Gene Simmons is not a suspect

There's a raid on a house by police looking for child pornography. The house is owned by someone famous, but police go out of their way to stress that the suspect is not the famous person, nor a member of their family; and that the famous person is not a suspect.

The press still use the famous person's name at the front end of the headlines, and a massive photo of him.

It might not even be that someone from the house downloaded anything; it could just be the IP address. And Simmons wasn't even in the country when the alleged offence occurred.

But the AP report still ends with two lines about Simmons:

Phone and email messages to Simmons' publicist were not immediately returned.

The 65-year-old Simmons has been a central member of KISS since the early 1970s. His family was the subject of a reality TV series that aired for several years.

Yes, they were. But not the subject of the story you've just filed.

Tumblrgem: NSFW

I'm not sure anyone actually asked for this, but here's a Lady GaGa discography via tattoos in gay porn. (Nobody has yet had the Tony Bennet collaboration etched across their butts)

http://yung-ninetales.tumblr.com/post/120799848508/lady-gagas-discography-in-gay-porn-tattoos

Taylor Swift porn site shows the problem with dot porn

From Taylor Swift's perspective, you can see the justification for her (or her management colossus) lashing out to buy taylorswift.porn and taylorswift.adult.

Because if she doesn't, someone else will.

When the .porn and .adult top level domains were announced, some voices suggested that these might be problematic as some brands or people might feel they have to buy their own names in the spaces to stop other organisations snapping them up.

And that's what's happened here.

In other words, Taylor Swift has been approached by an organisation and offered the opportunity to hand over thousands of dollars, in order to protect her image.

That's a shakedown, surely?

Harry Styles likes porn

What's probably most interesting about the 'Harry Styles twitter account has a favourite on a porn picture' is this bit:

The singer first favourited the image back on May 22, but followers have only just noticed and began reacting on the microblogging site.

It took over a month for someone, anyone to notice? What sort of shabby obsessives are One Direction fans, exactly? Back when I was a nipper, if Simon LeBon changed his Sunday paper from the Times to the Telegraph, Duranies would have had a pile of Sunday Telegraph magazines burning by sunset, and that was without the internet.

Yet one of One Direction can put a star on a vagina, and the hundreds of thousands who claim to be obsessed don't even notice for over a month?

Unless, of course, the favouriting only just happened, but on an old picture, but that would mean DigitalSpy don't understand how Twitter works and that's unpossible, right?

So, DS, what happened?

Harry Styles appears to have publicly favourited a pornographic image on Twitter, unaware that fans can see it.

It is not clear whether the One Direction star intended to favourite the picture believing it would be hidden or whether he was hacked.

There is a third possibility that doesn't seem to have occurred to DS, which is that Harry favourited the photo knowing it would be public. Or the fourth, more likely possibility, that whoever is "Harry Styles" for the purposes of Twitter wanted to favourite the photo on their personal account, but were logged into their work account.

Fans have now managed to get the hashtag #HarryDontLickAnything into Twitter's worldwide Trending chart.

You're telling him to not lick anything? WHAT SORT OF FANS ARE YOU?

Gennaro Castaldo Watch: Softcore porn is business

Ah, we hadn't heard from Gennaro Castaldo since he left HMV. He did leave HMV, although he hasn't updated his LinkedIn profile. Perhaps like other parts of the HMV social universe, the password was handed to an intern and never surrendered?

Anyway, you can't keep a good thought-wrangler down and we've got the first sighting of him in his new home, defending porny pop videos for new employers, the BPI.

He appeared on ITV news:

Explicit music videos should be made available to the public in a responsible age-appropriate way but should not be banned completely, Gennaro Castaldo of the British Recorded Music Industry told ITV News.

Now, obviously, there are music videos which are explicit because the music they represent is explicit - and banning things is bad. I guess that far we can go with Gennaro.

The problem, though, is that the music industry is using sexist sexy videos for songs they're aiming largely at kids. That's what we need to talk about, surely, and the conversation Gennaro didn't seem interested in having:

"We have been speaking to digital service providers about whether they could introduce age-based filters. That could be one way of solving this problem," Mr Castaldo said.

"Rather than trying to stop content by banning or censoring it, it’s about how to make it available in a responsible fashion."

You see? The problem isn't the music industry selling Robin Thicke by getting women to show their tits, it's the fault of "digital service providers" for not stopping kids from seeing it.

This is similar to the way that guns don't kill people, it's people failing to have bulletproof skin that kills people.

But, hey, just to drift further from the point, maybe a spot of meaningless cultural relativism could help?

