FITUG e.V.
Förderverein Informationstechnik und Gesellschaft
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------- Forwarded message follows ------- Date sent: Fri, 22 Sep 2000 21:01:56 -0400 To: politech@politechbot.com From: Declan McCullagh <declan@well.com> Subject: FC: Porn commissioners want more Net-prosecutions, convictions Send reply to: declan@well.com
[Or at least some of them do. --Declan]
http://www.wired.com/news/politics/0,1283,38901,00.html
COPA: Peddle Smut, Go to Jail by Declan McCullagh
3:00 a.m. Sep. 20, 2000 PDT WASHINGTON -- Porn peddlers should be prosecuted, say members of a federal smut commission.
Conservative members of the Commission on Child Online Protection suggested during a meeting Tuesday that the government should shield Junior from dirty pictures by imprisoning owners of "obscene" websites.
"I think the deterrent effect is key here," said Commissioner Donna Rice Hughes. "One of the main reasons we are seeing so much activity in the area (of online pornography) is because they're not getting prosecuted."
Hughes, a former Gary Hart gal pal turned anti-porn advocate and author, said that "one well-placed prosecution could send the message to the providers of this material that it's not acceptable."
But it's not quite that simple: A federal appeals court in June blocked prosecutors from filing cases under a new anti-erotica law -- ironically, the same one that created the commission. The law makes displaying "harmful to minors" materials online a crime.
That leaves existing federal obscenity laws as the Justice Department's remaining lock-up-the-miscreants option.
"Prosecution in a well-defined way is a good idea," said Michael Horowitz, chief of staff to the Justice Department's assistant attorney general for the criminal division and a commission member. "But it can't be in a splash-bang-wild, whatever-you're-going-to-hit method."
Anti-porn activists in the past have lobbied the Justice Department to file more Net-obscenity cases, saying that the relatively few federal lawsuits that have been brought demonstrate that the Clinton administration is neglecting children online.
The most recent variation of U.S. obscenity law grew out of the 1973 Miller v. California Supreme Court case, which upheld a law banning the distribution of material that is arousing but "lacks serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value." But obscenity laws date back much further, to prosecutions in England in the early 1700s, and were derived from religious prohibitions against blasphemy.
Critics say obscenity laws violate free speech rights guaranteed by the First Amendment.
Edward de Grazia, one of the founders of Yeshiva University's Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law, outlines in Girls Lean Back Everywhere: The Law of Obscenity and the Assault on Genius how obscenity prosecutions imperiled James Joyce's Ulysses, Lenny Bruce's monologues, and 2 Live Crew's lyrics.
[...]
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