Is this true?
[Gossip] Jenna Jameson Calls It Quits
Posted by Ashish on 01.14.2008Porn queen retires…
Pornstar Jenna Jameson announced her retirement from the business at the AVN Awards in Las Vegas on Saturday.
“Honesty is key,” she said. “I will never ever ever spread my legs again in this industry. Ever!”
Classy.
Content Producer Group Forms Piracy Enforcement Company
Details To Be Provided at XBIZ Hollywood ‘08 Industry Conference Piracy Roundtable Feb. 6
From XbizBy Ann Oui
Wednesday, Jan 23, 2008HOLLYWOOD, Calif. — Building on a meeting last year in Los Angeles at which a large gathering of content producers and others met to discuss ways to protect their content from thieves, the core members of the group that organized that meeting have formed a piracy enforcement company.
The new company is called PAK Group, Inc., and is a Washington for-profit corporation. A website for the company is not live yet, but according to the principals www.pak-inc.com will soon launch.
Rob Apgood, an industry attorney involved with the new initiative, told XBIZ that the main purpose of the company is to enforce copyright laws and to pursue copyright infringers on behalf of copyright holders who utilize the services of the company.
The main principals of PAK Group will be speaking on the Piracy Roundtable and Meeting at the upcoming XBIZ Hollywood ’08 Industry Conference, where they will outline in detail how the company will work and how copyright holders and others in the industry can become involved with it.
Other than Apgood, PAK Group principals slated to speak are Falcon Foto’s Jason Tucker and Andrew Stoddard of Hush Hush Entertainment.
The Roundtable event will take place Feb. 6, from 2–3:30 pm, at the Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel. Unlike the piracy meeting, the Roundtable is not limited to content producers. Admission is open to anyone who is registered for the XBIZ Conference.
“This is a group that has come together to coordinate and direct its efforts on thwarting piracy,” Tucker said. “If you are a content producer, then you know that your hard work is being raped by people who don’t have a right to display it. If that frustrates you and upsets you, then this seminar will provide you a chance to join a group that will really do something about it.
“Remember, you can be part of this effort even if you are not a content producer. As a member of the community, you can help take a stand against those who cost all of us money.”
“We spent more than a year and a half investing in and building the infrastructure that allows us to document infringements with the push of a button,” Apgood said. “This business model capitalizes on our ability to quickly and efficiently document infringements, tie the infringements back to the producer’s content, identify and show the copyright registration(s) being infringed, and generate the complaint for a lawsuit virtually instantaneously — while the other guys are hunting and pecking to make their claims.”
Keeping costs down is one of the main goals of the new company, Apgood added.
“I’m excited to have a role in this initiative,” Stoddard said. “It’s time we stand up as a group and do something about a problem that isn’t going away by itself. I’m also looking forward to speaking on the Piracy Roundtable and hope to see a lot of faces there.”
XBIZ Publisher Tom Hymes said he is confident that word of mouth will add to the interest in both the new company and the Roundtable.
“I encourage anyone who has a vested interest in this problem — and that’s pretty much everyone — to grab a colleague and come find out what this company is all about and what it means to them,” Hymes said.
In addition to PAK speakers, the Piracy Roundtable also will feature Eros Association President Fiona Patten and Diane Duke, executive director of the Free Speech Coalition.
For press and general inquiries about either the XBIZ Hollywood ‘08 Industry Conference or the XBIZ Awards, please contact Dusty Marie at dusty@xbiz.com.
From the pittsburg business times:
DVDempire site charges piracy
Pittsburgh Business Times - by Maria Guzzo
A Butler County-based Web site that sells adult entertainment DVDs has filed a federal copyright infringement lawsuit against a competing Ohio firm.
Right Ascension Inc., which does business at http://www.adultdvdempire.com, filed the lawsuit April 12 in U.S. District Court for the Western District of Pennsylvania against Eastlake, Ohio-based Action Software Inc. and Action-DVD.com Inc. and those firms’ operators, Alexander Belfer of Mentor, Ohio, and Minko Olegi of Eastlake, Ohio.
