The Associated Press reports that Playboy Enterprises, Inc. will be in court today to press criminal charges against a French women's magazine that reproduced images from Playboy photo shoots. France's strict intellectual property law allows plaintiffs to choose between the civil and criminal courts, and those convicted theoretically can be imprisoned for up to two years.

Voici defends itself on several grounds: that the pictures were free publicity for Playboy, and may help rather than hurt its sales; that Voici's 70 percent female readership does not overlap greatly with Playboy's; that Playboy itself has used images from other publications; and that the images reproduced in Voici are too small to be a substitute for Playboy's full-page spreads.

In other international sex-industry news, prostitutes in Greece (which licenses the trade) successfully lobbied to cut the 200 meter distance from churches, schools and charities required by law to 100 meters, thus enabling them to get closer to the areas frequented by tourists.