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Supreme Court Declines to Hear Obscenity Case
Justice is reporting that Monday the Supreme Court declined to hear the obscenity case of Nitke v. Gonzales. From the article: "Even in our federal system of government, the law concerning obscenity is a legal oddity. A photograph that in New York would be considered protected speech under the First Amendment could in Alabama be considered obscene, making the photographer and distributors subject to felony charges. That's a consequence of the Supreme Court's landmark 1973 case, Miller v. California, in which the court ruled that obscenity was essentially a subjective judgment, and called for prosecutors, judges and juries to apply 'community standards' in determining what speech was obscene and what was protected. In the age of the Internet, a new issue has been raised - if something considered free speech in New York is accessible in Alabama, where it's considered obscene, what standard should be used? By rejecting the case, the Supreme Court has left that question open."
The Supreme Court has taken about 500 steps backward in destroying the shackles of the federal government -- it has allowed so many unconstitutional programs, laws and taxes to stay on the books. This is a step forward.
The Constitution never intended to allow the federal government to regulate commerce (except in true imports and exports). The federal government was given the power to regulate the states -- to prevent them from tariffs, embargoing or taxing imports and exports between states. The interstate commerce clause is very clear when you review what the framers debated -- they wanted freedom in trade within the Republic.
Obscenity is and should always be defined by the community -- preferably by the household. What disgusts me should have no effect on what you like -- true freedom means allowing (if not accepting) others to do what they want as long as they don't harm your body or your property. Porn doesn't harm me, so I can not speak out against it. I am free to tell people on my property to leave if they decide they want to look at porn or talk about it on my land.
The community and the state (and the people!) are given the power to define all of the following:
1. Murder
2. Obscenity
3. Wealth Distribution (taxes)
4. Theft
5. Rape
None of these are to be controlled by the Federal government. None of them should.
Supreme Court +1
So if these guys won't make a decision on this...what recourse is there for ultimately finding a resolution?
Buy Steampunk Clothing Online!
What are the options
1) Come up with real objective standards, which are unquestionably censorship, and creates a huge backlash on the left
2) Legalize everything which creates a huge backlash on the right
3) Have a hedged nuanced position which essentially ducks the issue until the culture is more ready for options 1 or 2
4) Deliberately change the culture in some way so that 1 or 2 become easy
While everyone here would from an emotional standpoint prefer option 2, I'm not sure the Supreme Court's 3+4 position isn't the best way to achieve 2 over the long term.
The supreme court chooses which cases to hear so that it can change political environments. The court dosn't interpret the constituition, it just applies what will keep the peace today. Why is it so important for people to get certain judges appointed so that the judge will rule the way the extrments want - it's because they rule from the bench with no basis. Face it, when you accept that the supreme court is trying to rule the based on guidline then you will see how fragile laws are. There are many instances where the court has altered it's decsion on cases - slavery, women rights, abortion etc and this obscenity case will be no diffrent. It
This means that since the Internet can bring material into all communities at once, all the sex-o-phobic Feds have to do is file obscenity charges from the most conservative community in America. Bingo! It's obscene to them, and therefore it's obscene and can be banned.
1) Come up with real objective standards, which are unquestionably censorship, and creates a huge backlash on the left
2) Legalize everything which creates a huge backlash on the right
3) Have a hedged nuanced position which essentially ducks the issue until the culture is more ready for options 1 or 2
4) Deliberately change the culture in some way so that 1 or 2 become easy
5) PROFIT!
Three Squirrels
The laws of one state being forced on another is not right. As much as I despise smut, if this continues, you're not safe anywhere except living offshore. Are you supposed to buy a list of ip addresses and where they go geographically and then firewall out other states or cities or something? This just isnt good.
Contrary to popular belief, Unix is user friendly. It just happens to be particular about who it makes friends with.
Is it really all that hard? If it isn't legal to do X where you are without a computer, then it isn't legal to do it with one either.
If it's obscene in your jusridiction and it displays on your monitor, guess what, you just broke the law.
Seriously, why on earth would the Supremes waste their time on such a silly thing?
As long as the expression doesn't cause physical or financial harm to others, it should be protected.
"I'm just here to regulate funkiness."
On Barbara Nitke, the (co) plaintiff of the case in question.
Dig up some of her work & decide for yourself whether it's Art, Documentary or Porn. I'm willing to bet that even amongst Slashdotters there'll be the full spectrum of opinions, showing how hard it is to apply 'community standards' to the internet.
My pics.
Quoting from the article, this pretty much sums it up:
"...attributed the Supreme Court's decision to a reluctance to open a potential can of worms."
I guess, sometimes it is best to let the lower courts and local government deal with certain issues. Looks like the system works.
Now, the private land grab for private use decision, that's another story...
The Supreme Court just handed the federal government a big permission slip to overrule community standards in New York or LA or any other big city by applying some small town's standards everywhere.
If you don't like the offensive speech, don't listen to it. Otherwise, shut the fuck up. Community standards is just another way of saying that a significantly large group of people can bully everyone else into shutting up about what they want to say.
This is good news. If one jurisdiction deems Fox News to be obscene like it is, then it can be be removed from the air there, and the Supreme Court won't help Murdoch.
Oh You POS
Obscenity is and should always be defined by the community -- preferably by the household.
How is this even remotely workable from a real world standpoint? It sounds like you missed the entire point in all this, having varying definitions of the law actually decreases the amount of freedom you have. Now that Attorney General in Alabama can try to get you extradited out of NY to prosecute you on obscenity charges because the standards differ. Worse yet, they won't extradite you, they'll wait until you happen to show up in state and then bust you. How is that more freedom?
The notions you proffer only work when you have a system of fairly isolated groups, the US (and increasingly the world) doe NOT operate in such a manner. There is way too much interconnectedness to take such a myopic and simple minded view of local govts. Imagine if each county had completely different laws governing auto registration and markings, what a nightmare. If you think through your logic, you are actually increasing beauracracy by a significant margin, making govt even bigger, just starting at the local level.
But the law they passed on wasn't concerning the viewing of the materials. It was about whether the production and distribution of the material was threatened under the "Communications Decency Act of 1996" due to there being no national standard. The plaintiff was arguing that without national standards, her photography, which is considered art(protected) where she lives and produces it could be considered obscene in other parts of the U.S., and that under CDA96 she could be prosecuted if the materials were viewed over the internet.
... can I please have everyone who may read it let me know from where they are viewing my reply, so that I may be able to word it correctly and avoid all local legal ramifications?