Mr Castaldo said the industry takes the issue extremely seriously, but pointed out that "values move" on and that "back in the 50s, people were scandalised by Elvis Presley."

Yes, Gennaro. Values move on. Back in the 70s, people thought it was okay to sell any product - cars, nuts, shock absorbers - by sticking a woman in a bikini into an advert. We've moved on from there. When will the BPI join us?

Kasabian aren't lads, you know

Serge Pizzorno opens his heart to Metro, the poor misunderstood lamb:

What are peoples’ misconceptions of you?
That we’re boozy knob head lad-rock dicks – but when we release albums such as West Ryder, people are surprised. It’s always made us laugh. Those first few articles people write about you stay with your forever. It’s annoying but it’s good to surprise people. Some journalists just rehash all that stuff even if it’s not the truth.

Yeah, come on, journalists - stop giving the impression of Kasabian as being leery, beery lads. It's ages in the past that they were like that - why, it's nearly two whole months since they went on Absolute Radio at breakfast time and honked about buying porn magazines and wanking.

Another delight of the piece is the discovery that Kasabian still nurse a grudge against the now-defunct Cooper Temple Cause:

Playing with the Cooper Temple Clause in Wrexham when we first started. The gig was fine but they were miserable b******s. We were a young band and they’d had singles out – they treated us like s***. I remember thinking: ‘I’m not turning out like those f***ers.’ Musicians should try to help each other out. The ones who are too cool for that soon disappear but there are some who slip through the net and annoy you forever.

It doesn't seem to have even flitted through Serge's mind that, quite possibly, the CTC didn't warm to Kasabian turning up, Razzles under their arms, and that might have been why they didn't embrace them. And, frankly, who could blame them?

Jazz FM becomes Jizz FM

Listeners to Jazz FM on Saturday night had something of a surprise - the jazz stopped, and was replaced with what appears to have been the sounndtrack of a gay porn movie.

Which most people would probably have viewed as an improvement, but not the management at the station. MediaGuardian reports:

The unlikely interruption to the station's Funky Sensation programme was blamed by management on "unauthorised activity and inappropriate behaviour in the studio".

That really does make it sound like it wasn't a movie soundtrack, doesn't it? Let's hope they just mean somebody watching porn.

I think that would be better than actually having sex in the studio, wouldn't it?

More meat dresses

An email from the wonderful Morag in response to yesterday's piece about GaGa's meat dress not being entirely original:

in 1982 linder sterling made a dress out of chicken meat (she stressed it was leftovers from takeaways being a veggie) which she wore during a performance at the hacienda, partly as a protest about the venue showing soft porn. she ripped the skirt off (this was the year bucks fizz won eurovision) to reveal a massive dildo. Wonderful.

i suspect someone will have a medieval version with ruffs to best me on this but nevermind

Here are the remains of that very dress:

Nobody thought to gather up the scraps to put in a museum, as far as I know.

Lee Ryan wants to be Robin Askwith

You might not want to read this if you have already had breakfast, as Lee Ryan wants to appear in porn:

"I'd love to do porn. I would! I think I'd be great. I'd be brilliant.

"I wouldn't stop though, that's the hard thing about being a porn star."

No, Lee, I think you'll find there's something else that's har... oh, never mind.

I can think of nothing more like to destroy the desired effect of a porn movie than having balloon-faced half-wit Lee Ryan suddenly loom into the scene.

Lee, though, seems to think he's some sort of hot dude:

: "There's lots to be jealous of in this industry - we're surrounded by beautiful women.

"I've been with people in the industry and not - and they both suck.

"It's just I haven't had one great relationship - every relationship I've had has been shit."

You've tried people in "the industry" - Lee, in case you don't know, has a job in the standing up and opening and closing his mouth in time to the backing track business - and you've tried people not in the industry, and yet every time it's shit. Have you thought what the one constant is in all your relationships, Lee?

The music industry takes on the porn industry

It's always nice when the music industry thinks of someone new to sue. Now, they're going after the porn industry for using songs in wankflicks without paying royalties.

Pornographers against music industry lawyers. It's hard to know who you want to come off much, much worse.

Interestingly, the record labels have decided to demand back royalties rather than just telling them to stop. Because the RIAA are so greedy, they don't care if the cash is spunk-stained. Because all they care about is the cash. Who cares where it comes from?

"Child pornography is great" says Danish music industry lobbyist

Michael M suggested this Boing Boing headline might be the headline of the year:

Music industry spokesman loves child porn

The story comes from Pirate MEP Christian Engstrom's website:

"Child pornography is great," the speaker at the podium declared enthusiastically. "It is great because politicians understand child pornography. By playing that card, we can get them to act, and start blocking sites. And once they have done that, we can get them to start blocking file sharing sites".

