Lawsuit Alleges Store Is Unlicensed Adult Business
The latest joke around the adult entertainment industry is that sales have slid enough to justify asking the federal government for a bailout.
Companies say people were already spending less on naughty DVDs before the economy went sour, increasingly turning to pirated copies and YouTube-like Web sites that stream clips for free and undercut companies working to sell adult content.
And now, with consumers tightening spending as much as they can, those who work in the industry say paid pornography is the first thing to go.
"Porn and Starbucks -- we're going down," porn star Stormy Daniels said Sunday as she took a break from signing autographs and mingling with fans at the AVN Adult Entertainment Expo in Las Vegas.....read more
Sex video makers and distributors are evolving with the technology times, catering to customers seeking satisfaction on smart phones, Blu-ray players, and Internet television.
Digital Playground, which is credited with producing the first high-definition adult film five years ago, has a Web site devoted exclusively to Apple’s hot iPhones and offers free trailer "podcasts" for iPods.
"The way people get their porn is changing," Pink distribution operations manager Kim Kysar said as an annual Adult Entertainment Expo wrapped in Las Vegas on Sunday.
"It is going to be more personal and you get it anywhere you are: on the road, in the bathroom at work. Nobody is going to be the wiser."
"We saw a peak after Christmas when everybody got new video phones," Ms. Kysar said. "One of the first things people do after activating their iPhones is Google ’iPhone porn,’ and here they are."
"How great would it be to have a porn Internet café?" she asked, dreamily peering into adult entertainment’s future. — AFP"Porn barons in the US have called for a multi-billion dollar bail-out of the adult entertainment industry to help it through the "hard times" ahead.
Hustler magazine publisher Larry Flynt and Girls Gone Wild chief executive Joe Francis issued a joint plea for Congress to pump 5 billion US dollars (£3.3 billion) into the sector.
They claim that the economic downturn is hitting the porn business and that federal assistance is needed to boost the nation's sex drive. The pair add that they deserve the same treatment offered to banks and the automobile industry.
In a statement released on Wednesday, Mr Francis said the cash injection was needed "just to see us through hard times".
He added: "Congress seems willing to help shore up our nation's most important businesses. We feel we deserve the same consideration. In difficult economic times, Americans turn to entertainment for relief. More and more the kind of entertainment they turn to is adult entertainment."
But according to Mr Flynt, economic woes have led to a flagging national sex drive.
The porn baron-turned-campaigner said: "People are too depressed to be sexually active. This is very unhealthy as a nation. Americans can do without cars and such but they cannot do without sex."
He added: "With all this economic misery and people losing all that money, sex is the farthest thing from their mind. It is time for congress to rejuvenate the sexual appetite of America. The only way they can do this is by supporting the adult industry and doing it quickly."
Anti-porn campaigners said that they were not treating the request seriously.
Michael DePrimo, spokesman for the American Family Association, said: "Obviously they are being facetious. It is very much tongue-in-cheek - Larry Flynt has a sense of humour. But the fact that he is mocking Congress is not unreasonable." "
Sunday, January 11, 2009 You knew this had to happen. Purveyors of adult entertainment say it's time that they got the same government help as financial firms and the auto industry.
Yep, Hustler's Larry Flynt and Girls Gone Wild's Joe Francis say it's time for a bailout of the porn industry.Flynt and Francis say the economy has hurt their businesses, too, with sales of XXX DVDs down 22 percent. They want $5 billion in federal funds to help them make it until things pick up.TMZ has Francis' rationale behind the request. "The government has changed its economic policy and now is just handing out money," he told TMZ. "We have a $13 billion industry that's very in need of correcting, so I'll be happy to take their money."
Congress must "rejuvenate the sexual appetite of America," Flynt said.
However, if the three Congressmen that TMZ questioned are any indication, Flynt and Francis have their work cut out for them.
That doesn't dissuade Francis, who says he will personally go to Washington, D.C., to make the bailout request. I'm presuming that such travel is allowed under the terms of Francis' bail while he awaits trial on tax evasion charges.
The joke's on us: Although I don't doubt that the adult entertainment industry is, like many other sectors, taking a hit in this dire economy, I suspect that Flynt and Francis are simply taking advantage of current events to get some press.
The sad fact is that Capitol Hill asked for such mockery, from not only Flynt and Francis, but all Americans.
From the get-go, the lack of oversight in administering the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) has made every bailout handout a very unfunny, and egregiously costly, joke.
And since Congress opened up the bailout door so wide, then who's to stop any legal business form seeking relief?
Porn yes, autos no: That's the position of the folks at the Tax Policy Blog, where Josh Barro says the porn industry bailout isn't as crazy as it might seem.
"This bailout request may seem like a joke, and it will certainly strike many people as humorous, inappropriate, or downright outrageous," writes Barro. "However, we will, for the duration of this blog post, treat it as a serious request in order to explain some of the criteria that policymakers should take into account when considering whether/when to provide financial support to a private industry."
After evaluating that criteria, Barro concludes that the adult entertainment industry has several characteristics that make "providers of pornography a more attractive bailout recipient than, say, the auto industry." You can read Barro's full analysis here.
And you thought economists practiced the dismal science.
While the 2009 AVN Adult Movie Awards hosted a solar system of adult film stars – Ron Jeremy, Jenna Haze, Tera Patrick, Belladonna, Stormy Daniels, Jesse Jane, Sunny Leone and Bree Olson, to name a few – the annual celebration of porn was surprisingly political this year.
The night got off to a partisan start at Mandalay Bay when emcee Thea Vidale began her opening monologue by saluting the victory of President-elect Barack Obama.
“We’re going to have a hot couple having hot sex in the White House – with each other, no less!” she rejoiced.
The X-rated star proceeded to rattle off a litany of X-rated jokes and one-liners about Obama’s sex life and compared his physique to that of President Bush before the awards program got underway....READ MORE
by Elizabeth Hovde
It feels good to pass laws that protect people's health. But retaining the rights of private property owners and the social lives of a minority group feels pretty good, too. It's unfortunate state lawmakers didn't choose to do both. They could have.
Instead, Oregon rang in the new year with an indoor smoking ban similar to bans in other states and cities. It prohibits smoking at all indoor work sites. Smoking is no longer allowed in bars or restaurants, and a person can't light þup within 10 feet of a business' windows or doors....read more
January 8, 2009 I came across this today.
Let it soak in a moment…
Okay, so we have Larry Flynt and the Girls Gone Wild guy (who I could have sworn was in jail for tax evasion or something along those lines) asking the government for a $5 billion bailout. Their DVD sales have slipped, but their website growth has actually increased in the past year.
And their reasoning for this is not that they need money but rather:
[T]he industry leaders said the issue is a nation in need. “People are too depressed to be sexually active,” Flynt said in the statement. “This is very unhealthy as a nation. Americans can do without cars and such but they cannot do without sex.”
“With all this economic misery and people losing all that money, sex is the farthest thing from their mind. It’s time for congress to rejuvenate the sexual appetite of America. The only way they can do this is by supporting the adult industry and doing it quickly.”
I am as pro-porn as the next pro-porn person, but this is just god-damn ridiculous. What I’d like to see is exactly what Flynt’s plan is for rejuvenating the sex lives of Americans. Personally, I’m doing alright, but still …
I guess we’ll see how broken the government is depending on what they do with Flynt’s request (ignore it, I imagine).
A final note, the quotes from that article are the most amazingly vague quotes I’ve seen in some time, and we just had an election.
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