US Sex Sells News

Pornographic material and adult entertainment might be getting a lot more expensive in the state of Alabama.

The Alabama House Ways and Means Committee passed the proposed porn tax in a 10-4 vote for an extortionately high rate of tax to offset a massive budget shortfall .

In addition to any other applicable taxes, a 40% state excise tax will be levied on gross receipts from the sale, rental or admission charges of pornographic material. The tax will apply to any and all forms of pornographic or sexually explicit content purchased in the state of Alabama, including, but not limited to, pornographic magazines, adult videos, and online adult rentals.

The porn tax bill now heads to the Alabama House for a floor vote.

Update: Taxed Off

24th September 2015. See  article from watchdog.org

Thanks to the state Senate, Alabama was able to avoid an anticipated First Amendment lawsuit over its budget proposal, which included an extortionate tax on pornography.

In order to make up a $200 million shortfall , Alabama wanted to raise taxes with sin taxes. On Sept. 15, the porn tax failed to pass the Senate, during a budget vote in which the chamber approved two budget reform measures while also raising taxes by roughly $86 million annually .

As proposed, the tax on porn was clearly unconstitutional. The First Amendment protects artistic expression, even if pornographic. Alabama, by taxing the specific category of pornographic material, is directly engaging in content-based discrimination, something the Supreme Court does not allow. Indeed, in the 1972 case Police Department v. Mosely , the Court noted that above all else, the First Amendment means that the government has no power to restrict expression because of its message, its ideas, its subject matter, or its content. Thus, regulations that treat a category of content differently than other categories will be held unconstitutional unless it passes the exacting legal test of strict scrutiny.

Strict scrutiny requires a compelling governmental interest that is narrowly tailored to be the least restrictive means of accomplishing that interest. Absent those factors, a law will be deemed unconstitutional.

After an anti-porn campaign filed over 557,000 signatures last week on a California ballot measure requiring condom use in adult films shot anywhere in the state, Mark Kernes, the Board Secretary for the Free Speech Coalition (FSC), the porn producers' trade group, said on AVN.com (Adult Video News) that the industry is breaking the law by not using condoms on adult film sets and by not taking out required film permits.

Kernes explained:

There definitely has been some flight to Vegas, but the industry, in general I think, does not want to move to there because frankly, they like the atmosphere in Southern California, you can shoot outdoors for longer periods during the year.

...they're {producers) ... lying on their health permit application or simply not getting a filming permit. Most have chosen the latter course, possibly because lying on an official government document can be worth up to a couple of years in prison.

And, of course, we have a California State Supreme Court decision that says shooting pornography is legal in California, and there are only a couple of states that had decisions that said that. So, no, they don't want to leave L.A.

Some of them have been shooting outside of L.A. County, though, but that's kind of a far trek, because the studios are based in L.A. County, so they don't like to do that. Many of them are simply shooting as we might call it 'underground' in the county.

Award-winning director and actress Candida Royalle died at  her home in Long Island, after a long illness. Royalle had suffered for years from recurrent bouts of ovarian cancer.

Candida Royalle, born Candice Vadala, was born on October 15, 1950, in Brooklyn, and spent most of her life and career in the New York City area, though she lived in San Francisco for a time in the 1970s. She entered the adult industry in 1975, starring in the VCX movie The Analist , and over the course of her nine years in front of the camera, acted in nearly 70 films before deciding that she belonged behind the camera.

Royalle created Femme Productions, the first adult production studio to be owned solely by a woman and to produce films from a woman's perspective. Among her works to be hailed by critics were 1984's Femme and Urban Heat.

Some of Royalle's most memorable films, however, were Three Daughters , which received what today would be the equivalent of 4 As from AVN, and Sensual Escape , a compilation of two of Royalle's shorter films and starring Annie Sprinkle, Siobhan Hunter, Nina Hartley, Veronica Hart and Richard Pacheco. The film received what was then a perfect rating: AAAA.

In all, Royalle directed 19 movies, first solely under her Femme Productions studio, and under the Femme Productions/Adam & Eve label.

Alabama State Representative Jack Williams has proposed a 40% sales tax on receipts from the sale of sexually oriented materials as a desperate measure to help fill the $250+ million black hole in Alabama's General Fund budget.

Sexually oriented materials are described in the bill as:

Any book, magazine, newspaper, printed or written matter, writing, description, picture, drawing, animation, photograph, motion picture, film, video tape, pictorial presentation, depiction, image, electrical or electronic reproduction, broadcast, transmission, video download, telephone communication, sound recording, article, device, equipment, matter, oral communication, depicting breast or genital nudity or sexual conduct.

The tax hike would be in addition to the state, city and county sales taxes already in place, which usually runs up another 10 percent in costs.

Williams said:

We have created a class of products in this state that you have to be 18 to purchase and they have excise taxes on them. The state is broke.

Montgomery insiders say it has a realistic chance to pass, as Williams has accrued 26 co-sponsors for his bill, including Alabama House Speaker Mike Hubbard

The US adult trade grouo, The Free Speech Coalition has commented on the first and small fine issued by California for transgressions of local laws mandating condom usage in porn production:

Yesterday, Treasure Island Media announced that their six-year investigation with Cal/OSHA over the use of condoms had concluded with a whopping $685 fine for the company.