The venue was a seminar organized by the American Chamber of Commerce in Stockholm on May 27, 2007, under the title "Sweden -- A Safe Haven for Pirates?". The speaker was Johan Schlüter from the Danish Anti-Piracy Group, a lobby organization for the music and film industry associations, like IFPI and others...

"One day we will have a giant filter that we develop in close cooperation with IFPI and MPA. We continuously monitor the child porn on the net, to show the politicians that filtering works. Child porn is an issue they understand," Johan Schlüter said with a grin, his whole being radiating pride and enthusiasm from the podium.

How brilliant, eh, that kids are being raped and abused because of the upside for the record labels? Sure, if one or two of those kids might, you know, disappear, they're just collateral damage in the bigger war of keeping Bono in the manner to which he's become accustomed, right?

Interesting to discover that the music industry lobbyists are "monitoring child porn sites" - isn't that what got Pete Townshend into trouble?

Porn protests on YouTube: something, of some sort, should be done

In some sort of protest at YouTube removing music videos, protestors have been sticking a bunch of porn videos up onto the YouTube servers:

One user believed to have uploaded some of the pornographic material videos is Flonty, whose profile states that he is 21 and from Germany.

He told the BBC: "I did it because YouTube keeps deleting music. It was part of a 4Chan raid.

BBC Have Your Say users are equally, sort of worried, for reasons they can't put their fingers on, either:

YouTube delete music because they have to by law. Half the time you'll end up with a same copy of that same song elsewhere on YouTube anyway, and even then there are other sources for music. Children DON'T JUST find porn that easily. What about people at work who have a legitimate reason for using YouTube? How would one go about explaining porn to their boss?
Tony Williams, Liverpool

Given that the porn has been hidden amongst Jonas Brothers and Hannah Montana material, you might wonder what job it is that involves watching this area of YouTube at work.

Presumably, though, if your boss came in and found you staring at a butt-donut, or a session of naval-drubbing, you could simply say "look, here's a report on the BBC website about how you can't avoid porn on YouTube at the moment. And, erm, I think it also explains why I'm not wearing pants right now."

YouTube is a privately owned site. Why do people feel entitled to use the site as they please? Do they help pay for bandwidth? Google ultimately has governance of what content should be on a site that they own. In most parts of the world, anyone is free to set up their own personal website with streaming content for their cause. Let's just see how many views is generated beyond their own interest group.
Sophie, Toronto, Canada

Sophie starts off with a good point - Google do own YouTube, and can do with it is as they see fit - but then lurches off in a frankly odd direction. "Go on, put things on the internet and see how many people who aren't interested in your things look at your things". None, I'd guess. It wouldn't exactly prove anything, though, would it? A herpetology website isn't going to attract any views from people who aren't that interested in amphibians or reptiles, but it doesn't mean that there's something wrong with toads, does it?

But Sophie seems to be implying that people go to YouTube to look at things that they aren't interested in. Can that be right?

A lot of comments here seem to excuse this behaviour because "kids need to learn how they get here". As if parents should take this mindlessness as an opportunity to educate their children on sex and procreation.
RB, Florida

Also, of course, quite a lot of the videos don't really help on the procreation front, just raising extra questions along the lines of "and so how do Daddy's fishes then get from the tied-up lady's face into her belly?"

True, there's porn on millions of sites which children could easily have access to, but there is a significant difference between that and interest groups purposely tricking and delivering porn to children in a Hannah Montana package on YouTube .
Tiya, Miami, Fl

But if your kids are that young, you'd be supervising their time online and would have been able to leap in at the first sight of something unsavoury, right? Hello? Right?

Yes, yes, we've all seen the words "Hannah Montana package", but let's try and keep some decorum, shall we?

"Moderate all the uploaded videos? Are you insane?" said Michael, he's right because latest reports from a few days ago indicate 20 hours of video are uploaded every second. The only solution is to charge users for uploading content, while watching remains free.
Ian Mayman, UK

Ian Mayman doesn't say whereabouts in the UK he's from, but I'm betting it will be somewhere around 76 Buckingham Palace Road. Still, charging people to provide content for Google to sell advertising around - neat idea, Ian.

