For those of you that haven’t heard, Playboy is releasing their first 3-D centerfold in the June issue.  Hot chicks in 3-D, what is better than that?

Playboy readers who can only imagine what it would look like if a centerfold jumped right off the page are getting new specs to help them see into Hef’s world. The magazine’s June edition hits newsstands Friday equipped with 3-D glasses. Now the toy that has kids dodging dragons, meatballs and tall blue aliens at the movies will help adults focus on what is, at first glance, a very blurry Playmate of the Year.

“What would people most like to see in 3-D?” asked Playboy founder Hugh Hefner. “Probably a naked lady.”   Full Article

Well, I don’t mean to be nitpicky, and not to take anything away from Hef, one of my personal heroes, but Pink Visual DID think of this quite awhile ago when we released 3-D episodes on our site iPinkVisualPass .   Not only do you get hot girls in 3-D, but you get them on your mobile device.  So, when you finish wanking to the 3-D centerfold in Playboy and you are looking for something…well…more, you can always check out the 3-D porn at Pink Visual.  We innovate.  You masturbate.

© Glenn Francis, www.PacificProDigital.com

In July, the obscenity trial of adult video producer John Stagliano is scheduled to get underway in Washington, D.C. The beginning of the trial (assuming the case gets that far) will be far from the end of the story, of course, but it does mark a major phase in a series of actions so entirely pointless, it boggles the mind.

Setting aside for a moment the irony of putting anybody other than a member of the Executive or Legislative branches of our federal government on trial for doing something “obscene” relating to the D.C. area, one has to wonder what the government hopes to accomplish with this prosecution, or any prosecution like it. Suppose for a moment the DOJ manages to obtain a conviction of Stagliano (whose works are not even close to the most “extreme” pornographic works currently available on the DVD market, let alone the Internet market), do they really think that conviction is going to make a dent in the amount, change the nature or ‘soften’ the character of the pornography distributed in this country?

Consider this: in 2007, Brazilian webmaster Danilo Simoes Croce pleaded guilty to distribution of obscene materials, including videos that depicted (according to the indictment) “bukkake, fisting, depictions of defecation, urination, and vomiting in conjunction with sex acts.” If the government’s goal in prosecuting Croce was to deter the distribution of that type of material, it’s evident that their efforts came up just a bit short. You see, it was after Croce’s plea bargain was entered that that the infamous “2 girls 1 cup” scat video went viral and was seen by literally millions of viewers worldwide.

Since that time, the government also has successfully prosecuted longtime “extreme” porn producer Max Hardcore, resulting in hefty fines and a prison sentence of nearly 4 years. Most of Max’s catalog remains available to this day, however, and while most producers stop short of treading in Max’s footsteps (and did so long before he was convicted), there’s no shortage of other content producers that continue push the envelope.

According to the DOJ’s own statements, the investigation into Croce’s operation spanned 3 years. That’s three years spent pursuing a potential criminal (no depiction is obscene until a trier of fact says it is, after all) whose alleged criminal acts are mirrored daily by producers/distributors who are comfortably outside of American law enforcement’s jurisdiction, but whose creations are readily accessible to a U.S. audience.

When Croce was arrested, representatives of the Postal Inspection Service hailed the operation as an endorsement of the Service’s commitment to the US Attorney General’s “initiative against hardcore pornography” and proclaimed that it “sends a loud message to those involved that they operate at enormous risk of apprehension.”

Really? It send a “loud message” that there was an “enormous risk of apprehension”? To anyone familiar with the current landscape of the Internet porn industry, that claim is a bigger laugh than watching the YouTube videos with people’s reactions to watching 2 Girls, 1 Cup. There remain many, many people producing and distributing “hard core pornography,” including no shortage of people apparently willing to brave the “enormous risk of apprehension” inherent to distributing scat content.

As UCLA law professor Eugene Volokh observed in a 2004 post republished by the Cat0 Institute, short of a massive effort to block and filter online content, paired with an equally massive effort aimed at prosecuting downloaders/users of obscene materials, there’s little prospect of the government having a substantial impact on the creation, distribution or consumption of obscene materials.

Since the DOJ has never, to my knowledge, even suggested that they are willing to go that far in attempting to rid the world (or at least the web) of obscenity, it raises a pair of questions for which I’ve yet to hear a satisfactory answer:

Is there a point to prosecuting producers of obscene materials? If so, what is that point?

Maybe the DOJ will answer that question somewhere along the line in its prosecution of John Stagliano, but I wouldn’t hold my breath, if I were you…. unless autoerotic asphyxiation is your thing, in which case, knock yourself out. 

In looking over the terms and conditions of an SMS messaging service provider, I encountered a curious little section about the various words and terms that their clients are NOT allowed to include in messages to their SMS subscribers.  Some of the terms ‘make sense’ to the extent that the words involved are considered pretty offensive, while others seem…. just plain odd. (“Manloaf?”)

For some reason, what I find most amusing about the chart below is the fact that it has two blank spaces. They couldn’t come up with two more examples to complete the grid?

