Apple Sued For Man's Porn Addiction

coolnumbr12 writes "Chris Sevier, a 36-year-old man from Tennessee, got so addicted to porn videos that his wife took his children and left him. Now he has sued Apple saying the company failed to install any filter in its devices to prevent his addiction. In a 50-page complaint, Sevier calls Apple a 'silent poisoner' responsible for the proliferation of 'arousal addiction, sex trafficking, prostitution, and countless numbers of destroyed lives.' Sevier is seeking damages from Apple, but said he we will drop the lawsuit if Apple agrees to sell devices with a 'safe mode.'"

Comments

False Flag

[digitrev]

Normally, I'm not this paranoid, but this reads like a false flag operation by some religious group looking to get filters installed by default. At the very least, I wouldn't be surprised to find out that they're helping fund this insane lawsuit.

Re:False Flag

[ArcadeMan]

Just because he's insane doesn't mean there's no religious group behind the lawsuit.

Re:False Flag

[Gription]

It is this sort of stupidity that I think the creationists could use as an effective argument against evolution.
- The fact that SO MANY people have no ability to take any responsibility for their actions and the fact that people don't overwhelmingly blast them for their insane helplessness seems to be some level of proof that humans have no evolved traits for any self responsibility. I would expect that self responsibility would have to be part of any sort of evolved survival traits.

(or maybe we need to release more tigers in our cities to get the old awareness going again...)

Re:False Flag

[Reverand Dave]

Usually one follows the other.

Re:False Flag

[Austerity Empowers]

If I am on a jury, and I hear "Addicted to porn", I'm going to have a really hard time remaining objective about the person speaking.

As such I'd probably get thrown off the jury and people who actually BELIEVE THIS SHIT will take my place.

Re:False Flag

[Anonymous Coward]

Personal responsibility is an invented concept driven by societal needs. Fundamental evolution doesn't work well with the concept. In fact shuffling responsibility onto others and suckering them into dealing with it is a fantastic survival strategy we can see throughout the animal kingdom.

Re:False Flag

[Reverand Dave]

This is the exact opposite. Humans are selfish and self-serving like no other species can be. This is a direct result of natural selection. Your ancestors weren't the ones holding the door so people could get through, they were the ones trampling old women and children to get theirs first. More recently however, helplessness is a trait that is bred and perpetuated by a society that is ok with just accepting things as is without explanation.

"How did the universe get here? I dunno, God did it." What is more lazy and helpless than that? It's pretty thematic through out the whole ID debate. Acceptance in spite of investigation and evidence to the contrary. That is the epitome of a lazy and entitled attitude IMHO.

That being said, fuck yeah, bring on the tigers.

Re:False Flag

[GameboyRMH]

Mod parent up, was just gonna say this.

Evolution doesn't give a damn how much of an irresponsible moron you are, only how much you reproduce. And irresponsible morons are especially good at that.

Re:False Flag

[mwvdlee]

Which type of people do you think procreate the most; people with or without a sense of responsibility?
There are whole MTV shows dedicated to demonstrating this principle of evolution.

Re:False Flag

[Artifakt]

I'm wondering if this particular Sevier lives in Sevierville. Seveirville is named after John Sevier, a pioneer settler to the region. That part of the state has literally thousands of people with some variant on Sevier as their last name; Mostly Seviers, but with Siviers, Seebers, Seibers, Severs, and even a few Xaviers. I know of only one sex shop in the Sevierville area, but I don't think it's out of business. (It calls itself "Sexy Stuf", and the ex and I don't patronize places that can't spell, but it looked open when we stopped at the Smoky Mountain Knife Museum (It's like a four story mall full of knife dealers, with taxidermied animals and indoor waterfalls, and I'd bet Mr. Sevier would love it if he can stop focusing on sex so much).
        Knoxville, 30 miles away or so, has lots of sex stores still open last I checked - Adult Superstore, Fantasy World, Intimate Treasures, Romantic Escapades, and others. Town and Country seems to be fading fast, but they're kinda disquieting (as in labeling the plus-size video's "fattyporn", and clerks who seem oddly judgemental), so I really doubt it's apple putting them out of business.