For those who wanted to protest the loss of music from Google, it doesn't seem very inventive to upload porn to YouTube. If they really wanted to make a more distinguished protest, they could have plainly made a video of their own and uploaded it instead of acting cowardly as they have.
Kelly , Crofton, BC, Canada

Kelly neglects to mention how much time she had been giving to the question of music on YouTube prior to this story appearing, nor if she has extrapolated that this sort of discussion is taking place because of the porn in a way that wouldn't have happened with a worthy piece.

It doesn't make it right, of course. And, in one of the few comments that is actually delivering a coherent thought, Nicholas Mills points out it could be counter-productive:

This could be a serious problem - not because of the idea that children could see this material but because it's a rare occurrence which could cause catastrophic results: censorship. And serious censorship at that - with people using this incident as an excuse to begin censoring video's not suitable for children. Youtube is a fantastic medium that self-censors amazingly well - what, I hope, people understand is that this is one situation and a minority out of the majority of users that post non-pornographic content and follow the rules.
Nicholas Mills, Glasgow, Scotland

Kanye West won't do porn. Not bisexual porn, anyway.

Whoever hacked into Kanye West's accounts did a nice job, planting a public seed that West was, well, willing to plant a public seed:

“I know that people will find this as another thing to hate on, but f--- it. I’m open to doing porn. Hell, I’ll even do bisexual scenes - myself, another man, and a woman, or just me and two women. I know people will find that as some weird sh--, but I am who I am.”

Of course, there wasn't a word of truth in it. Well, probably. The real Kanye popped up - sorry, ill-advised choice of phrase - and put everyone straight:

"Yoooo, why won't you let me be great!!!" West wrote. "I had the two greatest days of my life, and when I get back from the Louie [sic] show, I read some sh-- claiming I said I'm down to do porn and some bisexual porn!!!! I can't believe the AVN [Adult Video News] would post [that story]."

He seems especially upset that he was supposedly going to do bisexual porn, doesn't he?

Assuming, of course, that this message was the real Kanye. There are a lot of impersonators - haters, if you will; impersonhaters, presumably - pretending to be Kanye:

"First people believed the Twitter/ Stephen Colbert thing, Rolling Stone even printed it!!!!" he said. "Now somebody has been hacking into my MySpace and somebody's actually hacked into my personal GMail account and has been e-mailing people from it. ... Hey, world, I no longer have GMail! I found out I had twelve unauthorized Skype accounts under my name!!! This [is] all in the past four days. Welcome to Kanye West World!"

Surely, though, someone as supposedly cool as Kanye wouldn't start a message with something so cringe-inducing as "why won't you let me be great", or sprinkle his public utterances with so many exclamation marks he makes himself read like a twelve year-old. The only logical explanation is that there is no real Kanye West any more.

The Source cans the sauce

The economy? Is there even still an economy in America? Isn't that why everyone is huddling together for warmth in the parks by the Smithsonian?

With the downturn now so bad the US Treasury is thinking of issuing Pogs instead of Dollars, it's perhaps counter-intuitive for The Source to be turning away adverts. But it is, taking a gamble that refusing "booty ads" (porn, escort services, that sort of thing) might make the magazine a bit more mainstream and tempt a higher quality of advertisers. Sure, it's a profit-driven principle, but at least it's still principled.

The Daily Mail has a short memory

While getting agitated with Madonna over her suitcase adverts, the Mail screeches:

Put it away Madonna! Heavily airbrushed singer strikes raunchiest pose ever in latest Louis Vuitton ad

Raunchiest pose ever? Madonna? This would be the Madonna who not only did the Sex book showing her being taken from behind by Vanilla Ice, but also did proper porn when she was younger, would it, Chris Johnson of the Mail?

"But, but... they really did make a KitKat advert..."

The Daily Mail is a little flushed with the news that a bloke - a "civil servant", apparently - is being charged with crimes arising from writing fanfic.

Admittedly, his fanfic was extreme - as the Mail painstakingly details:

Walker is accused of posting the article on a fantasy porn website.

It allegedly described in detail the kidnap, mutilation, rape and murder of Girls Aloud members Cheryl Cole, Nadine Coyle, Sarah Harding, Nicola Roberts and Kimberley Walsh.

Unpleasant, certainly, but is it pornographic? To the point where it requires prosecution rather than, say, the suggestion the author might like to nip out and meet some actual women to talk to?

And isn't there a slight suspicion that the prosecution has been arrived at not because of the content of the stories, but because of the characters? There are lots of tales of kidnap, rape and murder written that don't attract this sort of attention from the police. It's not entirely comfortable to picture people sitting down writing stories about real people being raped and dismembered for fun, but if the worry is that that person is obsessing over a pop star, shouldn't that be the focus of response rather than going "and it's lewd, too, so you're going to court, young fellermelad"?

