Scanner : the law

Japanese Film Crew Arrested For Shooting Porn In A McDonald's

Bryan Christian — Wed, 16 Apr 2008 14:01:00 GMT

No, this is not it.

An undisclosed number of filmmakers and actors were arrested last Wednesday in Japan for shooting a porn in a McDonald's earlier in the year.

Producer Kunikazu Ishii, 51, an actress, 21, an actor, 29, and staff were arrested for allegedly shooting a porn film at the McDonald’s outlet around 3 p.m. on Jan 24. A customer noticed them and called police. McDonald’s staff were apparently unaware of what was going on.
One of the suspects was quoted by police as saying, “We didn’t think it would be a problem as long as nobody noticed what we were doing.”

Yeah, we're not buying that one either. You know what would have been a way better excuse? "We didn't think it'd be a problem as long as everyone was lovin' it!" ZING!

Zing?

Whatevs. Hey, we'll make it up to you: click through for the supersexy female version of the above ad.

[via AVN]

Video of the Day: If You See Bigfoot, Keep Him Away From Your Kids

Bryan Christian — Fri, 04 Apr 2008 16:15:00 GMT

It's a testament to the skill of those fake news clips over on The Onion that, when you stumble across news clips that are genuinely ludicrous -- like this, the story of this clearly demented kiddie fiddler who's blaming Bigfoot for his perversions -- they look pretty much about the same, right?

[via]

UPDATED: Tapes Don't Lie: Shakira Allegedly Rocked Yacht With Two Dudes And A Camera

Bryan Christian — Thu, 03 Apr 2008 18:01:00 GMT

Former employees of Alejandro Sanz are currently being prosecuted for, among other things, attempting to extort money from the hugely succesful Spanish recording artist with, it has been alleged, a tape showing him in an MFM-threeway with a certain other Latin-language superstar. And no, we're not talking about either Gloria Estefan or anyone in the Miami Sound Machine. Click through for more details...

UPDATE: ... which are apparently totally fake since Radar is reporting that it's an April Fools prank by the DJ we refer to in the piece. Jerk!

A home-made tape could involve Spanish singer-songwriter Alejandro Sanz, Colombian pop diva Shakira and her boyfriend, Antonio de la Rúa, in sexual intercourse together aboard a yacht owned by Sanz.
According to Internet portal Infobae.com, the tape is being held by the prosecutors evaluating the case against Carlos González and his wife, Sylvia Alzate, Sanz ex-employees who are accused of extortion against the artist.
This morning, People en Español released an article citing that both artists' agencies have denied the existence of such a tape.

However, that hasn't stopped radio DJ's from mentioning the tape on the air and getting rumor out there. Defamer points out that if the tape exists, and becomes part of the proceedings in the prosection of Sanz's would-be blackmailers, it would certainly make its way online -- but we're not so hopeful. Strike that: we're wayyyyyy hopeful; we're just not optimistic. Anyway, since you already know what Shakira looks like, have a gander at the two fellas who may have touched peepees or something.

Sanz, who it should be noted has won more Latin Grammy's than anyone else. [via]

Antonio de la Rúa, who it should be noted is no longer going out with Shakira, who it should be noted is standing next to him. [via]

Ron Jeremy and Vivid Video Are Out to Destroy YouPorn

Bryan Christian — Fri, 21 Mar 2008 16:39:00 GMT

Hey everybody, close your eyes and pretend it's 1999. Are you there yet? Has your computer turned into an iBook and does every commercial on TV have Moby in it? Good. Now, Google up something about... er, wait, sorry, um... go to AltaVista and see what Metallica drummer Lars Ulrich says about Napster. He doesn't like it, huh? He wants it destroyed, you say? Well, now, snap your fingers and come back to 2008! Blammo, you're back. Great. Remind us to tell you about what Hillary's up to later.

In the meantime, remember what you read about Lars Ulrich? Well, change "former metal God and current douchebag" with "porn veteran and Mario lookalike" and "music downloading" with "free porn streaming" and you might be able to guess why that unwieldy trip through time was necessary. (Or not.)

Quoth the master:

"What harms the industry is the Internet. Before it was helpful. Every company had its own website. Now you have things like YouPorn and PornTube that show full-length features of Vivid's movies. Who the f--- do they think they are? Now Vivid is suing them. You wouldn't see YouTube play a full-length feature of a Steven Spielberg film. But they think that it's just porn so they can get away with it. So now Vivid is striking back. Piracy is piracy, whether the film is PG, R or X. We deserve the same respect."

And to that end, Mr. Jeremy has endorsed Vivid Video's pledge to sue the pants off anyone who's caught streaming Vivid products without consent. (What they plan to do with pants we're not sure.)

Boy, hell hath no fury like a hedgehog scorned, huh? Now, we all know that he and Vivid are basically doomed to failure on this one, right? Maybe 10 years ago we thought something like this would have a shot, but now? Forget about it. Music, video, passport records -- it's all gonna be free on the web eventually. So let 'em try! What'll it harm? We'll still love you, Ron! How could we not? Jeez, have you seen the control that guy's got over his own ejaculate? It's, like, telekinetic. Mad props forever, you know? So, click on through for a reminder of the total freaking stud that Mr. Jeremy once was and will continue to be in our hearts and, most likely, our flash-enabled, no-pay browsers.

