So why would a video of a mildly overweight toddler dancing badly receive 518,448 views on YouTube? It immediately comes to mind why a toddler dancing very well might be popular. It immediately comes to mind why a spectacularly cute toddler dancing badly might be popular. I wish this were not the case, but it also immediately comes to mind why a grotesquely overweight toddler dancing badly would make for a popular YouTube video. No, this toddler is not related to any star of stage or screen either.
The answer is that the video is controversial. The child’s mother Stephanie Lenz videotaped her kid attempting to dance to Prince’s “Let’s Go Crazy” which was playing on a nearby boombox. Universal Music Group, which owns the copyright for that portion of Prince’s catalog asked YouTube to take the video down because “Let’s Go Crazy” could clearly be heard on it and they felt this infringed on their copyright. YouTube took the video down and that would have been the end of it, except the EFF took on the mom’s case
So Stephanie Lenz and the Electronic Frontier Foundation sued Universal for wrongly asking that the video be taken down. Today, Ars Technica, a site about the “art of technology”, posted the latest in a whole series of interesting articles on the case and its implications for all video makers. The short version of what went down is that Universal defended by claiming the EFF was using the court system to bully them out of their rights and using meritless lawsuits to further their own agenda. This is ironic for so many reasons, I don’t even know how to start to enumerate them, so I won’t. The way everything shook out, judges determined that, yes, the EFF can bring a suit …
The biggest problem with the astroturfing style of marketing is that it makes everyone very skeptical of everything; it makes it very difficult to believe in anything. If a star willingly gets naked on camera, there will be some puritanical types who will think ill of them for it. Yet most people who enjoy being in the spotlight and being immortalized have a hankering to be in the spotlight and be immortalized even when they are, ya know, doing it. I have frequently run into famous people who want me and Forrest Black to shoot artistic nudes of them, but who do not want anyone to see the finished work. As an artist, it is important to me that people actually see what I create, so we have, to date, declined private commissions of this sort. A combination of following the various sex tape scandals, and my own personal conversations with people who wanted to get naked on camera without the social repercussions, has lead me to assume that most sex tapes are released with the knowledge and consent of the parties involved. That way, they can get the erotic attention and the victim sympathy.
The problem with this is that some people actually want their private lives to be, ya know, private. I have come to believe that actor Verne Troyer genuinely feels his privacy is being invaded with the current sex tape clip making the rounds and, at the request of his manager, I am having the honestly barely PG-rated clip removed from BlueBlood.net.
Late this evening, I received an email from someone named Ray Hughes who said that Verne Troyer was his client and who attached a PDF of what appear to be court documents pertaining to …
So I guess this is just weird sex trial coverage week at BlueBlood.net. First Max Hardcore gets convicted, then Ira Isaacs gets a stay, and then R. Kelly got acquitted. Now it appears that notoriously litigious, Hot Topic-esque, altporn, membership site SuicideGirls (aka SG) has settled their most recent lawsuit. It is hard to keep track of all their legal scuffles, but this was the one against their former contractor fetish photographer Philip Warner and his collaborator altmodel Apnea.
The initial dispute between SuicideGirls and Apnea appeared to arise because she modeled with a girl named Katie for a forthcoming site, which had offered her and Katie disproportionately large sums of money for a simple nude photo shoot. Even though this new site had not launched yet and most planned sites never do launch, SG was particularly bent out of shape about the Apnea and Katie photos because Katie had also reportedly worked as SG’s accountant. This presumably meant that she was privy to very proprietary information. SG went so ballistic over this that they not only took away Apnea’s complimentary site membership, but they put a stop payment on a check they had already written to her.
