and had never downloaded any pornography from the Internet. On information and belief, many other members of the class have paid sums of money in settlement with the pornography purveyors even though they had never downloaded any pornography from the Internet, and certainly had never unlawfully downloaded any pornography from the Internet.

Subsequently, Ms. Hansen and others associated with her called Ms. Barker's place of employment and left messages on the voicemail to which several of Ms. Barker's co-workers also had access and continued to contact Ms. Barker on her personal telephone. Class members have been subjected to the same or similar treatment.

As the author of the article quoted above, Mark Goodge, points out:

It also gives the lie to two other common claims made by pro-compulsion campaigners: that ISPs are irresponsible and parents don’t care, and the only solution to both of those is legislation. In reality, a lot of parents do care about what their children are accessing on the Internet, and will choose to use a system which does screen out the worst of it if that option is available. And ISPs are responsive to consumer demand, so they’re choosing to offer that to their customers.

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In sum, although the complaints state that IP addresses are assigned to “devices” and thus by discovering the individual associated with that IP address will reveal “defendants’ true identity,” this is unlikely to be the case. Most, if not all, of the IP addresses will actually reflect a wireless router or other networking device, meaning that while the ISPs will provide the name of its subscriber, the alleged infringer could be the subscriber, a member of his or her family, an employee, invitee, neighbor or interloper

However, not all the information sought is required to advance the claim. For example, in addition to names and addresses, plaintiffs seek both the home telephone numbers and email addresses of the putative John Does... information which is clearly not required to proceed with this action. In particular, obtaining the home telephone numbers seems calculated to further plaintiffs’ settlement strategies, discussed above, rather than advancing their claims by allowing them to effect service.

Our federal court system provides litigants with some of the finest tools available to assist in resolving disputes; the courts should not, however, permit those tools to be used as a bludgeon.

The list itself is pretty amusing, apparently comprised of two porn movies and a selection of newspaper articles about sports (presumably from the Las Vegas Review Journal). Of course, as we noted originally, even though these copyrights are registered in Righthaven's name, it's likely that they aren't actually valid or enforceable, since the whole crux of the Righthaven saga is that many of the rights transfers to the company were shams, so the original copyright holders still control the works. Buying one of these registrations at auction is a way to own a piece of copyright trolling history, but it's probably not going to make you the legal owner of Ebony Amateurs Vegas Edition #10.

Also up for auction is the trademark on the name Righthaven itself. When righthaven.com sold, it was turned into a service offering "hosting with a backbone" in a somewhat ironic use of the domain. I suspect we'll see something similar happen with the Righthaven trademark, since the company's dismal reputation and long list of legal failures makes it a pretty unappealing brand for any purpose other than parody or satire.

As an infant, I was exposed to breasts almost every single day. Thirty years later, breasts have taken over my life. Not a day goes by without some stray breast seeping into my consciousness. Occasionally I catch myself glancing at the breasts of my female friends, and I habitually pour milk all over my cornflakes. Worse, breasts have served as a gateway drug for vaginas.

I used to think I was alone, but extensive new research in the form of almost three anecdotes published by the Daily Mail - a seedy gossip website specializing in celebrity erotica, catering to men too old to buy Nuts and too married to run up hard-to-explain credit card charges on proper porn - has revealed the devastating impact that breasts have been having on other young children.

Each tragic case of boob trauma follows the same remarkable pattern. An ordinary little boy approaching his teenage years suddenly starts to change his behaviour: becoming withdrawn and moody and mysteriously growing about six inches in height. Detailed investigation of the child's browser history reveals that the cause is not the rough patch the parents have been going through, a recent change of schools, or puberty; but an addiction to online porn.

The Daily Mail makes money from posting pictures of scantily-clad women on the internet. Sometimes these women are topless. Sometimes they are completely naked. Often the images are captioned with breathy descriptions of 'cleavage', 'dangerous curves', 'thigh-skimming' dresses. Sometimes the images are of disturbingly young girls, accompanied with phrases like the infamous "all grown up."

Article I, Section 8, Clause 8 of the United States Constitution, known as the Copyright Clause, empowers the United States Congress: "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and discoveries.

Thus, copyright is authorized only for works which promote the progress of science and useful arts....

Early circuit law in California held that obscene works did not promote the progress of science and the useful arts, and thus cannot be protected by copyright.

Subsequent non-en banc decisions by the Ninth Circuit failed to follow this prior circuit decision in California.

Given the absence of any subsequent en-banc Ninth Circuit decisions, Supreme Court precedent, or changes in the Constitution that copyright is authorized for works which does not promote the progress of science and the useful arts, the subsequent Ninth Circuit decisions are void and do not constitute binding precedent.

Hard Drive's work does not promote the progress of science.

Hard Drive's work does not promote the useful arts.

Hard Drive has judicially admitted that its work is adult pornography.

Hard Drive's work depicts obscene material.

Plaintiff is informed and believes, and thereon alleges that to create the work, Hard Drive and its agents and/or its employees violated laws which prohibited pimping, pandering, solicitation and prostitution, including any claims of conspiracy.

Hard Drive's work depicts criminal acts and/or conduct.

Hard Drive's work is not copyrightable.

Unnumbered Doe suggests that Liberty Media sought the public identities of Does 1-38 to coerce pretrial settlements. Unnumbered Doe’s Mot. 7 (“While we cannot know for certain how the Plaintiff intends to proceed . . . the likely course of action is to contact each of the individuals and demand a monetary payment for settlement of the claims in question.”). This allegation is not supported in the motion papers or by Liberty Media’s actions to date. It is purely speculative and not grounds for allowing the moving defendants to proceed anonymously.

Unnumbered Doe further argues that the anonymity of Does 1-38 should be protected because the disclosure of their identities in conjunction with this lawsuit, which involves homosexual pornography, may cause reputational harm and intrusion upon their privacy. Id. Unnumbered Doe asserts that being named as a party to this action amounts to “a public accusation” that the defendants downloaded and viewed homosexual pornography. Id. Doe 15 similarly argues that their public identification in the lawsuit will expose the defendants to “intrusive public scorn.” Doe 15’s Mot. 3.

The potential embarrassment to Does 1-38 of being associated with allegations of infringing hardcore pornography does not constitute an exceptional circumstance that would warrant allowing the defendants to proceed anonymously. As the Superior Court of Massachusetts stated, “mere embarrassment [is] not sufficient to override the strong public interest in disclosure.” Roe, 2011 WL 2342737, at *1. Thus, the potential embarrassment or social stigma that Does 1-38 may face once their identities are released in connection with this lawsuit is not grounds for allowing them to proceed anonymously.