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Should Innocently-Named Porn Sites Be Illegal?
Folic_Acid writes "CNET News.com's Declan McCullagh is reporting that the U.S. House of Representatives is scheduled to vote on an amendment to a bill dealing with child abduction that would make it a crime to use an innocent-sounding domain name to drive traffic to a porn website." I can't wait to see the counter-bill that would illegalize naughty, filthy names that lead only to inoccuous content.
Smut shops have always hung huge lit signs that say "News." This isn't exactly the same as a pr0n store called "toys for kids," bt the same kind of thing.
A businessman has the right to call his business whatever he chooses.
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From the article:
I support the protection of children, and banning real child porn BUT this proposal which bans pictures of anyone who looks like a minor is ridiculous. Some 16 year old girls look 36, and some 25 year old girls look like they are 15.The bill is too subjective to be fair, or useful. If someone takes pictures of a minor you can prove based on the date the photo was taken, and the model's birth date that a crime was committed. How does one decide if a model looks too young or not?
Provided that the ammendment is very specifically worded to include tests such other laws have - like would a "reasonable, average person expect to find pronography at a sight with this name" - then I'd have no problem with it.
I can see a really strong argument that such as misleading site name is fraud in a sense - deliberately taking someone somewhere they don't want to go. How this is supposed to make such as site more profitable is beyond me. Kind of like how bait-and-switch is illegal for stores, bait-and-switch in website names can arguably be made illegal as well.
More to the point, why criminalise something? Next they'll criminalise other information they find undesirable. To stop it, all the USgovt need do is register some trademarks and defend them. Furthermore, I believe the US & states attorneys can sue for trademark infringement even without the involvement of the trademark owner [consumer protection].
The bottom line is that there are many porn sites out there that *deliberately* seek to attract people who were not seeking porn. The most notable example, of course, is "whitehouse.com". Ultimately, this is a truth in advertising issue: if I open a can that says "peanuts", it should contain peanuts. If I order a "real, fully functional sailboat" it shouldn't be six inches high. And, in the world of information, if I buy a magazine entitled "Home Wine Making", it should contain information on wine making. Imagine if it were a tract against drinking from some benighted fundamentalists? You'd be pissed, wouldn't you? You'd want your money back, wouldn't you?
The problem, of course, with domain-name-spamming, is that once I've given you my eyeballs, I can't take them back. There is no way for me to demand a refund. Furthermore, these sites are often deliberately deceptive. "Whitehouse.com" was not founded at that address because he thought it would be a good way to found his business: it was founded because he wanted to trick people who would otherwise not want to view his warez into viewing them. This is false and deceptive, and is nowhere near legitimate free speech. Why don't you focus your energy on something that matters?
(And, please, spare me the slippery slope conspiracy theories.)
"He who would learn astronomy, and other recondite arts, let him go elsewhere. " -- John Calvin, commenting on Genesis 1
I'm having trouble understanding why there seem to be seperate laws and exceptions being proposed for porn.
I don't find porn sites particularly offensive. What I do find offensive is landing on religious sites using deceptive names. Or domain squatters. Especially domain squatters.
Why the focus on porn? Why are porn merchants any different from other merchants? I find many cosmetic company pages pretty darn nasty. Church pages... don't get me started...
What *should* one expect to find at www.cats.com ? Why is that ok and www.pussy.com not ?
- MugginsM
The aim of this is perfectly reasonable, but I have real problems with using legislation. Basically, I do not see "the internet" as a public utility that should be regulated by lawmakers
I would be more sympathetic to a more general law that prohibited "advertising obscene content in a misleading way" or something (it would have to be worded a lot more tightly than that, but you see what I am driving at). Pulling up a consensual, commercial system like DNS and slapping laws on it just is the wrong way to go about things. In a few years as the technology moves on, more laws will be needed and the state will be in the position of firing shotgun blast after blast at a moving target; sometimes hitting, sometimes missing, and usually spraying a few bystanders with buckshot.
What I am getting at is that laws should target the fundamentals, not the implementation details. Advertising and Obscenity are fundamentals. Domain names, search engine listings and the like are implementation details.
Protection of children on the internet ought to be market driven. It has not been successful enough because of the fraudulent advertising of web filtering product vendors. If the public were more aware of the fact that blacklist-based products like NetNanny do not work, there would be a market for workable alternatives based on whitelisting. As it is, the prospective customers of a working system are instead buying the crap.