Voyeur Dorm

Articles about the Voyeur Dorm and its legal battles with the city of Tampa.

A Federal judge ruled Monday in favor of the city of Tampa in its attempt to force the Voyeur Dorm to move out of a local residential area. The city tried to evict the internet porn site last year, arguing that running an adult entertainment business in the residential area violated zoning restrictions, but the site's operators sued to remain open. As of Thursday, however, the site was still active and accepting new subscribers, so the battle is apparently not over. (Link expired) . . . Jane Duvall analyzes the Voyeur Dorm case in more detail for YNOT News, a resource center for adult webmasters.
Yahoo | YNOT News (Nov 2000)

While they try to kick the Voyeur Dorm out of town, the city of Tampa is targetting other adult entertainment businesses in a full-blown smut sweep.
St. Petersburg Times (Nov 2000)

Tampa's war on Internet voyeur sites continues. On Wednesday, city police and code inspectors raided the Dude Dorm (which is operated by the same company that runs Voyeur Dorm) and briefly shut down the webcasts.
Tampa Tribune (Mar 2001)

The Voyeur Dorm takes its case to the Court of Appeals in Atlanta, hoping to stave off eviction from its house in Tampa. The city of Tampa says Voyeur Dorm is an adult business that violates zoning laws, but the people who run Voyeur Dorm say they're no different from any other internet business that operates out of a home.
10 News (Jul 2001)

The owners of Voyeur Dorm have won their case on appeal and can continue to operate from a Tampa house. (For the unitiated, Voyeur Dorm is sort of an adult version of Big Brother. A group of college-age women share a large house in Tampa fitted with dozens of videocameras, and subscribers can watch them eat, sleep, shower, work on their tans and have naked pillow fights. The same company also runs an all-male version called Dude Dorm.) The city had tried to shut down the Voyeur Dorm for zoning violations, arguing that the operation constituted an adult entertainment business in a residential area. The owners countered that no actual business took place at the house, since the site's viewers, servers and management were located elsewhere. A district court originally ruled in favor of the city, but the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals in Atlanta reversed that decision on Friday.
Tampa Tribune (Sep 2001)

At Wired, Noah Shachtman discusses Voyeur Dorm's legal victory against the city of Tampa, which he calls "great news for Internet smut sellers, because it sets a precedent that blue businesses can operate without legal interference from their communities." An overstatement, methinks. Elsewhere, Adult Video News talks to Luke Lirot, lawyer for Voyeur Dorm, about the case. "The 11th Circuit cut through the city’s attempt to inflame the issues by going in great and graphic detail of some of the lurid descriptions of some of the limited and isolated occurrences of the exposure of anatomical areas, etc. But the 11th Circuit looked at the legal issues and properly embraced the important First Amendment concerns that we had tried to articulate." (You can check out Voyeur Dorm or its all-male companion site Dude Dorm here.)
Wired | AVN (Sep 2001)

A week after the Voyeur Dorm won the legal right to keep broadcasting from its Tampa house, another "college girls sharing a house wired with cams" site, Ucanwatch.com, has abandoned its legal battle and moved out of its waterfront mansion in the Tampa suburb of Tarpon Springs. As in the Voyeur Dorm case, the city had charged Ucanwatch.com with multiple zoning and business license violations, while the site's owner argued that no actual business took place at the house.
St. Petersburg Times (Oct 2001)

Voyeur Dorm

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