Hardcore Czechs

Baldwin Louie — Fri, 18 May 2001 15:00:00 -0700

Who'd be a first lady? The Czech president, Vaclav Havel, is taking legal action against the owner of a pornographic Web site named after his wife, Dagmar. According to CNN, the site displays "several sexual acts including some with women resembling the Czech Republic's first lady". A spokesman for the Czech president said that the owner of the domain "may have committed the crimes of violating others' rights, compromising morality and unauthorised enterprise".

Newsbytes, which obligingly gives us the link to www.dagmarhavlova.cz, remarks that "many Czech citizens remain unimpressed with the president's second wife", a former actress. The Prague Post elaborates on this: it seems that the president's wife is "being dragged into a swirl of tabloid-spawned rumours of infidelity".

The owner of the offending site is Miroslav Blahovec, who explains that he would obey the law if it said he couldn't register the domain name, but "the team of lawyers for the company that runs the page didn't find anything that was against the law". A co-founder of a company that helps people buy Web addresses adds: "In the Czech Republic, there is no cyberlaw at all." Companies such as Cesky Mobil, which runs the Oskar network, have been forced to change their site names because squatters got in first. In an added bizarre touch, Blahovec originally obtained dagmarhavlova.cz by swapping it "like a baseball card" with a friend, for miloszeman.cz.

Meanwhile, Scottish police have been doing their bit for sexual awareness by referring children to a Russian porn site, according to the Register yesterday. It's all a terrible mistake, though, the Tayside force had been handing out leaflets to schoolchildren recommending that they visit the Drugsaware Web site to "learn about the dangers of drugs". However, the company owning the site ceased trading and the domain name was bought by a "Russian porn peddler". According to Inspector Gordon Nicoll, "a substantial number of leaflets" have had to be destroyed.

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