FEDERAL OBSCENITY LAW????

[LindaMight]

Originally Posted by Lemmy

Nice to hear someone is getting FSC newsletters so they can share it with the rest of us.

Good thing the Family Research Council neither makes nor enforces the law. Bunch of fuckin' hypocrites.

For anyone who has not seen this article from FSC....here it is:

ICANN FACES PRESSURE ON .XXX DOMAIN
WASHINGTON, DC -- Michael Gallagher, assistant secretary at the Commerce Department, recently asked for a hold to be placed on the contract to run the new top-level .xxx domain, until the suffix can receive further scrutiny. In response, ICANN, the Internet’s key oversight agency, agreed to a one-month delay in approving the new domain. All this happened at the last minute, with meetings already scheduled for final approval and all systems “go.” Bush administration concerns cited “unprecedented” opposition and worries about a virtual red-light district reserved exclusively for Internet pornography.
The pressure on the administration appears to have come from right-wing social conservatives.
“Selling hard core pornography on the Internet is a violation of federal obscenity law, so the Bush Administration is right to oppose the .xxx domain,” said Patrick Trueman, Senior Legal Counsel for the Family Research Council and former Chief of the DOJ’s Child Exploitation and Obscenity Section. “The Bush Administration should not, in any way, be seen to facilitate the porn industry which has been a plague on our society since the establishment of the Internet. The .xxx domain proposal is an effort to pander to the porn industry and offers nothing but false hope to an American public which wants illegal pornographers prosecuted, not rewarded.”
Trueman’s opinions notwithstanding, the adult entertainment industry, fearing that adult websites could be forced to give up dot com domain names and be ghettoized in .xxx, is actually (mostly) closing ranks against the .xxx domain idea. This creates an interesting situation in which the adult industry and its traditional foes are pushing for the same outcome.
In the meantime, the Internet advocacy group ICANNWatch.org is accusing ICANN of abandoning its own stated processes and procedures for the adoption of top-level domains by caving-in to the Commerce Department.
If all that were not enough, ICANN is also facing pressure over .xxx from developing nations with different values about sexuality.
On the other side of the issue, .xxx champion Stuart Lawley, of the Florida-based ICM Registry which originally proposed and sold the idea, says he is confused about the timing of the objections at the last moment.
“This matter has been before ICANN for five years, and very actively and publicly debated for the past 18 months,” he said. “We are, to say the very least, disappointed that concerns that should have been raised and addressed weeks and months ago are being raised in the final days.”
Michael Froomkin, a law professor at the University of Miami, said it’s not surprising ICANN’s board has found itself in a pickle. “They’re supposed to be picked for technical competence,” Froomkin said. “They’re not elected. They’re not representative of anything much. Who would pick this group of people to make decisions about how we feel about (domains) with sexual connotations?”

[Lemmy]

Thanks so much Linda. An interesting read.

[Linkster]

Tommy - thats exactly right - thats why the industry has never really contested the whole 2257 concept - it pretty much gives what we do a legitimate base by defining internet porn and seperating it from obscenity (which is illegal but like posted above is hard to define and prosecute). There have been cases of actual illegal obscenity prosecuted but they normally are in cases where an adult store violates a local ordinance and the locals use that to shut it down.
Hopefully the people that are following the 2257 case presently understand that the concept of 2257 has to stay around for the primary producers - as this is what has protected us in the past - and they dont go trying to get the whole thing thrown out.