In a press release, AIDS Healthcare Foundation, which initiated the investigation, tried to save face by calling it a landmark ruling, and it was--for the adult industry. AHF had hoped that Cal/OSHA would consider the lack of condoms on an adult set to be a serious fine, and had pushed for fines in the tens of thousands of dollars. Instead, Cal/OSHA rebuked them.

For the past several years, Michael Weinstein has been siphoning non-profit money for a campaign of harassment, while communities in need suffer. In doing so, AHF has effectively become a lobbying organization, spending political money profligately while many people in L.A .and across the country die for lack of treatment. So we ask again: why is Weinstein focusing on so many millions of dollars to patrol the country's roughly 1,500 adult film workers when there is not an issue with HIV in adult film?

For those in the adult industry, there is reason to celebrate. The $685 dollar fine--the same fine that a company might get for not having a full stocked first aid kit--is precedent-setting. Weinstein is free to bring more and more cases against adult companies, but the outcome is already known.

Cal/OSHA resources should be used to investigate actual workplace safety regulations brought by workers, not imagined violations of some moralist's fevered mind. He is wasting state resources and preventing state workers from helping those in need.

Treasure Island should be applauded for their tenacity, and attorney Karen Tynan should be congratulated on a case well argued. We look forward to more such landmark rulings.

Adult movie studio Malibu Media has asked the Indiana federal court to ban negative terms during an upcoming trial against an alleged BitTorrent pirate. According to the copyright troll, descriptions such as copyright troll, pornographer and porn purveyor could influence the jury.

Malibu Media, the Los Angeles based company behind the X-Art adult movies, is one of the most active copyright trolls in the United States. This year alone they have filed a 1,104 individual cases against alleged downloaders.

The main goal of the company is to demand settlements of a few thousand dollars, without going to trial. However, defendant Micheal Harrison decided to fight back and wants to have his case heard before a jury.

The lawsuit in question dates back to 2012 and both sites are now gearing up to present their arguments in court. This is new territory for the porn company, and recent motions reveal that the copyright troll is worried about its image.

A website called FreeVRGoggles.com is giving out Google Cardboard-like virtual reality goggles to users in the US. The site is sponsored by BaDoinkVR.com, a porn website that deals in virtual reality content for the porn industry. In fact, BaDoinkVR was amongst the first to offer such free Cardboard VR headsets in order to promote such content.

What better way to bring VR to the mainstream than for it to be adopted by the porn industry right? It is somewhat inevitable too. VR obviously makes sense for the industry, which has been looking for better ways to reach the public for a long time now. The one word that has always been attached to virtual reality is immersive , which means that it's no surprise that the pornographic industry wants to use it.

While providing content over a Samsung Gear VR , Oculus Rift or other more expensive VR headsets would cost a bomb, the Google Cardboard and its various adaptations (like the OnePlus Cardboard ) provides just the opportunity the industry has been looking for.

A panel of New York state appeals court judges have ruled that sex shops are legal in New York City. his is the climax so far of a 14 year long legal battle.

The decision by the court of appeals is not going to be sending us back to Times Square in the 1980's, said First Amendment attorney Erica Dubno. She argued for city sex shops, and won, based on an argument that a city effort to ban sex shops was based on a study carried out in 1994.

Beginning in 2001, the Giuliani administration had attempted to shut down all sex shops, including those that were operating within what came to be known as 60-40 guidelines, where at least 60 percent of their merchandise and displays were not X-rated.

Dubno and other attorneys got the state courts to block the city's shutdown order until a formal legal ruling on the matter could be made. One was made two years ago in favor of the 60-40 sex shops.

The city appealed and on Tuesday evening a state supreme court appeals panel, by a 3 to 2 vote, upheld the ruling.

The case is not over. The city can appeal and has not yet said whether or not it will.

A measure mandating condom use on all adult film sets in California will appear on the 2016 ballot after organizers gathered the required number of signatures last week.

The anti-porn campaign group, The AIDS Healthcare Foundation, said it had acquired 371,000 signatures for its proposal, slightly more than the 366,880 required by the state to place the measure on the ballot, according to Reuters. In a statement , AIDS Healthcare Foundation president Michael Weinstein said:

In 2012 in Los Angeles with Measure B and with our initial polling for this measure, voter sentiment favoring safer sex in adult films was clear: unlike most politicians, voters were not squeamish about this issue. seeing it as a means to protect the health and safety of performers working in the industry.

Californian voters have already approved a similar measures requiring condom use for adult film productions in Los Angeles.

In a blog post , the Free Speech Coalition, an adult industry advocacy group, blasted the measure, saying it would install Weinstein as the state's porn czar because of a provision that would allow him to personally enforce the law.

A study by digital analysts Juniper Research has concluded that adult smartphone users will each watch an average of 348 porn videos on their devices in 2015.

In total, the researchers estimate that 136 billion sexually explicit videos will be watched on smartphones this year. They go on to predict that the number will increase by a further 55%over the next five years, to 193 billion videos.

According to the Juniper report, titled Digital Adult Content: Market Trends, Forecasts and Revenue Opportunities 2015-2020 , the increase will be more significant in developing markets, as Wi-Fi and 4G technology become more widely available. The rise will be less steep in western Europe. However, net growth will be at its greatest in the United States.