The dispute between comically psycho-competitive SuicideGirls and their staff photographer Philip Warner appeared to arise when Philip posted on the internet that he was going to be adding community features to his own web site, basically making it a lot more like SG. According to AltPorn.net’s exclusive interview with Apnea, SG handed Philip a new and more exclusionary contract one day after he announced his web site intentions. He refused to sign the new more controlling contract, so one day later SG made a public break with him. …
Yesterday, R. Kelly was acquitted of charges for child pornography which have been pending for nearly six years now. If I believed he were innocent, I would think it was a real travesty to have such horrible accusations hanging over his head for so long. Now, the extremely witty Josh Levin over at Slate and the highly respected Bill Wyman over at Hitsville have both been covering the R. Kelly trial and associated tribulations with exceptional thoroughness and panache. If you want to know way too much about R&B singer and producer R. Kelly and his penchant for underage girls, I definitely recommend the work of both of these writers. I’m going to try to break it down for y’all here though.
First of all, I think the irony police need to be called. This week Max Hardcore was handed a criminal conviction for making videos of adult women dressed youthfully and engaging in consensual extreme sex acts, most likely including watersports (not the jet-ski kind), videos for which Max Hardcore had full documentation that the women were legally adult and consented to appearing on video and having said video distributed. The same week R. Kelly got excused for making videos of allegedly underage women engaging in arguably consensual extreme acts, definitely including watersports (not the jet-ski kind), videos for which R. Kelly could produce no documentation that the women were not underage or had consented to have their image recorded and shared in this way.
I feel sorry for R. Kelly. I truly do. I suspect he is not competent to handle his own affairs, yet, being rich, he is surrounded by people who apparently regularly take him for as much money as they can carry away. Even the star witness for the prosecution stated …
I’d like to take a moment out from my busy schedule of rolling around on the floor laughing at the recent obscenity prosecutions in the United States, in order to comment on them. Veteran adult video performer and producer Max Hardcore was just found guilty of obscenity in Florida. For those who are unaware of his oeuvre, Max Hardcore was the first guy on the extreme-hardcore-with-teens bus. Whether or not you really want to see gaping anal or watersports or puking in a sexual context or even naked chicks who look younger than twenty-two, Max Hardcore certainly deserves both credit and responsibility for bringing such things into the popular culture. Apparently, along with credit for his ground-breaking work in rough sex on camera comes an attempt by the State of Florida to nail him on 20 counts of distributing obscene materials through the mails and internet. Now I have it on good authority that various government agents have been so anxious to bust Max Hardcore over the years that one such over-eager and nervous gent once accidentally discharged a firearm in Max’s house, during a study of paperwork, such that repairs were needed. Now, don’t get me wrong, Blue Blood magazine in print used to get screeners of Max’s movies way before they got as extreme as they supposedly are now. And I couldn’t sit through one then. At the time, I was just like, how did some construction worker manage to parlay an interest in sex into this huge career?
Now Blue Blood art director Forrest Black and I used to enjoy going to all the adult industry trade shows. We attended the adult video shows in Vegas since the pre-Internet times when the adult video show was a little …
I’d like to take a moment out from my busy schedule of rolling around on the floor laughing at the recent obscenity prosecutions in the United States, in order to comment on them. Veteran adult video performer and producer Max Hardcore was just found guilty of obscenity in Florida. For those who are unaware of his oeuvre, Max Hardcore was the first guy on the extreme-hardcore-with-teens bus. Whether or not you really want to see gaping anal or watersports or puking in a sexual context or even naked chicks who look younger than twenty-two, Max Hardcore certainly deserves both credit and responsibility for bringing such things into the popular culture. Apparently, along with credit for his ground-breaking work in rough sex on camera comes an attempt by the State of Florida to nail him on 20 counts of distributing obscene materials through the mails and internet. Now I have it on good authority that various government agents have been so anxious to bust Max Hardcore over the years that one such over-eager and nervous gent once accidentally discharged a firearm in Max’s house, during a study of paperwork, such that repairs were needed. Now, don’t get me wrong, Blue Blood magazine in print used to get screeners of Max’s movies way before they got as extreme as they supposedly are now. And I couldn’t sit through one then. At the time, I was just like, how did some construction worker manage to parlay an interest in sex into this huge career?