In the lawsuit, Right Ascension alleges that Action stole copyrighted material from the adultdvdempire.com Web site and placed it on Action’s site, http://www.action-dvd.com. The material included images, photographs and text including movie descriptions and biographical information about movie performers that Right Ascension had created or collected for its site.
Right Ascension requested a preliminary and a permanent injunction against Action, asking that the company stop the copyright infringement.
Right Ascension is asking for $150,000 in damages for each work that was copied from its Web site but does not indicate how many works the firm believes were stolen.
Right Ascension alleges that Action’s piracy is driven by the desire to attract Right Ascension customers to its site, so Action can gain profits.
The case has been assigned to Judge William Standish. A hearing date has not been set.
Porn filmmakers join fight against Internet piracy
By Matthew Belloni Sun Jan 13, 4:51 PM ET
LOS ANGELES (Hollywood Reporter) - What does Sumner Redstone have in common with Steve Hirsch, founder and president of the world’s largest producer of hard-core sex videos? More than the Viacom honcho might think.
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Hirsch’s Vivid Entertainment, the biggest name in the $12 billion-a-year adult video industry, filed a lawsuit last month against PornoTube, one of a handful of popular video-sharing sites styled as the dirtier cousins of YouTube, Redstone’s legal nemesis. Similar to the Google-owned video juggernaut, PornoTube has become a destination for free porn by letting anyone post sex videos without filtering out clips that might be copyrighted.
“In other words,” the lawsuit reads, PornoTube “deliberately and knowingly built a library of infringing works … enabling them to gain an enormous share of the Internet traffic, increase its businesses and earn vast amounts of revenues in the process.”
Redstone’s words, almost exactly. Vivid’s argument mirror’s Viacom’s $1 billion claim against YouTube, filed last March and just entering the discovery phase in New York. At issue in both cases is whether video-sharing sites are shielded from liability by the Digital Millennium Copyright Act if they take down videos once asked and don’t profit “directly” from the infringements. (Vivid also claims PornoTube violates a strict child-pornography law by not verifying the ages of the participants in videos posted on its site, though recently an appeals court ruled against that law on free speech grounds.)
The copyright infringement issue is unsettled, but the cases are piling up. Vivid joins Titan Media, a gay erotica publisher that sued the Michael Eisner-backed Veoh, as well as Viacom’s case and the plaintiffs in a class action also pending against YouTube in New York.
Hirsch believes PornoTube doesn’t do enough to keep his content off its site, and, like YouTube, it has leveraged the traffic it now delivers into marketing deals with other sex video producers. It has left Hirsch, a leader in an industry that has welcomed new technologies like the VCR and VOD much more than its Hollywood equivalents, with little choice but to sue the pants off the free sites.
“How do we survive?” Hirsch asks. “We don’t produce videos just because it’s fun. As DVD sales decrease, we need to look to other revenue streams.”
Domestic DVD spending for mainstream fare was off 3.6% in 2007, but Hirsch told Portfolio magazine recently that Vivid’s DVD sales are down 50% since 2004. VOD is the future, he says, but he can’t compete with free. PornoTube and its brethren YouPorn and XTube continue to draw mass amounts of traffic, and they don’t seem to care about monetizing the eyeballs.
North Carolina-based PornoTube didn’t respond to a request for comment. But Vivid’s critics, much like those criticizing Viacom in the YouTube case, argue that most of the porn on the sharing sites is created and distributed by amateurs. And what copyrighted stuff there is probably serves as valuable promotion for Vivid. Hirsch disputes both those arguments.
“Two or three minutes — that’s all you need,” Hirsch says. “After watching two or three minutes of hard-core sex, you’re not going to go and buy the full movie. And if you look on these sites, an overwhelming amount of content is copyrighted.”
Hirsch likens the porn industry’s perilous situation to the music business’ similar reliance on consumers paying for collections of product (albums) that can be enjoyed in bits and pieces — and often for free on the Internet. Total album sales slid 15% in 2007, the third consecutive year of decline.
Hirsch says he and his legal team are gearing up for a long fight. They could probably call Viacom’s lawyers for some tips.
Reuters/Hollywood Reporter