So who's breaking the law? The person with the computer, the ISP who the computer's connect to, the owner of the pipe bringing the "obscenity" across the state border, the ISP who's providing the bandwidth to the originating server, or the person who's providing the images (even if they're legal in the state where this person lives/hosts from)?
The revolution will not be televised... but it will have a page on Wikipedia
In short, Free Speech should be like Marriage (I mean Marriage in the original sense here, and not the redefinition of this word currently being shoved down our throats by some). It used to be that a marriage recognized in one state was legal in all of them, because all states agreed on the general definition of marriage and would accept minor variations in different state's procedures.
Perhaps a better analogy would be for Driver's Licenses. Gain a driver's license in one state and you're legal to drive in all 50 states, even though the motor vehicle laws differ in the details across the different states. Oops, bad example in these days of the Real ID Act, which may result in some states not recognising another's because a state has a policy of giving driver's licenses to (operative word) illegal persons in this country.
But you get the idea. Everything is bad somewhere, but few things are bad everywhere, so what should we really be prohibiting?
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
"We can get all we want on the office computers" remarked Justice Clarence Thomas.
try { do() || do_not(); } catch (JediException err) { yoda(err); }
for the SCOTUS to leave this case alone, if there hasn't been enought sifting around of the issue in this regard at the various appellate (or State Supreme Court) levels, since SCOTUS decisions often raise as many questions as they answer.
If an issue/case hasn't gotten enough judicial review before it reaches the top bench, they may make a decision in a relative vacuum that cretaes more problems than it solves.
uR iGn0ranc3, Their Power
MOD PARENT UP
It's that which causes offence to the community.
But how is something viewed in private, acquired discreetly, causing offence to the community? It would be different if someone were running a business selling these items locally, but why is "obscenity," at the demand side, an issue, even in so far as to be about free speech? The people making the "speech," or expression, are within another jurisdiction, and whatever free speech issues there should be are there. Hearing speech, even obscene speech, should never be a crime.
Of course, child pornography and such is a different animal, since you're dealing with people who abuse children - even if they're across state lines, that's different from "unprotected" speech.
If you're from Alabama, and you go to New York, and you get offended by something that you find obscene/immoral/etc but the locals don't, then you've gotten yourself offended under your standards and you'll just have to deal with it.
.coms :p
If you surf to a site on the internet, then it is the same thing. Of course, there's no easy way to determine where a site is and under which jurisdiction it belongs, but having to enforce the opposite - i.e., the sites have to know all the local laws all around the country and filter output accordingly - would be retardo supreme.
There was this setup where sites could be like sitename.ny.us wasn't there? shame that everyone just used
This thought is so very wrong!
Your idea will allow the least tolerant person to define the standards for everyone else. Perhaps you mean they define it for their household, but if that's the case they'd never be in court. Community is too big and diverse to have exactly the same standard for every member and call it fair.
What the law should say is that Smut cannot be forced on those not desiring it, however they must also take common sense steps to avoid it on their own.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
This may not actually be a problem, but hasn't the Court basically decided that, by not hearing this, content creators must adhere to the highest standard of obscenity laws in order to not face criminal punishment somewhere in the United States?
I give this example: if I created a picture that is completely moral/ethical/unobscene in Pennsylvania and put it on my web site or in my magazine, someone in, say Ohio (which, in this scenario, has stricter obscenity laws), could bring criminal charges against me even though my business in based in Pennsylvania and my web site is hosted in Florida.
If I'm understanding this correctly, the Court has decided in favor of the stricter obscenity laws and saved themselves some time by simply refusing to hear the case. I agree that it's up to the individual states to decide upon their own morality, but the Internet is a medium which knows no state bounds.
Going back to my example, would I then need to put a splash page that says something like, "If you are from Ohio, you cannot legally view this page. Please leave. If you choose to enter, you agree that you will not press charges against me for content of this web site that may be obscene in your state" ?
Sounds like we webmaster types are gonna have a lot more legal gotchas to monitor.
Colin Dean Go a year without DRM
Maybe they could've strengthened Internet immunities. But I don't think those need strengthening: "plain brown wrapper" applies: AFAIK, the offense is in publicly displaying (often for sale) obscence material. The Internet fits neatly into older models: no problem for pulled-media (website visits), a big problem around pushed-media (pr0n email spam). 'course there are problems catching the spammers, but that doesn't mean spam should be legal.
It's a matter of "push" vs "pull" - if you happen upon some "obscene" content while actively pursuing content (not necessarily obscene), then you have nothing to say about it. If, on the other hand, I email you content that might be considered obscene, then I am soliciting you, and you might have a legitimate gripe. But merely encountering something you consider obscene isn't (or shouldn't be) actionable. Just acknowledge that we all share the same resources, and continue with what you were doing.
That is just what happened in the case of the Amateur Action BBS, which was based in California when the operators got convicted in Tennessee.
If you read the article, you can see what the appeals court focused on, and apparently the SCOTUS agreed. Basically, the appeals court said that there was no example of what the plaintiffs had in mind. I think what the SCOTUS (and the lower-level appeals courts) are looking for is an actual prosecution of an obscenity case based on this law, as opposed to just a hypothetical case concerning the text of the law. I think they may then choose to "draw the line". I am not saying I agree with that approach, but that does appear to be the approach that was taken.
Obscenity is not now, and never has been, protected speech under the first amendment. In fact, there are no constitional restrictions on laws to restrict obscenity even to adults. The only question is about the standard for obscenity, and "who decides"?
SirWired
This is where Slashdot needs to add a SCARY +1 moderation. Scary is a positive moderation for insightful thinking that we should all afraid could actually happen -- and us all be worse off for it if it does.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
If you don't like porn or naked art or puppies licking themselves them don't watch or purchase such material. The case in question raised an extremely valid contitutional point that I think you're completely missing. If I can view an adult web site hosted in New York from Utah, whose community standards should apply and why? What is the harm is viewing in an adult web site from the privacy of your home and why should your community get to decide what they will "tolerate" in your own home?
Can you imagine if we applied the Miller test to other constitutional rights like the right to a speedy trial or freedom of religion? What if the community didn't want to "tolerate" the right to an attorney or the right to habeas corpus? You can see were this is going. Why is there a tolerance test for freedom of speech in the first place? We don't need the First Amendment to protect pictures of flowers and puppies, but we do need it to protect those that want to look at nudie pictures or protest against their president.
Freedom speech in the internet age -1
Sometimes I wonder how those judges act around each other, in private. I mean, surely these people drink beer, scratch their crotch, and cuss at least once in a while.
When they turn down cases like this, they give these judicial briefs sometimes explaining their reasoning. But prior to any public announcement, I wonder what their conversations are like amongst each other behind closed doors.