George Carlin would have had a field day with this

Among other things, this list looks like a cheat sheet for the modern keyboard warrior. What is really striking is all the omissions; they provide “dickwad” as an example, but not “dick” itself? The same terms and conditions document I pulled this chart from does provide general guidance regarding explicit sexual language, crude words, profanity and hate speech…. but I’m still at a loss to explain the blank spaces in the example chart. Am I supposed to fill those in myself? It’s in alphabetical order, so I suppose I can limit my brainstorming to words that come after “wop,” alphabetically speaking.

How about Wristwatchcrisco and Yemenitehole in tribute to the late, great Frank Zappa? Too obscure?

Poor Steve Jobs; he just can’t seem to come up with a plausible response to what should be a simple question.

Whenever someone asks Jobs about the app store’s staunch “no porn” policy, he appears to be compelled to answer with fanciful blather regarding social responsibility, respect for women, or some tripe along those lines. The news and blog sites are abuzz with his latest laughable rationalization: Apple has a “moral responsibility to keep porn off the iPhone.”

Well, I hate to burst your bubble, Steve, but as I pointed out to the folks at XBIZ when they asked me for a comment, your company has created multiple devices that allow your customers to connect to this thing called “the Internet,” via software that your company authored, called “Safari.” If part of your goal was to “keep porn off the iPhone,” building a web browser into the device was rather antithetical to achieving that goal.

You see, out here on the Internet, porn is abundant. Perhaps you haven’t heard this Stevie, but I think I’m safe in asserting that your customers HAVE heard this. The reason I’m so confident in that assertion is that you and I actually have thousands of customers in common. How do I know? Another feature of the Internet is that we have all these magical, revolutionary devices called “web servers,” which are able to track a certain doohickey called the “user agent” and store data on such things, so that fellows like me can tell what sort of devices the people looking at our porn websites and mobile porn sites are using to view said sites.

Guess what? To the total lack of surprise of anyone NOT named “Steve Jobs,” there are thousands upon thousands of iPhone, iPod (and yes, now even iPad) owners browsing our porn sites, despite what I presume to be a forthright and earnest effort on your part to keep that from happening.

You see Steve, in addition to the legion of social conservatives and anti-porn crusaders within the Apple customer base (you know, the ones who evidently complained vociferously a couple months back about our app that showed women clad in bikinis?), it appears that many of your customers DO like porn, and DO want porn on their iWhatevers.

Look, I understand that appearing to endorse or condone porn can be a negative thing from a public relations perspective, and there are probably dozens of solid business reasons to avoid the appearance of being porn-tolerant. It’s just that I’m growing weary of having my intelligence insulted, and that’s what you’ve been doing lately every time you open your mouth about the app store’s anti-porn content policy: insulting the intelligence of app developers, the media, your competitors, and your customers.

Maybe the next time someone asks about porn and the iDevice-of-the-moment, you could just cut the crap for once and tell it like it is….? Just say “Look, this is a simple business decision, and one that I’m not inclined to discuss further. End of story.”

That  might not be real satisfying for headline-writers, but it has the benefit of being true, simple, final, and — best of all — it doesn’t make it seem like you think your customers are bunch of cretins incapable of finding Safari on the bottom menu, and subsequently typing a porn-related query into Google.

We’ve added a new offering to our growing collection of mobile properties — a new mobile retail store from which our fans can buy DVDs, download videos to your iTunes library or shop for a variety of other products. To check out the store, visit pinkvisual.com on your mobile device, and tap the “Order Pink Visual DVDs” link….Read More

Unless you’ve been living under a rock for the last few months, you know that the new iPad from Apple hits shelves here in the U.S. this Saturday. Since we also know that Apple’s app store is completely porn-unfriendly, Pink Visual has taken it upon ourselves to cover your iPad porn needs with a brand new site: PinkVisualPad.com! Just like our iPhone-optimized sites, PinkVisualPad was created with painstaking attention to detail, so it will look,…Read More

A mere three months after being approved for placement in Apple’s app store, the “Cutest Girls” app developed by adult entertainment studio Pink Visual was among the estimated 5,000 “overtly sexual” apps purged from the app store late last week. Although Pink Visual is renowned for its iPhone-optimized websites and web apps, including its flagship mobile site iPinkVisual.com, the studio has experienced “almost nothing but vexing frustration with …Read More

Ventura Content, the copyright-holding company for Pink Visual-branded content, announced today that it has filed a complaint with the US District Court for the Southern District of New York against Mansef, Inc. and 6721851 Canada Inc., alleging that the two companies have violated U.S. copyright laws by operating four websites that have reproduced, displayed, performed and distributed Ventura Content’s copyrighted material tens of millions of ti…Read More

The race for market share in the impending iPad porn market just got a lot hotter, as one of the leading providers of iPhone porn has thrown its pink, fuzzy pimp crown into the ring. Pink Visual, among the first adult entertainment studios to build sites optimized for the iPhone and a market leader in mobile porn distribution, announced today that it has already developed "core functionality" for www.PinkVisualPad.com, a new site optimi…Read More

Can’t wait to get your hands on the Conan O’Brien/Pink Visual Porno DVD? Well, get your hands on it before it’s even produced using Pink Visual’s Augmented Reality technology. Using a computer equipped with a cam, visit http://www.ipinkvisual.com/conan/ and print out the Pink Visual Logo Marker. Hold the Pink Visual marker angled towards your cam and voila…you have Conan The Bangbarian in your hands in your own home!…Read More