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A quick google of "Free Speech Coalition "PROTECT ACT"" brought up this helpful page with this helpful quote:

even if it is legal to hold privately (i.e. non-real child pornography)

In McCulloch v Maryland (17 US 316, 1819), Chief Justice John Marshall ruled that "the power to tax is the power to destroy." While that ruling was in a different context, that principle still holds today. For example, in Speiser v Randall (357 US 513 [1958], citing an earlier case, sorry can't get Findlaw working for this one), the Supreme Court held that "It is settled that speech can be effectively limited by the exercise of the taxing power."

It is legal to tax First Amendment-protected material, but such a tax must never:
1. Single out the press
2. Target one group of speakers over another group
3. Discriminate on the basis of content of taxpayer speech.

So, while you pay sales tax on a CD, you pay the same tax on your CD as you pay on your couch and your Jolt! cola. Such a tax applies, but it does not apply only to something that is protected. It encompasses protected things, but it does not single out protected things as the subject of the tax. You pay sales tax on books, but you do not pay a tax that applies only to books.

A "music download tax" targets a specific kind of expression --music -- and is thus illegal under the First Amendment. Similarly, porn taxes are illegal for exactly the same reason, and in Texas bar owners are litigating a tax on admission to topless bars (because dancing, including nude dancing, is also protected, although the extent of that protection is far from settled). One poster asked if the porn industry has a lobby. Yes.

There are two ways such a tax could work:
1. An internet sales tax that applies to all goods and services sold over the internet. This has obvious problems.
2. An internet download tax that covers all downloads, eg, including your web traffic, email, and so on, essentially a bandwidth consumption tax. This has other problems in that pretty much everything on the internet can be construed as speech in one way or another, and thus the argument can be made that the tax targets only internet-based speech, which would be protected.

Note that the First Amendment itself does not differentiate between commercial and non-commercial speech, and thus the courts have tended to err on the side of freedom in commercial speech. There are of course exceptions for things that are deceptive, defamatory, libelous, and harmful; however, for the most part, if what you have to say, even in a commercial enterprise, if it's true, it's pretty much fair game.

Well I found a few interviews and articles he did after recent national tragedies, but they do tend to be lost amongst the chatter against Thompson so it is not surprising you missed them. The best bet is to search for "Jack Thompson" + $TRAGEDY, as he seems to be able to find his way to the spotlight after every incident of national suffering to spew his latest theory regarding the cause. Anyway, here's the links for you enjoyment:
VA Tech tragedy
Devin Moore Shootings
Red Lake Shootings

Oh and here is an article by a non gaming web site about the Louisiana Game Bill:
HB 1381

Anyone else worried about this?

Authorities and officials requiring all "questionable"
material be required to don the XXX TLD? again at brief
glance it looks like a good idea, but in the long run it
could be hazardous for free speech in a whole..

Reading material:
http://www.freespeechcoalition.com/BriefHistoryof. XXXandLinks.htm

I wonder how long before someone uses CGI to make artificial kiddie-pr0n.. "but she's not underage, Your Honor! Right here in the code, her age is commented: Nine hundred." Loopholes, glorious loopholes. Just FYI, IANACP.

It's already been ruled upon. The Child Pornography Protection Act of 1996 was overruled in Ashcroft v. Free Speech Coalition on the basis of "simulated" child pornography. Then, in 2004, Congress passed the PROTECT Act, which relegislated similar clauses to the Child Pornography Act. It was struck down by a federal court just in April of this year.

It's already a long-standing issue.

I wonder how long before someone uses CGI to make artificial kiddie-pr0n.. "but she's not underage, Your Honor! Right here in the code, her age is commented: Nine hundred." Loopholes, glorious loopholes. Just FYI, IANACP.

It's already been ruled upon. The Child Pornography Protection Act of 1996 was overruled in Ashcroft v. Free Speech Coalition on the basis of "simulated" child pornography. Then, in 2004, Congress passed the PROTECT Act, which relegislated similar clauses to the Child Pornography Act. It was struck down by a federal court just in April of this year.

It's already a long-standing issue.

Porn will be illegal soon? Yeah, you're right... I have been noticing a severe drop in the number of porn sites recently. Online porn is a $3 billion business, which means it has a lot of clout. There is no way a buisiness that brings in that kind of money will let itself be legislated out of existance (Cigarettes are way more harmfull than Porn, but cig corporations are still making a ton of money).

Look at my email address. I know a little bit about this topic.

The so-called social conservatives are smarter than to outright outlaw porn -- instead, they're concentrating on making the regulatory burdens so great that it's impossible to produce or distribute porn in the US legally. A subtle distinction, but an important one. For instance, if the FSC loses the court battle over the new 2257 regulations, US companies won't be able to accept foreign passports as proof of age. Worse, a company in Los Angeles shooting porn overseas would have to have someone in their Los Angeles office at any hour, day or night, when shooting was taking place overseas. You want to go to work at 3am and sit around waiting for an inspection?

I know several people who have sold their adult businesses to overseas concerns for fear of prosecution here in the US. Not for anything illegal, just for basic porn. Even more people are moving their servers overseas, which I personally think is pointless, but some people believe it will help.

Believe what you want, but there is a well funded, very intelligently run effort to get rid of porn in general in the US, not just on the internet. It's hopeless and stupid, of course, but that doesn't make it any less dangerous

As for free speech, who needs laws? Heard about NTFU?. They got shut down for posting pics from Iraq. Government landed on them with both feet with a 300 or so obscenity charges; got the guy jailed without bail (!), got a plea bargain, got the site shut down. No more unauthorized pics from Iraq.

So snide insinuations aside and generally smugly superior tone aside, what are your credentials for being knowledgeable in this area? Do you think the new Supreme Court will uphold the 10th circuit's Sundance ruling? Can I suggest some reading?

-b

Wake me up when there is a news item about how all the pornography on the Internet has suddenly disappeared.

http://www.freespeechcoalition.com/

Read up on 2257, an amendment to US law that will pretty much end the use of any form of intimate (not just explicitly ponographic) photography on US websites. A lot of sites have gone down or changed recently because of it...

in robots.txt put: User-agent: ia_archiver Disallow: / According to the archive.org policies page: http://www.sims.berkeley.edu/research/conferences/ aps/removal-policy.html this will not only keep them from indexing your sites but remove all content they have archived. Seeing how archive.org is most likely going to get Bram in trouble it got me to think about my adult websites I run that used to have more questionable material before the bush administration, time to add that to all my robots.txt files since the war on porn has recently started via alberto gonzales passing the new 2257 regulations that require ANYONE who uploads a pic/vid/whatever that is "sexually explicit" to have IN HAND model id's, release forms (even though the forms already exist at the original production studio), all alphabetically indexed available 40hours a week for inspection (5 years in prison if your documents aren't up to snuff) of course many parts of this law are blatantly unconstitutional and it is being challened in court by the free speech coalition http://www.freespeechcoalition.com/ .