"Okay, so we have this obscenity case on our hands...," says Sandra Day O'Conner.
"F*ck that..," says Clearance Thomas, tiredly wiping his hand across his face.
"Right," she says, tossing the papers aside and moving on to the next stack of papers.
Hmm...nevermind about the crotch scratching. I'd be horrified to know that Sandra scratches herself. Talk about a case of obscenity!
The EXISTING Federal Law remains valid. We can argue all day about the merits. This was an attempt to get a law thrown out. It failed. I've noticed the Supreme Court often prefers to wait until a specific case (involving prosecution under the law) comes before it before it tackles things like this. Solution: If you provide content that you are concerned about, I would stongly recommend you caveat access to that content in a manner that makes it clear the end user is PULLING the content, as opposed to you PUSHING it. Ultimately, if Federal Prosecutors go after you, the defense will hinge on whether your provided it, or the recipient pulled it. IANAL.
The law says the person providing the images is.
Which makes the law extremely stupid when you consider that it tries to address activities that can originate outside the border of the country...
--Phillip
Can you say BIRTH TAX
I think it's funny that someone decided that the Supreme Court's views on obscenity belongs on Slashdot - "News for nerds". Geeks promoting the geeks and porn stereotype. It's an interesting connection. Not one I care to visualize though. Bleh.
When I said that there was "no constitutinal restrictions" on laws to restrict obscenity, even to adults, I left something out. The SCOTUS HAS found that any laws restricting obscenity must have a rational basis. This is probably what stops outright bans on porn.
SirWired
I'd prefer just the +1 Insightful thank you, instead of the weak kneed moderator(s) that keep modding me "Overrated" because they can't find anything technically wrong with what I write, they just "feel" that it's obscene and needs to be censored.
Oh You POS
. . . and I'm guessing, not from many lawyers.
IAAL, so let's lay a few things out:
1.Community standards is only one prong of the Miller test. Here it is in its entirety:
* Whether the average person, applying contemporary COMMUNITY STANDARDS, would find that the work, taken as a whole, appeals to the prurient interest,
* Whether the work depicts/describes, in a patently offensive way, sexual conduct specifically defined by applicable state law,
* Whether the work, taken as a whole, lacks serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value.
So, sadly, there's really no chance that Fox News is obscene.
2. Although the Supreme Court's refusing to hear this case means that the Miller test will continue to apply to the internet, there is protection from getting hauled into court anywhere in the country merely because of what you put on a website, under jurisdictional principles. You can't be hauled into court in any particular jurisdiction unless you've "purposefully availed yourself" of that jurisdiction's legal privileges and protections. And other cases, some about pornography but most about plain old e-commerce, say that just posting something on the internet isn't "purposeful availment." You have to do something in that actual location - not necessarily be there physically, but send or sell something to someone there, or some other interaction that would let you know that someone there was using your site (e.g., requiring a registration that asks for a zip code or area code). It doesn't make the Miller "community standards" test any less absurd in this day and age, but it does help a little.
Simple: The person with the computer viewing the image. That person is the only one who is both 1) in the jurisdiction in which the image is illegal and 2) aware of the image, not the mere passage of bits through a pipe.
Of course that's too logical so we have to have a bunch of court cases about it to establish the obvious with no guarantee that logic will prevail. Who actually is prosecuted will probably have little to do with concern over the law being broken, but what results in the most leverage (perhaps the ISPs).
The enemies of Democracy are
"tries to address activities that can originate outside the border of the country"
It's the american way!
The revolution will not be televised... but it will have a page on Wikipedia
What the law should say is that Smut cannot be forced on those not desiring it, however they must also take common sense steps to avoid it on their own.
Right, because that's so much less vague than the current law. What are common sense steps? Could a spammer say that it's common sense to have spam filtering software, therefore any porn spam seen is exempt? If there is a pornographic image on a sign, is the common sense step to make sure that you never look there? How do you know not to look until you've already seen it.
-dave
/., where "Apple and Google provide Iran with nukes" will be refuted with "But Microsoft is a convicted monopolist"
All censorship is on a slippery slope towards despotism unless clear lines are drawn delineating the absolute limits of censorship. Subjective obscenity laws are extremely dangerous.
Check out my women's designer clothing store.
I'm going to go out on a limb and say that a few stops down this slope will be the application of this law to political speech. If a website's political speech is deemed "obscene" in some district in, I don't know, say, Texas, the feds can charge the website's operators with obscenity in that district, and the chilling effect will warm the hearts of all the folks in Washington who have been working so hard to do away with all this "free speech" business for so many years.
This sig, aah-ah, is comin' like a ghost-sig...
So who's breaking the law? The person with the computer, the ISP who the computer's connect to, the owner of the pipe bringing the "obscenity" across the state border, the ISP who's providing the bandwidth to the originating server, or the person who's providing the images (even if they're legal in the state where this person lives/hosts from)?
They are all purveyors of filth. They all need to be jailed. And the makers of the cabling, because they knowingly created a medium to distribute filth. Anyone involved in subnetting because once again, they knowingly have created a worldwide filth network. IBM for making filth viewing screens that some call computers. now that i've settled that, can someone help me download some good filth.
"By rejecting the case, the Supreme Court has left that question open.
Really... what did you expect?
If the court actually made it clear then they would be doing the job that they signed on for.
But as typical "murcans, they are slackers and couldn't do a job right to save their lives.
For Dada, the State has not business other than enforcing his business will upon others, and making sure his wage slaves do not rebel against him.
If he wants to impose his will upon someone who lives thousands of miles from him, the State should take all means possible to do so.
As a bourgeois, Dada only wants the whole world to conform to his standard of mediocrity.
I think the whole argument about community standards with regards to Internet activity is moot. Why? Because using the Internet is not a community activity. Opening up a dirty book shoppe is a community activity because everyone in the community will know of its existence and ostensibly have to walk by it with their nose turned up on a daily basis. But when I download pr0n, there isn't suddenly a giant red "P" glowing above my house. Hell, I've surfed pr0n at Starbucks (with my back to a wall) without anyone nearby knowing what I was looking at. That makes it private with a capital "P". Regardless of how notorious a web site is, visiting it is done in private unless you do it with your computer hooked up to a Jumbotron at a stadium. So if the supremes were able to strike down laws on consentual sodomy because it is an activity that occurs in private, there should be no problem at all with making the same argument about pr0n.