Re:False Flag

[amRadioHed]

Humans are selfish and self-serving like no other species can be.

Sure... if by "like no other species can be" you mean "exactly like every other species is".

Re:False Flag

[Golddess]

Hey now, I'll have you know I'm perfectly capable of being insane without needing a religious group backing me up, thank you very much. :P

Re:False Flag

[GameboyRMH]

Hey, he had kids already, evolution says he's doing better than any of us who don't have kids.

Re:False Flag

[Obfuscant]

but seriously we don't blame the heroine or meth for a junkie becoming a junkie.

We do, however, blame the guy standing on the street corner handing out free samples of dope trying to get people hooked.

I blame them for being less perfect than I am, just like this dude is.

FTFY. Humans are an imperfect animal with build in chemical and psychological pathways that can lead to dependency on many different kinds of things. Some people have had enough support early in their lives that they haven't made bad decisions that lead them down the bad pathways; some people haven't. That doesn't make the person pathetic or weak or even simple, it just makes him human.

Re:False Flag

[Anonymous Coward]

Reason and faith are only incompatible when they intersect to the detriment of the former. There's plenty of stuff that could logically exist that we have no evidence for, and possibly never will. You can select an outcome in those cases and they would have to be based on faith.

And as for everything else, most people without recourse to proper equipment or resources have to take many of the more obscure scientific theories on faith. Some people do not, and that is how you end up with conspiracy theories becoming prevalent in the face of scientific knowledge. Conspiracy theorists are fine with science itself, they just have no faith in the results that have been presented to them by certain authorities. That is an important difference.

Faith is not important for science, but it is important for the acceptance of the results of science, when those results are not obvious and easily repeatable by the layperson. Scientific advancement benefits as much from credulity, as you would put it, as religion does.

Re:False Flag

[HaZardman27]

Smokers didn't sue their local convenience stores where they bought their smokes, they sued the manufacturers of said tobacco products

What's even more bullshit, is that in this case, it is more like suing the company which built the truck used to haul the cigarettes from the factory to the convenience store. At least the convenience store made the conscious decision to sell cigarettes there. The truck company just built a damn truck, which happens to work on highways and is capable of moving cigarettes.

Re:False Flag

[fl!ptop]

either way he's not getting anything

Which is probably why he was addicted in the 1st place.

Re:False Flag

[hairyfeet]

Dude while you may be correct that real geniuses with vision have probably stayed at the same level when I was a kid we at least had a high percentage with what we called "street smarts" or basic common sense, now we seem to be creating people that are too fucking stupid as to even understand basic cause and effect, see the woman who fed nothing but Mickey D's to her kids for a decade and then tried to sue because she didn't know a decade of 24/7 fast food would make kids fat and diabetic as just one of a billion examples I could post here.

Maybe its because when I was a kid any woman that had a litter of kids by different men would have been looked upon as a whore and the guys who fathered those kids as worthless scum if they didn't step up but you didn't see the whole "half a dozen kids with half a dozen dead beat dads living like animals" shit like you do today. Hell when I come back from my babe's place, even late at night, I had to dodge kids just running loose like dogs, its seriously fucked up man, and its no wonder we are breeding so many dumbasses when you have kids that aren't being taught shit and left to run loose like animals needless to say their little brains are gonna get exactly jack and shit for stimulation.

At the end of the day you could take the smartest baby on the planet and put them in a house where nobody bothers to even talk to the kid and the babysitter is reality shows and they'll grow up to be just another moron on the march, you have to put in real effort and do the work when it comes to kids. I should know as I raised my two nephews as my sister lay dying and her ex, their father? Idiot. yet they are both HIGHLY intelligent and I would attribute that to constantly giving them new things to learn and do, if they wanted to play a video game? i would show them how the game was made, so that they knew how everything worked, i even let them build their own PCs at 11 years old, explaining how each piece they were installing worked and how the ones and zeroes were turned into images on a screen.

