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24 Jul 2010 02:10

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Offbeat: Jury decides “Girls Gone Wild” doesn’t need hot coed consent

  • Through her actions, she gave implied consent. She was really playing to the camera. She knew what she was doing.
  • Jury foreman Patrick O’Brien • Describing the circumstances that made his jury side against an anonymous St. Louis woman who did not consent to being shown in a Girls Gone Wild video originally shot in 2004. The woman danced for a camera, but was unwilling to remove her top for the cameraman, only to have someone else pull it off instead. Even though she didn’t sign anything, they put her in the video anyway. “I was having fun until my top was pulled off. And now this thing is out there for the world to see forever,” said the plaintiff, when told of the jury’s reasoning. Despite all this, she was nominated for “Ass Clown of the Week” by the city’s alt-weekly, The River Front Times. Because she was asking for that, too. (They later apologized.) source

24 Jul 2010 01:07

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U.S.: Vacation rentals in NYC no longer on the table thanks to new law

  • Craigslist entrepreneurs in NYC: Sorry. After saying he would veto the law, New York Governor David Paterson passed a law banning short-term vacation rentals in the city, forcing people to go to licensed hotels instead. If you go to Craigslist, you’ll see quite the cottage industry exists for this kind of housing. NYC mayor and noted iPad fanatic Michael Bloomberg supported the measure: “When housing designated for permanent occupancy is illegally converted into a hotel, unsafe conditions are created, the residential character of City neighborhoods is harmed and the supply of much-needed units of housing is depleted,” he said. Or, more likely, this cottage industry bloomed because hotels in NYC are super-expensive and out of whack with the rest of the country. source