Yeah, hang on though, there are some police at the door... I doubt it's anything serio(*$*#!....CONNECTION LOST
The revolution will not be televised... but it will have a page on Wikipedia
I think you missed what he's saying. He's saying it should only be defined by a household, which is a small community. In other words, my wife and I decide whether or not our children will have access to porn, noone else. And we decide was does and does not constitute it (assuming such a distinction matters based on our first decision).
What the law should say is that Smut cannot be forced on those not desiring it, however they must also take common sense steps to avoid it on their own.
I am in complete agreement with that sentence and with the post you replied to.
Secession is the right of all sentient beings.
I believe it was Malcolm X who said profanity shows a lack of a vocabulary. While profanity can get the point across more effectively, his point is taken.
You can convey a message without it being obscene. If you can't, either you have something very very obscene to say or those defining obscenity have gone awry.
Except for ending slavery, the Nazis, communism, & securing American independence, war has never solved anything.
They should judge within Internet Community standards, so if the picture is not obscene enough for the internet it should be taken offline.
I'm not personally into it, in the way that I'm not personally into white power, Christianity, kinitting, having children, gay sex, etc. But people liking any of those things is fine with me. And that's where I have a problem with community standards; people that want the government to regulate other people's consenting adult behavior (say with the sodomy statutes that were recently struck down) or other people's ability to discuss desires and interests, essentially want their particular perversities made law.
If its one thing we do better than any countries out there its dodge critical questions and pass the buck.
Actually, I'd say the problem in many places outside the US is that their judiciaries do NOT "pass the buck". This is a problem in Commonwealth countries like Canada and Australia anyways. Judges are supposed to make judgements based on a reasonalby strict interpretation of the law, and it is important that they be fair and independent from influence by the legislature so they can rule a law invalid should it violate the constitution of the country or if the interpretation is politically unpopular. The problem comes in when judges overstep their bounds and decide to pronounce important decisions in absence of valid law instead of directing politicians to address the legislative void democratically.
The judge was doing his job correctly in dismissing the obscenity case and leaving the question open rather than setting a precident that effectively creates a new law. The origins of the patchwork of US obscenity laws makes little sense in the age of the internet, but it came about because a judge "passed the buck" there too--basically, saying that there was no viable legislation that defined obscene speech federally and that it was the responsibility of state and local authorities to establish "community standards". In the absence of such standards then all obscenity cases should be thrown out as this one was unless they violate criminal law (child porn, inciting violence, making threats, defamation, etc).
So how would I define community standards in the age of the Internet? I'd probably use the "lowest common denominator" however in the US the most politically popular might be to be fairly strict with community standards on a national basis. I think that's where the Clinton administration was going with the CDA. I would defer to the community standards that apply to the locality of the author/distributor myself, and if it was my decision I would say that if there was any mechanism that limited the consumption of content from an internet site to a "membership list", that no community standards of any physical jusristiction should apply. Because the community consists of people who voluntarily sign up to access the content and by that they give consent that they believe the content meets the standards of that "virtual community" then no such site could ever be obscene. Such a rule would probably be best enshrined in law democratically but it seems sensible to me.
If I was making a site that consisted of kinky BDSM photography that would undoubtedly be obscene in many locales that is what I would do--I'd have a sign-in page that clearly states that "viewer discresion is advised" and require people to sign up to visit the virtual gallery. I wouldn't collect a huge amount of information--just require a person to sign in with a username and password. If they even go through that much trouble then no user can argue that "obscene material" was thrown in their face.
People pay for access to the internet, much in the way they pay for cable. If you do not want anything obscene in your household, dont pay for it to enter your domain.
http://www.spectacle.org/795/amateur.html is a story of the reality of "venue shopping".
Sad, but true that ANYONE can drag anyone in the US into their local courts and prosecute them.
When your children become adults and still live in your house, will you prosecute them for obscenity when they expose their bodies on a web cam ?
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
Obscenity is and should always be defined by the community -- preferably by the household.
Perhaps you mean they define it for their household, but if that's the case they'd never be in court
That's exactly what he ment. It's incredibly obvious if you read the rest of the paragraph.
They call me the wookie man, I guess that's what I am
Why should the community get to dictate what kind of material I can or cannot, as a private individual, decide to purchase or otherwise indulge in?
I'm not talking about having copies of Playboy and Hustler in my store display window, I'm talking about the idea that someone who wants to seek out content of any nature should be free to do so. Its not being forced upon anyone or being shoved in their face, this is about people willingly seeking it out.
So, to that extent, I believe the whole doctorine of "community" standards is a giant farce designed by conservatives to force their moral views down our throats, collectively.
There has been a lot of discussion about how wrong it is for a community with more restrictive standards to affect the freedoms of those with more "open" standards. However, this occurs with so called "hate-speech", "racially motivated", or otherwise "offensive" speech. Politically correct terms are invented all the time to try and not "offend" someone in society and many people accept that as OK.
Is sexual speech different in that if you are offended, take a hike (Alabama); however, if someone from New York burns a cross in an Alabama person's yard, it really is OK for Alabama to be upset?
Your password has expired, please login to change it.
Adults can freely buy AO games. Not true. Because Wal-Mart won't distribute them, they don't get produced which means I can't "freely" buy them if they are never made, right?
So, the next step for the NCSF might be to set up a legal defense fund foand team available for any internet porn site that gets prosecuted on obscenity charges outside its physical jurisdiction (both for corporate office and server location) for material that would be acceptable under community standards of its physical jurisdiction(s).
Figure out what the most wildly tolerant community is in the country; set up a porn studio and servers there. Figure out who the most conservative federal prosecutor in the most conservative federal jurisdiction... and his email address. If you're willing to skirt conspiracy or spamming charges, make sure he gets nice regular ads for the site, detailing what sort of material is available. Repeat appeal process... with genuine case.
In short: insert stick in hornets nest; stir vigorously.
//Information does not want to be free; it wants to breed.
does anyone think this http://www.newamericancentury.org/ is an obscenity that ought to be quashed?
"It's obscene!"
I can see how community standards in Alabama would be against Art, but since when have the people of Alabama avoided Porn?
Ceci n'est pas une signature.
Obscenity isn't speech. (I don't beleive that, just playing devil's advocate). You are beginning your argument with the idea that obscenity is speech, and is protected by the first. Where is that stated in the Constitution?
That being said, GP was correct in coming down on you a bit. It's a little silly to make an argument based on a literal reading of the Constitution.
"The government grants you rights, not the other way around."-- beav007. Yes, these people really exist...
Why should the Supreme Court waste time deciding who's responsible for consuming prohibited information when they're busy spending the afternoon with Anna Nicole Smith?
--
make install -not war
I think a lot of the adult games don't bother with the ESRB and just sell in porn shops / adult internet. Vivid does this, as do the Japanese games with nudity. Peach Princess releases stuff domestically. Even Sony did one (sold through playboy).