The Mail seems a bit confused about what it is the accused has actually done:

A civil servant is being prosecuted under the Obscene Publications Act for a blog in which he allegedly details the kidnap and murder of Girls Aloud.

So, it was a blog, was it?

Oh... maybe not:

Walker is accused of posting the article on a fantasy porn website.

So it was an article, then?

Headlined 'Girls (Scream) Aloud' it is said to have run to 12 pages.

Although, admittedly, they do have the margins set incredibly widely on the Northcliffe House printers these days.

Maybe the Mail should hire someone to write technology-related stories for them - twelve pages? Of what? A4? A5?

The Mail rounds off its coverage - and I'm using 'round off' in the sense of 'pads out' - with the biggest ragbag of background information imaginable. It's perhaps the only time the wording of the 1959 Obscene Publication Act has shared space with a brief explanation of the mechanism employed by Popstars: The Rival to arrive at a winner.

Somewhat oddly, then, an article which is supposedly about online obscenity ends with this:

They reached Number One in the charts with their debut single Sound Of The Underground and have had 18 consecutive Top 10 singles - a record.

There's a lingering suspicion that the Mail might be attempting to explain that a "single" is also known as a record, rather than reporting the band's entry into the Guinness Book.

R Kelly: An innocent man, at last

Not long ago:
The jury has acquitted R Kelly of all 14 charges related to the sex video.

R Kelly trial: Defence concludes "It wasn't me" defence

We're a bit confused about the R Kelly defence team at the trial - we could understand adopting a 'it wasn't me on the video' line, or a 'the video has been altered to make it look like me' approach. But can you really say "that doesn't even look like me, and it's been altered to look like me"?

We'll find out soon - the defence team have rested their case after concluding with what seemed to be a session pitching for the best animated short at next year's Oscars:

Defense expert Charles Palm made the clip from a section of the sex tape at the center of the case, using special effects to illustrate how easy it is to digitally manipulate video. The defense hopes Palm can successfully refute the evidence of prosecution expert Grant Fredericks, who said that the tape could not have been digitally altered. Parts of the media have dubbed this the "Little Man Defense" or the "Wayans Defense."

The clip showed the couple on the tape having sex in what the state says is the hot tub room at Kelly's former home. Their bodies slowly become transparent, then slowly reappear. Then their heads slowly disappear until their two headless bodies are romping. At one point, the man on the tape - his head intact - appears to be having sex with a headless woman.

The heads come and go "like ghosts" on the manipulated tape Palm said.

Much hangs on a mole which may or may not appear on the man's back in the video. Prosecution belief is that it's Kelly's mole; the defense suggests it's "artefacts on the recording" which come and go.

R Kelly trial: PI claims witnesses solicited bribes

Jack Palladino, who is some sort of top-drawer celebrity private investigator - turned up in Chicago today for his part of the R Kelly trial. He'd had a meeting with prosecution witness Lisa Van Allen - last week, she told the court that he'd taken the opportunity to threaten her; today, he suggested that, actually, what happened was the she and her fiance had attempted to blackmail R Kelly using him as the go-between.

Although, apparently, not by actually directly asking for money. Because that would have been tacky, and this whole story is about class:

According to Palladino, Brown solicited the bribe by mentioning a $300,000 book deal Van Allen potentially had to tell the story of her life with Kelly.

"I didn't believe there was a book deal. The $300,000 was a coded way to get money from my client," Palladino said. The investigator said he unequivocally told Brown that Kelly would not pay them anything.

On cross-examination, prosecutor Bob Heilingoetter noted that neither Brown or Van Allen had ever explicity asked for money.

"I'm trying to figure out where this extortion is, except somewhere between your ears," Heilingoetter said.

But Palladino testified the two repeatedly said they wanted to do what was best for their family and urged the investigator to talk to Kelly.

Interesting note: Palladino got paid fifteen grand just for flying to Atlanta and having the conversation with the pair. It might have been cheaper for Kelly to have paid off the blackmailers. If that is what they were.

Turning the wheels of justice - slowly

The Sun-Times is watching the R Kelly child porn trial with more attention to detail than, frankly, many of us could stomach, but it's turning up some rare gems.

They're still at the jury selection stage, with one otential getting himself excused through his grasp of reasonable doubt:

"Child pornography is immoral, people. R. Kelly may have led the Taliban to attacking us on 9-11, but you can't prove it."

For this reasonableness, he was allowed to go home.

[Thanks to Jack B for bringing the blog to our attention]