The proposed tax bill also includes some things that have been invalidated by the courts any number of times already (see COPA, COPAII):
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Originally Posted by AVNONLINE
The draft bill not only sought to fund its own enforcement and other child-protection efforts by levying a 25-percent tax on all Internet pornography transactions, but also mandated that “regulated pornographic websites” use “software certified for that purpose” to verify all users attempting to access the sites are 18 years of age or older. Although the concept of certified age-verification software was left undefined in the draft legislation, a “regulated pornographic website” was defined as “a person required to maintain documents verifying the age of persons engaged in sexually explicit conduct pursuant to section 2257(a) of title 18, United States Code.”
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The entire "restricted access" issue has been pushed around any number of times, and fails every time.
As a side note, I think if you look at most of the recent "anti-porn" laws that have either been passed or floated, you will see that they are intentionally including wording and / or concepts that have been shot down in court.
I have a theory on this: They know that the laws will be invalid on their face. They know that the wording as proposed would never stand up in court. The intention isn't to regulate our industry, it is to look good for voters that "you tried something but them damn courts cut us down". The law makers look good with their more conservative voters, and they don't get the backlash of the more liberal voters who want to see porn.
Why else would the new DOJ regulation include, to the word, regulations that were already shot down in Reno v. Sundance? More importantly, it is the words that the court specifically used to shoot reno down.
Why else did Ashcroft take COPAII back into court for another run rather than work on a new bill? It isn't about willing the "war on porn", it's about appearing to be doing something while in fact doing nothing, and tying us all up in legal knots while they are doing it.
Alex