I actually bothered to read the entire article, and the supreme court decision here was basically no decision. What the lower court stated, was that the plaintiff (the artist) had actually failed to show cause. She failed to actually demonstrate that she was actually being effected or restricted by the current laws of the land. While it was certainly true that the there could be constitutional conflicts in the decency,free speech, and federal child protection laws, the court always fails to intervene in the laws until somebody can show ACTUAL damage (not perceived damage). Often the standards of this don't have to TOO high, but the court needs to have some belief that a law passed by congress or a state actually DOES conflict with a constitutionally protected right of an living and breathing individual person before they will even CONSIDER the case. The plaintiff failed to this in the eyes of the lower court, and the supreme court agreed with that decision. So while it's TRUE that it still leaves the actual decision wide open, it DOESN'T mean that the court has made a decision in either direction in this case. So people who think they have are responding to more legal FUD. If there was an ACTUAL artist, who posted something on a NYC website that was legally protected, was then prosecuted by a local community somewhere else, then we would suddenly have a case that the courts might rule on. And then everybody on both sides would have a real case to argue about. The plaintiff failed to show whether this had even happened yet, so the court dismissed the case. The Supreme court agreed with the lower court's reason for dismissing the case. 'Nuff said.
Excellent in theory — although I'd be interested in an appelate e-commerce "purposeful availment" citation. Unfortunately, in practice your claim seems directly contradicted by the 6th Circuit's 1996 ruling on venue in US v. Thomas. Specifically:
So, in practice, this means you would need to find out the community standards before accepting any subscriber there. In fact, it's not even clear that it requires a subscription; the Thomas case implies that even making the material freely available for download might be reasonably feared by a potential defendant as constituting "purposeful availment" of any jurisdiction where the download occurs, if the prosecutor is so inclined.And, as the Nitke plaintifs tried to argue, the number of possible venues and lack of clearly specified standards makes for an intolerable practical burden.
Absent a line of reasoning as to why concerns of adult site operators that arose from the Thomas AABBS case are mitigated by any apellate ruling since, "purposeful availment" arguments provide no useful help whatsoever.
//Information does not want to be free; it wants to breed.
In short, Free Speech should be like Marriage (I mean Marriage in the original sense here, and not the redefinition of this word currently being shoved down our throats by some). It used to be that a marriage recognized in one state was legal in all of them, because all states agreed on the general definition of marriage and would accept minor variations in different state's procedures.
But you get the idea. Everything is bad somewhere, but few things are bad everywhere, so what should we really be prohibiting?
Apparently, gay marriage?
"Sure, go ahead, look at porn all you want... but if you try to marry someone of the same sex, we're gonna have issues."
Yeah. That makes sense.
No. I'll simply expel them from the community. My children will have the chance to be emancipated at any time once they are adults, and that may come even before they are 18.
I wish the law would expel ME from the community, actually. I'd rather withdraw completely from the system.
Secession is the right of all sentient beings.
It gets even stickier when you start taking into consideration the rape laws and the age of consent...
And it gets worse again when you start factoring in the "corruption of a minor" laws. In Ohio, it's legal to marry and have sex at the age of 16 with parental consent, but under 18, they're considered to be minors and any sexual contact can be considered to be corrupting them. Go figure.
This sig has absolutely no significance and serves only to take up screen space and waste the time of the reader.
(originally going to be part of my other post, but it got longwinded)
Apparently some people think your post was flamebait/troll. If it was intended as flamebait, you could have chosen a particular stance on any one of your issues, but rather you said it should be up to the local most feasible level of governance. For those who haven't read the Bill of Rights, that precedent was established with the Ninth and Tenth Amendments. Let's give some specific examples of why these crimes are not as clear cut as we'd like to believe.
1) Murder. What constitutes murder? Any killing of a human being? Ordering/hiring somebody to kill a human being? Aborting a fetus? Aborting a fetus solely because it's female? Is the death penalty murder? Killing somebody while driving drunk? Killing in defense of a loved one?
2) Obscenity. Is nudity obscene? Is sex obscene? Sex with animals? Bikinis? Breast feeding? Women showing more than just their eyes while in public? Nude pictures of children? A video of childbirth?
3) Wealth distribution. Sales tax? Property tax? Income tax? Estate tax? Corporate tax? Who gets the taxes? Poor people? Black people? Friends of the Bush family?
4) Theft. Is it always theft to take something that doesn't belong to you? A wallet on the side of the road? If it has contact info in it? If it belongs to a known drug dealer? Shoplifting? Taking milk from a store that lost power due to a powerful hurricane, when there is nobody working at the store and the goods would spoil anyway? Copyright infringement? Is it OK to take land from white farmers because their grandparents to the land from the native inhabitants?
5) Rape. (This is probably the one that got you tagged flamebait/troll) All non-consensual sex? Prostitution? Consensual sex with a 17 year old with a fake ID saying she's 22? What about sex forcibly carried out under court order in some other countries?
6) (from somebody else) Slavery. Even this is not as clear cut as one would like to think. Does indentured servitude count? What about child labor? Coal mining towns of old with a company store?
I don't know what all the right answers are, but I know where I stand on most of these issues. But I would not expect my opinion to be the same as somebody in Kabul, New Orleans, San Diego, or Amsterdam. There are many other items that could be added to the list: drug use and pollution come to mind.
Then the question becomes, "who should draw the line?" And that's a damn good question. I would like to agree with you, that the local most feasible level of government should define these things. I do with one exception: human rights. Things like the Civil Rights Movement have shown us that those in power at some of the local levels become corrupt. At times like these the federal government must step in to protect civil liberties. I think the same could be said about the UN stepping in and imposing sanctions on countries guilty of human rights abuses.
Of course, then the question becomes, where does protecting human rights end and micromanaging local legal standards begin? I have no idea. I am not wise enough to discern that sort of thing. (that, and I was supposed to get back to work twenty minutes ago.)
This main question is "If someone in New York City has a server in New York City with BDSM images on it, can said person be tried for obscenity charges in Alabama because someone in Arab, AL accessed the images which the community standards of Arab, AL would deem obscene but would not be considered obscene in NYC?"
This really is a question of where do community standards end. The information presented by the person in NYC would not be considered obscene in NYC but would be considered obscene in a small town in AL. Say, something like the Roger Maplethorpe photos. Should the person in question be tried for obscenity in AL?
There is no "-1 offended" or "-1 you don't agree with me" mod options for a reason.
BZZT!!!
//Information does not want to be free; it wants to breed.