BAM! Top that! Check his shit! He's so much of a stud he's got to chain his jacket to his nipple for fear of it running off and humping someone.

Spam King Pleads "6ui1ty" to Felony, Could Get 26 Years

Bryan Christian — Tue, 18 Mar 2008 20:07:00 GMT

'Spam King' Pleads Guilty
Notorious spammer Robert Soloway faces a possible 26-year jail sentence for fraud and tax evasion.

Italian Dude Fined For Grabbing Crotch; Salon Gives the Background

Bryan Christian — Fri, 07 Mar 2008 13:00:00 GMT

We're pretty certain that even in the country that basically invented the word fascism, gentlemen of every class have been able to rub their balls in public. But the times, they are apparently changing. An Italian court has ruled that it's illegal for a man to be "ostentatiously touching his genitals through his clothing" in public -- which they've apparently been doing for luck, according to Slate.

What does the crotch have to do with luck?

It's the seat of fertility. The crotch grab goes back at least to the pre-Christian Roman era and is closely associated with another superstition called the "evil eye"—the belief that a covetous person can harm you, your children, or your possessions by gazing at you. Cultural anthropologists conjecture that men would try to block such pernicious beams by shielding their genitals, thus protecting their most valued asset: the future fruit of their loins.

Hey, what is in the water over at the Slate offices to where they have to ask what the crotch has to do with luck? We feel lucky every day to have our crotch. Where else would we put our lucky junk?

Anyway, congrats to the Italian courts for keeping their priorities straight!

One Good Thing About Texas: You Can Now Legally Get a Double Dong

Bryan Christian — Thu, 06 Mar 2008 13:00:00 GMT

All right, so chances are you're not so pleased right now with the state of Texas -- even if only for guaranteeing that we gotta go through, like, 7 more weeks of this Obama/Clinton horseshit. Well, how do you think Texans feel about it? You don't think they'd have liked to have been, as one of their least-loved semi-sons might have put it, "The Decider"? Well, at least now they've finally got the right to fuck the pain away with whatever the hell sex toy they can get their ballot-stained fingers around.

Just two weeks ago a federal appeals court struck down the old-fashioned law that made it illegal for Texans to sell (and thus buy) sex toys for sexual purposes (as opposed to, say, medical instruction). You also weren't allowed to own more than six devices, because such a collection would be considered promotion--so you were screwed (or would that be weren't screwed?) if you just happened to like a vibrator on a Monday, a dildo on a Tuesday, a G-spotter on a Wed, and so on...

Now, as some of you may know, we (meaning me, Scanner Bryan) used to live in Texas, and frankly we never even knew that this law existed for all the vibrators floating around. They were everywhere, man, so much so that we can hardly believe that they were illegal or anything. Jeez, next thing you're gonna tell us is weed's illegal, too! Mwah, that's rich.

[Img via The Stockroom, who are still having their big Independence Sale]

Previously: Texas Crawls Toward the 19th Century: Sex Toys Legalized

Scanner PSA: Best Buy Can Legally Give Your Porn to the Cops

Bryan Christian — Fri, 21 Dec 2007 16:18:00 GMT

There are tons of cheap places to put your downloaded porn these days. You got your thumbdrives, your flash cards, your external hard drives, your iPods, not to mention all the ways you can burn that stuff to CD and DVD. Why do we mention this? Because the one place to store your porn should never ever ever be on your main hard drive. Because if you ever have a problem with your system, and send it in for repairs, Chuck down at the Nerd Herd can now legally hand all yr wackoff material to the fuzz.

"If a person is aware of, or freely grants to a third party, potential access to his computer contents, he has knowingly exposed the contents of his computer to the public and has lost any reasonable expectation of privacy in those contents...," the Superior Court of Pennsylvania ruled December 5th.

Let's set aside questions of piracy and obscenity for just a sec, because we've got a whole other type of question: isn't downloading porn *so* Web 1.0? I mean, you got all those Flash-based video-on-demand sites out there... Why not let them worry about getting raided by the cops. Saves you the bandwidth and the headache -- and it ain't like your ISP wasn't gonna know what you were up to either way.

Online Smut: Saving The World One Wank at a Time

Bryan Christian — Tue, 06 Nov 2007 17:59:00 GMT

We've always found "Freaknomics" to be decidedly lacking in the "freaking" department. Good thing Todd Kendall, an associate professor at the Clemson University School of Economics, is around. According to Reason magazine, his study "Pornography, Rape, and the Internet," postulates that online porn may actually contribute to the common good:

In a paper presented at Stanford Law School last year, he reported that, after adjusting for other differences, states where Internet access expanded the fastest saw rape decline the most. A 10 percent increase in Internet access, Kendall found, typically meant a 7.3 percent reduction in the number of reported rapes.

The theory is that by watching someone else engage in an act, the impulse to violently perform that act may be bypassed altogether. Actually this is a pretty well documented phenomenon. Did you know that nationwide, incidences of getting hit in the jewels by a child fell 9.5% after the premiere of America's Funniest Home Videos?