Maybe I'm just old fashioned but unless a kid has brain damage or some other mental defect if a kid ends up booger eating stupid i tend to blame the parents. Naturally they can't all be Einsteins but if there is two things little kids loooove its finding out how things work and using their imagination. If the parents would actually give a fuck instead of just letting their kids run wild and ignoring them? Then i think we could avert the march of the morons. Instead sadly it will more likely be like what i saw when I'd pick the boys up from one of their friends houses, a place without so much as a magazine in the house and parents that would just sit watching stupid shit that was the equivalent of "Oww my balls" while making sure junior had a console and a set to keep him out of their hair. Its no damned wonder we have so many dumbasses per square foot now, that is the seeds that society has sewn.

In Soviet Tennessee

[instagib]

pr0n looks for YOU!

safe mode

[RichMan]

Remove the battery. Your device is now configured in safe mode. Unless you are disturbed by a black screen the device is now configured not to present offensive material.

Any material is possible to be a problem to someone. As "safe mode" cannot be sufficiently defined yet leave the device with any function at all "safe mode" is impossible".

Re:safe mode

[alen]

remove the battery? this is an iphone we are talking about

Not his fault

[MrEricSir]

What was he supposed to do? It's not his fault Apple makes such sexy hardware.

Re:Not his fault

[cyclopropene]

What was he supposed to do? It's not his fault Apple makes such sexy hardware.

Get an iBurka?

Re:Not his fault

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

What was he supposed to do? It's not his fault Apple makes such sexy hardware.

Please observe the symbol on reverse side of your Apple product, facing away from the screen. Look at that: A tasty apple, with a bite taken out.

The fool. He picks up an internet connected device marked with the symbol of man's descent into sin(and nakedness) and then is surprised when his concupiscent flesh is besotted with unclothed harlots? Isn't that the most plausible outcome?

Re:Not his fault

[Rob Riggs]

Computers don't download porn; people download porn.

Personal Responsibility

[Sparticus789]

If this continues, every item sold within the US is going to have a 89-page disclaimer. It is bad enough that insulated cups have warnings about the contents being hot, now electronic devices need to have a disclaimer about the internet having pornography? This guy is literally, blaming the messenger (company that makes the device), for this his own actions and lack of self-control. Plenty of people can use the internet and even peruse sexual content without having their lives destroyed.

Maybe he should have tried getting a life and setting his priorities, instead of watching the Farrah Abraham video.

Re:Personal Responsibility

[DigitAl56K]

If this continues, every item sold within the US is going to have a 89-page disclaimer.

I believe Apple already serves this with every iTunes update.

Case dismissed!

Re:Personal Responsibility

[bonehead]

I remember a time when people were expected to take responsibility for their own actions. The world was a much better place then.

Now everyone who engages in anti-social / psychopathic behavior is a "victim". We blame government. We blame society. And best of all, we blame inanimate objects. But under no circumstances can we point out that the guy actually chose to behave in the way he did, and that he is entirely, 100% to blame for the situation he finds himself in.

(I'm not saying that viewing pornography is "in general" anti-social behavior, however, within the context of the boundaries of his marriage, it apparently qualified.)

I'm suing slashdot

[nitehawk214]

For years and years of not getting my work done.

Re:I'm suing slashdot

[DigitAl56K]

I'm suing slashdot

"... just as soon as I get off slashdot."

As a recovering porn addict, I find this stupid

[Anonymous Coward]

For several years, pornography ruled my life. I lost my family over it. I lost my self respect over it. It was causing such deep depression that I nearly lost my life over it. Being in IT, I could get around any filters. If I wanted porn online, I found porn online. Simple as that. I finally broke my addiction to it and got my life back together. So, I feel the pain of the person who TFA speaks of.

That all being said...

This. Is. Stupid. Why not just sue The Internetz and your ISP and your carrier and every person who's ever produced pornography, and Samsung for making iPhone screens and... you get the point.