In the age of the Internet, a new issue has been raised - if something considered free speech in New York is accessible in Alabama, where it's considered obscene, what standard should be used?
At first this seems like an intelligent question, but it avoids the real issue. Listen, no one held a gun to your head and made you visit a website with an obscenity on it. All they did was make something world-readable. You voluntarily connected to the unsecure Internet network, You navigated to the site in question, You clicked on the link you had never clicked on before knowing not what to expect, You scrolled down, and Then you saw the obscenity. Without getting into the usual bad analogies that get upmods but fail to move discussion forward, let me ask you, if you had done all this and were genuinely offended, which solution is most reasonable: "A) don't visit that link or site or network again" or "B) hire an expensive attorney, pay a bunch of money in court costs, request an injunction, and then repeat the entire process next week when mirrors of the site you shut down pop up all over the net". And any judge with half a brain knows darn well what's really going on when people behave unreasonably in this fashion. Someone is trying to use criminal proceedings for personal gain or to settle a personal score. And he might go along with it. But in the process the plaintiff must state his given name for the record, so now the entire world knows exactly what kind of man plaintiff John Q Pantiesinabunch really is. Once you know that, you can figure out how to handle him.
You missed a minor step: download the files to a computer in the community, and THEN file the charges.
//Information does not want to be free; it wants to breed.
So basically Nitke has to wait until somebody finds her site offensive, brings charges, and the appeals go up to the Supreme Court. I suppose that concrete instances make it easier to decide.
But as far as I can tell, she's liable today. I just looked at her site. She's got a "Hey, kiddies go away" interstitial page, but she doesn't require a credit card or other proof of age. Click through, and there's a nekkid woman.
I'm a bit surprised that the Supreme Court doesn't consider it "harm" that she risks prosecution for that. And she's not the only one; there are thousands of sites whose owners risk prosecution and cannot know what their legal status is. Those sites include people acting in good faith and without prurient interest, like breast-cancer awareness sites.
Eventually one of them will be charged under the law, and then they'll know.
I wasn't familiar with those interesting tidbits - I respected him for his warnings about the power of the military industrial complex
If you cannot keep politics out of your moderation remove yourself from the Mod Lottery.. NOW!
They're not concerned with whether or not your voluntary porn viewing becomes public. They're concerned for their poor little kiddies who might accidentally bump into Nitke's site, and aren't subjected to any age-testing at all. The porn shop down the street from you will chuck you out if you're under 18 (in their own self-interest; they know that they will get chucked out of town, picketed, or legally harassed if they don't.)
Ultimately it's up to the parents, but the parents aren't totally out of line in asking for a bit of help keeping the porn away from accidentally showing up. I'm glad Google finds ways to keep the search-engine spam porn down; that keeps the kiddies mostly out of the dangerous neck of the woods when they're not seeking it out.
The law as written is incredibly dumb; a credit card is a lousy way to verify age. I'd say that Nitke's interstitial page is sufficient to satisfy the interest of keeping kids from seeing porn unless they're looking for it. But now we'll have to wait until somebody actually brings charges to find out.
In Tort law there were historicaly 3 standards. First there was the strict locality rule that existed in the early part of the 20th century. This rule basically said that if a doctor is sued for negligence, the issue of whether he was negligent (ie took reasonable care) would be measured by the standard of care n his locality. The justification for the strict locality rule was that doctors are not equal everywhere. As time went on, a 2nd standard called the similar-locality rule emerged that said that we would measure breach of duty for negligence in medical malpractice cases by looking at a similar locality. So if you lived in a rich area with many competent doctors, you would have to measure due care for a similar area. Today, the standard of care is usually measured the National Standard of care. What changed? Doctors became accredited, education for doctors became standardized, and it was recognized by the courts that all doctors, regardless of where they were, now had access to knowledge via books/journals/internet to know what a reasonable national standard was. The reason that I am talking about negligence and tort law here, is because it's a very analagous situation. The courts applied a local standard to a duty of care in an age where information was compartamentalized, and where the standard of care varied from region to region, and state to state. information and standardization changed all that. Here we have a similar case with Obscenity laws. In an age when culture and values are becoming increasingly national (and global), the standard changes. 50 years ago there was no MTV, 50 years ago there was no internet. 50 years ago, local communities were very much cut off from the rest of the world. Today that is not the case. So the question becomes, if we live a society with a truelly single national culture that shares most, if not all fundamental values, and in a society where almost all cultural information is available to anyone, anywhere, can a strict local standard really continue to exist? I guess the supreme court does not want to venture to answer that question, but it is definately true that today that question is much harder to answer then it was 50 years ago.
Fool me once...shame on you, fool me twice...won't be fooled again (our president)
The relevant community would be the Internet. I doubt any sensible consensus could be reached here, no wonder they wouldn't hear the case.
Prediction: The real iPhone killer is going to be sex robots from Japan. Think about it.
You posted that states should decide what murder is, but then went on to say that this is okay because if they did something wrong the federal government would decide it was unconstitutional.
If the decision were purely up to the state, there would be no federal or constitutional oversight. States could do whatever they wanted.
It makes no sense to say that states should have absolute authority in something as long as it agrees with what the federal government or Constitution says.
Our founding fathers tried to create weak decentralized government under the Articles of Confederation, and failed.
Our nation should not try to completely define sensitive issues that are open to interpretation, but instead should provide a rough framework to restrain and support more localized frameworks (Similar to the way all the rooms in a house have common framing and support, but may have different walls, carpeting, sizes and shapes).
None of these are to be controlled by the Federal government.
It's interesting that other federal countries decided not to go down the same path. For instance, Canada's basis for federal criminal laws is rooted in their concept of equal protection--that a Canadian should not be subject to a criminal law in on part of the country which is legal in another part of Canada.
Which is why things like crimes against person or property are standardized at the federal level.
I actually wouldn't want that for the US, but it's an interesting idea. I beileve there are some legal scholars who offer that the 14th amendment can be read to the same thing, and courts have been reluctant to enforce such a concept because of the tradition that criminal law is the domain of the state.
I suspect this might be visited sometime in the future.
There is a simple way to make Community Standards based laws valid and fair again. Apply them only to physical media distributed directly into the community in question at the volition of the producer or supplier of the questionable content.
The Producer or supplier of the content would then be prosecutable because they took a direct action to supply material to a person in a community that deemed that material to be obscene. However, a person who requested that material be shipped into that community would be held accountable as a supplier or distributor for initiating the transaction instead of the originators of the material.
If a person in a community requests, electronically, material be downloaded that is considered obscene in that community, then fault rests squarely with that person.
