By some calculations, Fabian Thylmann is the biggest porn king of all time. But right now, he's stuck inside a Belgian jail.
MUNICH - Glasses. Hoodie. Bulky body. No gold chains, mink coat or oversized sunglasses. This guy is a pale-faced nerd -- a geek. His name is Fabian Thylmann, and he just happens to be the biggest porn king of all time.
The German multimillionaire changed the porn sector worldwide by coming up with a totally new business model. On his website Youporn, millions watch sex videos on a daily basis. Thylmann is just 34 years old.
But for a couple of days now, the man German magazine Focus dubbed the “ruler of the kingdom of pleasure” has been in jail. He is awaiting extradition from Belgium, his adoptive country, to Germany where he faces charges of tax evasion.
Assertions that his company empire was evading tax on a grand scale were first made by journalists from the German newspaper Die Welt. Thylmann sued, and won. But prosecutors opened a case, and a Düsseldorf regional court is now hearing it.
REGENSBURG, Germany, Aug. 21 (UPI) -- A German copyright law firm said it will publish a list of pornography pirates on its Web site at the start of September.
The firm, Urmann and Colleagues of Regensburg, said Tuesday it will publish a list of Internet connections used to pirate pornographic materials, starting with connections in police stations and church rectories, The Local.de reported Tuesday.
The firm, which represents several pornography sites, said the list will go up on its Web site Sept. 1.
The law firm said it will also send out thousands of cease-and-desist orders along with demands for compensation.
"As legal representative of its clients, the firm U+C warns owners of Internet connections who have violated copyright," the firm told Der Spiegel magazine. "These clients include companies from the pornography industry who believe their copyright has been violated."
A car salesman who supplemented his income by running a cottage industry, illegally selling adult pornography, has been given a suspended jail sentence.
Simon Pearce also received a hefty £10,000 court costs order and will have to carry out 200 hours of unpaid work.
When trading standards officers visited his home they found Pearce had a stock of 5,500 copied DVDs.
He had a price catalogue of "thousands and thousands" of titles.
The 44-year-old, of Newstead Way, Loughborough, pleaded guilty to possessing unclassified recordings and also British Board of Film Classification R-18 recordings for the purpose of supplying them, between January 2009 and January last year.
The High Court ordered O2 to hand over the personal details of more than 9,000 O2 broadband subscribers to Golden Eye International and the pornography firm Ben Dover Productions.
Ben Dover is a pseudonym of Lindsay Honey, a British performer, director and producer of pornography, who set up Golden Eye International in 2009.
The judge however said his intention to demand £700 from each of the O2 customers he accuses of unlawful filesharing was “unsupportable”.
The judge also said the letter Golden Eye International intended to send demanding payment was “capable of causing unnecessary distress because it could be read as an implicit threat of publicity once proceedings have been commenced”. It intended to threaten those who did not pay the damages with court action.
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The personal data of more than a million pornography connoisseurs has been exposed, after the YouPorn site was found to be storing email address and passwords on a public-facing server.
It appears that the information was being stored in a debug log file with a publicly accessible URL, according to security expert Anders Nilsson of the Swedish firm EuroSecure. Nilsson noted that, judging from the contents of the log file, it had been publicly accessible since around November 2007, and had been showing new registration data ever since then.
"For a security professional it is baffling how coders working on a website with such sensitive content can make mistakes of this magnitude," Nilsson wrote in a blog post on Wednesday. "Allegedly hundreds of megabytes of data has been secured by people with unknown goals. Cyber criminals can easily go through these e-mail addresses and match them with passwords and this way gain access to e-mail accounts."
According to the security expert, the debug log file was found on Tuesday, probably by "someone sweeping websites for publicly accessible, but hidden folders".
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