Stopping the addiction does not rely on Apple blocking porn on your iPhone. It involves taking responsibility, getting help, and STOPPING.

Re:As a recovering porn addict, I find this stupid

[Anonymous Coward]

This.

I too am a recovering porn addict. 15 months 'sober.' There is much that could be discussed about the causes of, and methods of overcoming, a porn addiction, but blaming the manufacturers of devices is ludicrous. My last look at porn was on an iPad - which I no longer have.

With statistics showing that 50% or more of men now look at porn regularly, porn addiction is a pretty big deal. And no - it's not just a religious sort of thing. It's a ruining marriage, losing job, lost productivity, wasted time and money and quality of life sort of thing.

Re:As a recovering porn addict, I find this stupid

[Anonymous Coward]

Thanks to both of you for sharing this - I think it's an important point of view not often heard. A porn addiction can cause as much trouble as addiction to alcohol or controlled substances, and it is even more ubiquitous - you can always find it for free, and without ever being seen in public.

But this guy's case is without merit. It's like suing a grocery store for selling liquor to an alcoholic. I'm sorry, but personal responsibility here is the answer.

Re:As a recovering porn addict, I find this stupid

[AvderTheTerrible]

One could also argue that the near ubiquitous availability of porn is simply allowing men to get what they want without a lot of hassle. Namely dating, courtship, and maintenance of a girlfriend/wife who, while attractive, good company, and (hopefully) a very good friend, simply does not live up to the task of keeping the mans sexual drive satisfied.

Porn addiction should be looked at in a couple different directions.The first is the direction that is being talked about so far in this discussion, namely of men who can't control themselves and spiral out of control with an addiction.

Another direction to look is what kind of family life does he have? Does his gf/wife make sure to tend to his needs? Does she care enough about him to get interested in things that he enjoys, sex among them? If there is sex, is it kept interesting? Or has it gotten incredibly stale and any attempts to make it interesting have been failures, either because they just didn't work, or worse, because the woman had no interest in exploring those options and simply expected the man to be satisfied with what he had? Or is this man in a worst case scenario where he has tried his best to find companionship, only to be left out in the cold and judged as not worth anyone's time in a relationship?

What a lot of people need to come to terms with is simply that people have sexual urges. For extensive periods of time our societies have placed a great amount of weight on suppressing those urges and judging them to be "unclean", meaning that only the boldest or most well connected had access to avenues of sexual experimentation. Now with porn literally everywhere, everyone can experience, at least at a distance, almost anything sexually imaginable. The game has changed, quite literally.

With sexual freedom comes a lot of people discovering urges they may never have been able to realize they had. And to be honest up to this point the majority of those people discovering themselves sexually have been men. Women are getting there, but it is taking them longer because of natures built in sexual imbalances. And this is one of the main parts of the problem.

Men have discovered that they want more than to just take a girl out to dinner and a movie on a regular basis, and if they are lucky, they get to have sex on rare occasion. Men have discovered that they want to have sex a lot more often than in the past and women are taking a long time to adapt to these new sexual demands.

Women hold the keys to the sexual kingdom quite closely and refuse to open the gates unless great sacrifice is made in order to get there. Men have simply started to decide that the price of admission is too high, and they are choosing substitutions that are more easily accessible.

As misogynistic as it sounds, the porn problem is caused in part by women making themselves unrealistically unavailable when demand has never been higher. The same thing happens in any high demand, low supply market. High demand and unavailability of any alternatives means everyone competes tooth and nail to pay top dollar for one unit of the coveted item. Then something else that works to satisfy the same demand comes along and suddenly everyone starts to wonder why they're paying out the ass for the cow when the imitation milk is damn near free.

It's simple economics only with sex as the currency. Men want sex but are tired of having to pay for the hassle of dates that may not be enjoyable, relationships that become stale after so long, and escalating costs for lower and lower returns. Until women start to become sexually open as well, porn will continue to be a huge problem for society because men gotta have it, and now they don't need women to get it anymore.