The equivalent physical world to each would be the following two scenarios.
1) Bob calls "Pr0n Pr0duc3rs of California" and orders a DVD that is considered to be obscene in his community and requests it to be shipped to him. Bob would be held solely responsible for violating that community's standards.
2) PPoC decides to set up a remote distributor and store front in a community and begins to sell material from that storefront that the community deems obscene, then PPoC would be held liable for violating the laws of the community the store front resides in.
3) Bob logs onto the internet and goes to PPoC's website and downloads a video. That video is deemed obscene by his community's standards. Bob would be held solely responsible for violating that community's standards.
4) Bob gets in his car and drives to California and buys a DVD from PPoC, where it has been deemed protected material under the 1st Amendment and drives back to his home in a community where that DVD is considered Obscene. Bob, again, would be held solely responsible for violating his community's standards.
In #1 above, PPoC could be held an accessory only if it could be proven that they knew in advance that the requested material would be deemed obscene in the community they have been asked to ship it to.
In #2 above, PPoC would be held fully responsible for the material they distribute through the storefront and warehouse in that community because they exist as a corporate entity within that community.
Notice that #3 & #4 are almost identical. PPoC makes no direct action that results in their content being distributed into a specific community. A purchaser of that content does.
Basically the community standards test should only apply, and can only reasonably apply to the person or persons whose act directly results in the distribution of material in a community deemed obscene by that community.
The main precedent on such in the internet era is the Thomas AABBS case. Poking around, I've been unable to find a copy of their BBS terms of service (if they even had one). Many adult sites expressly set in the terms of service what the governing jurisdiction is; EG, AT Kingdom's TOS, part XVII. A. (SFW, unlike the rest of the site).
On the other hand, it's not clear that that would be sufficient to get around 18 USC 1465, given the appellate ruling from US v. Thomas.
On the gripping hand, IAmNotALawyer; it may be perfectly clear to your attorney. But as far as I can tell, it doesn't create any new legal tangles; it just fails to clear up the existing one, because there is no concrete case to nail the theory to. It sounds like the courts are saying "don't come back until you can point to a specific case of bad prosecution." They want a clear, non-hypothetical case, where the business was in one place, and the prosecution somewhere else. Until then, they have other non-hypothetical cases on other important matters to occupy their time.
As to your hypothetical example, the TOS ought to be linked to from any splash page. It would also not be unreasonably paranoid to redirect any http request indicating an outside referrer to the splash page (as is fairly standard), to make sure the TOS have been agreed to (as well as to cut down on bandwidth leeching).
//Information does not want to be free; it wants to breed.
But...that's already true, and always has been, no law needed. This has nothing to do with a household deciding if they want to access porn or not. This is about the federal government imposing standards on all communities, no matter what you want.
Spam ought to be illegal, period. Porn should not be on signs visible in public areas.
A store on the outskirts of town with a small sign saying "adult books" should be avoided by those not wishing to see porn. Especially when it has a warning sign on the door saying not to enter if you are offended by porn.
Avoid Missing Ball for High Score
What if the court had said that, in the case of the internet, the community standards used to judge the obscenity would be the standards where the material originates, and not where it is ultimately viewed?
Then, provide a couple of escape clauses - if the legislatures of three other states can pass laws banning the material, the community of origin must then consider the material obscene (but not ex-post-facto). Also allow an executive pardon to stay the power of the states.
Make this mechanism also applicable to online religious speech, so you have a MAD-arrangement between red and blue states.
I think a lot of the adult games don't bother with the ESRB and just sell in porn shops / adult internet. Vivid does this, as do the Japanese games with nudity.
Note that in Japan, pornographic video games are actually heavily regulated. There's an industry body called EOCS that hands out content ratings, and - guess what? - most producers of adult games get them rated, so they can be sold in shops. This leads to self-censorship: even hardcore porn titles in Japan will have mosaics over the genitals, which is necessary even to get an 18 rating.
In many cases, when a Japanese porn game is released in the USA, the US company will actually go through all the pictures removing the censorship.
In other words, don't go thinking Japan is some haven of unrestricted porn. It's actually more heavily regulated there than anywhere in the US.
Right. And could you point out where in the Constitution an exception is made for defamatory speech, speech in the furtherance of a crime, speech that will cause a imminent and serious public harm (shouting "fire" in a crowded theater), speech that will provoke the reasonable man to violence (fighting words), or speech that divulges trade secrets or otherwise violates a contract?
Right, and for that reason, such acts are not legitimately illegal in the United States. By "legitimately" I mean, by the Supreme Law of the Land, the Constitution, any acts of legislation declaring such things illegal are prohibited, and thus any such legislation on the books is illegitimate. Not that that will stop anyone from trying to enforce it.
Now, you can argue that they *should* be illegal, but for that to actually happen, you'll need a constitutional amendment.
For that matter, can you point out what in the Constitution prevents states from regulating speech as well as Congress? (First Amendment only says "Congress shall make no law...." It says nothing about states.)
That would be where the 14th Amendment comes into play, prohibiting the states from violating the rights of American citizens. (In other words, state legislatures are restricted by the Constitution precisely in the ways that Congress is).
Your absolutist pseudo-textualism does not work.
I think it is you who are the pseudo-textualist. I just wrote another post on this same topic yesterday.
If you are going to refer to some source as justification (either for your thoughts or your actions), and use that as evidence that such-and-such is right, then you had damn well take that source literally. If you want to argue based purely on reason and verifiable evidence that such-and-such is right or wrong, then sources become irrelevant, as you must ultimately appeal to self-evident (or at least universally agreeable) premises, but this is a long and inefficient process. The former, textualist stance is actually just a subset of this though, where the agreed-upon premises are whatever your source says. Such sources, like a religious text or a constitution, are the written form of a common agreed upon set of premises.
But if you're going to say "whatever this text says is right", and use that to force your viewpoint, but then turn around and say "but of course this text must be interpreted, not just taken literally", you've effectively given yourself free reign to justify anything you can conceivably interpret your source as saying. Since it's conceivably possible to "interpret" anything out of anything (witness the abuses of the Interstate Commerce Claude), then you can just say "I'm right because this text says so. I know it doesn't *literally* say so, but you've got to interpret it the right way, and my way is the right way, so I'm right".
In the case of academic matters like religious debates or some shit, all that doing the above entails is that you're a self-righteous ass. But when it comes to to political matters, then it makes you a self-righteous ass giving himself the go-ahead to walk all over whoever he pleases, and then justify that to himself with some bullshit "interpretation".
If you're going to have a written body of law, then follow that law to the letter. If you don't like the way things turn out because of that, then change the fucking law.