Porn addiction is the end result of mens biological imperative being artificially suppressed for thousands of years by societies that looked down on it and left most men with little to no way of actually expressing it, and suddenly removing that suppression by way of all manner of se

I like it!

[wjcofkc]

While I think he's completely crazy to blame his addiction on Apple, the 'Safe-Mode' is not an altogether bad idea. Wouldn't it be nice to know your kids new MacBook had sex simply turned off?

It would take them days, perhaps even weeks to find a way to circumnavigate the measure. Just think how much our kids could learn about BSD! The really aspirational ones might even learn to cover their tracks with a terminal and Vim!

Man's Porn Addiction?

[Black Parrot]

What's with the redundancy in the headline?

Parental controls

[Quila]

It's been built-in for years. The problem is that a person with a problem isn't going to use them to restrict himself.

This Happens All the Time

[Grashnak]

Sevier claims that his addiction started when he “accidentally” replaced the “a-c-e” in Facebook with a “u-c-k.” Sevier said this F***book site “appealed to his biological sensibilities as a male,” and he started to prefer the images on the screen to his own wife.

Man, that happens to me all the time. One time, I reached for the skim milk and accidentally drank a 40oz bottle of vodka.

Another time, I was making a peanut butter sandwich and accidentally injected heroin into an artery.

Someone should pay!

Let's add

[SirGarlon]

Let's add that the US media run the most shocking, bizarre, or outrage-causing stories they can find, regardless of the actual importance of the events. Since our population is over 300 million, you can manage to find a couple of those stories every day if you have thousands of reporters scouring the country. Then they harp on those stories for weeks. This gives the impression that everyone in the USA is some kind of freak.

What disturbs me is the number of people here who believe it -- who carry a gun because they actually believe they'll get attacked, or who think they'll get sued if someone spills hot coffee.

So perhaps stupid lawsuits like this occur (rarely) in other countries as well, but the media don't deem them newsworthy so you don't hear about them.

Re:Let's add

[Joey Vegetables]

Just because you might never have been a victim of violent crime - which has a tendency to concentrate itself in certain geographic areas, including the one where I was born and still live today - does not mean everyone else is so fortunate. I grew up in what would now be considered the ghetto. From the time I started working around age 10 (delivering papers), until the time I got a car and moved to the suburbs, which was when I was in my early 20s, I was violently assaulted roughly every year. About two thirds of those times I fought off my attackers with a deadly weapon (although none of those times ever resulted injury to anyone - I only needed to display it for them, cowardly bullies they were, to turn around and run off). One time I was able to run to safety and another time I was able to lock myself in a room until the attackers left. But on the remaining 2 or 3 occasions I was beaten badly and robbed of everything I had on me. I was very lucky I did not get shot (there were guns pointed at me on all those occasions as well as one or two of the others). Now that I don't have to hang out at bus stops at weird hours of the night, and live in a relatively safe part of town, that kind of stuff doesn't happen to me anymore, but at one time it did, and during that time, the fact that I was armed very likely saved my life. Some of the people I grew up with have similar stories, and one of them (that I know of) was brutally murdered, for no apparent reason, 2 or 3 months ago. You may be sheltered enough not to have to worry about this sort of thing, but a lot of us are not so fortunate, and I think I can speak on behalf of many of them, at least, when I tell you that their decision of whether and how to arm, train, and protect themselves and those around them is absolutely none of anyone else's business.

The greatest commandment - love

[raymorris]

Weirdo fundamentalist sect <> faith

When Jesus was ask what was the greatest commandment, he said "love". Love your neighbor and love God, all the law and the prophets hang on those two, Christ said. So anyone teaching hate toward anyone is teaching the opposite of Christianity.

Certainly that happens, just as the guy selling fake "bomb detectors" claimed science, fools and charlatans sometimes claim God. Their claim is just as bogus though, as Christ clearly directed us to love those who oppose as we love ourselves, even fact even MORE than we love ourselves, love them as he loved us.