-Forrest Cameranesi, Geek of all Trades
"I am Sam. Sam I am. I do not like trolls, flames, or spam."
Yes, but not in full since the SCOTUS appeal was declined; and again, IAmNotALawyer; I'm just a bright layman.
Thus my point about jurisdiction. Purposeful availment = some other interaction that lets you know that the person you're dealing with is coming from that community. It's pretty clearly more than just putting something on a website.
Thank you! The Toys & Zippo cases referenced by the 3rd C. are quite enlightening. On the plus side, they seems to imply to my lay ears that if you're running a free public gallery, with content available to anyone who visits, there is no purposeful jurisdictional availment; which ergo may benefit ars gratia artis (and porna gratia pornae).
On the minus side, it still seems to require that any adult e-commerce site become familiar with the particular local community standards for every person who asks to subscribe, since even one customer in the jurisdiction has the potential to meet the test. Thus, we go right back to the unknowable multiplicity of applications that the Nitke plaintiffs seem to be arguing.
As you originally said, it's a little bit of help, at least for those not out to make a buck. I've only rarely felt a need to pay for porn, given the free abundance. (Which may be tied to commercial market conditions, but anyway....) Also, given the unarousing crap that is becoming prevalent on many commercial sites, perhaps getting porn production back into purely amateur, er... hands?... might be a good thing. =P
//Information does not want to be free; it wants to breed.
What about the U.N. or the World Court? I guess you meant the most global authority that you find acceptable. Perhaps for some people that level would be the state, or county, or city, or even just themselves.
I think you need a new argument. You don't even question why you think a state would make some of those bizarre definitions while blithely assuming the federal government wouldn't.
I can't picture any state government deciding that it was okay to use torture to seek information or confessions but our federal government has implemented this practice.
I can't picture any state government deciding that it was okay to kidnap citizens of their and other states and send them to a third state to be tortured but our federal government has implemented this practice.
I can't picture any state government deciding that it was okay to tap interstate phone calls without a warrant but our federal government has implemented this practice.
I can't picture any state government deciding that it was okay to pre-emptively attack another state because they just might possibly be a danger to them but our federal government has implemented this practice. (This one really annoys me because the U.S. has now proved that they are a threat to other countries and they can use the same line of thought to justify attacking us.)
I could go on but I think the point is made. Six years ago I couldn't've pictured the federal government doing any of those things either. Who do you think has more moral authority? The career politician on the other side of the continent or the guy down the street who knows what things are like in your neighborhood. The answer is both. States are supposed to be experimental testbeds for laws. The courts and elected representatives from all the states are supposed to keep that in check and make sure the states play fair with each other.
BTW, You're off your rocker if you think taxation is not some inescapable coercion. It was just that issue that caused some local malcontents to take up arms and revolt against their legal govermental authority. That issue is what this country is founded upon.
This all has a terribly simple solution:
Set-up a community which interprets Supreme Court rulings as obscenity. Then file criminal charges against them.
The application today is that web publishers, knowing that certain potential viewers will be offended by their content, should take steps to make sure that such content cannot be accidentally viewed by "weaker brethren". This was the principal behind restricting potentially offensive content on broadcast TV to the wee hours.
Such publishers may not care two hoots about Paul the Apostle's advice. But they should bear in mind that if they don't apply self-censorship in avoiding audiences that are offended, they may end up with government censorship (option 1) - which is the worst possible outcome for all concerned. Since said standards are arbitrary, they will eventually turn and bite the "right" as well as the "left" (and have done so historically).
The intelligent answer is the person with the computer. As the content is not automatically transferred, the user therefore initiated the action which connected his state to the computer in the other state.
Really, it's simple if you look at the initiator:
Did the site owner dial into a site in the other state: no
Did the ISP direct the user's computer to connect to the site, or the hosting site to the user... through a deliberate automated process or by direction of somebody at the ISP: no
Did the end user (person at the computer) choose to access the site and the content therein: yes
There's the answer folks.
Let's not forget installing the Shah of Iran, that was on Eisenhower's watch as well.
That's a consequence of the Supreme Court's landmark 1973 case, Miller v. California, in which the court ruled that obscenity was essentially a subjective judgment, and called for prosecutors, judges and juries to apply 'community standards' in determining what speech was obscene and what was protected. In the age of the Internet, a new issue has been raised - if something considered free speech in New York is accessible in Alabama, where it's considered obscene, what standard should be used? By rejecting the case, the Supreme Court has left that question open.
Apparently, that has not stopped FCC to classify content as "obscene" or "not obscene" at will. What community standards are they using? They are asserting their own rightous moral values on everyone who broadcasts. They claim to be fair, they are not. They don't prosecute, judge or fine people fairly, either (think Stern vs. Oprah vs. Janet Jackson). Apparently, someone needs to tag the Supreme Court, assert the 1973 precedence against the FCC, and see the $hit hit da fan.
Coderz 4 Life
Maybe the US needs to treat the Internet as a state and give it it's own court system and jurisdiction (and local laws). Of course these laws should only be used internally within the USA, and no effort to force other countries to recognize those laws should ever be made.
That also could mean the Internet gets its own sales tax rate, across all websites, instead of depending on what state the company is located in. Maybe the funds could then be used to improve Internet infrastructure... much like how state taxes can be used to fund improvements to highways and such.
5) Profit!!!
The next site to slashdot will be ready soon, but subscribers can beat the rush and start slashdotting it early!
The population of the known universe were in shock today with the revelation that the US Supreme Court was observed behaving in something vaguely resembling a genuinely judicial manner. In response to these developments, a statement was received by us from the zoning co-ordination staff of the infernal regions, which informed us that they have plans to establish a ski resort later this year.
More on this as it develops.
Do either #1 or #2.
Wait for the opposing stance's PAC to give you money.
Do the opposite.
Wash Rinse Repeat.
PROFIT.
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
Think about it. We all elect 100 people who represent our local values. We elect one guy who represents our national values. We make that one guy pick somebody the other guys have to approve, and one approved, that person, along with 8 buddies, gets to make the final, unappealable decisions on everything. You can't threaten to pull a Supreme Court judge's campaign contributions. You can't scare the populace into replacing half of the Supreme Court at once.
We should not bitch about the Supreme Court making the rules. If the Supreme Court doesn't make the rules, who are we going to have do it? Congress? Yeah, they're way better.
paintball
my wife and I decide whether or not our children will have access to porn, noone else.
I think the kid might want to have a say.
If you plan to deny a teenage boy porn, you'd better hope he can't hack.
You can't take the sky from me...
Basically, the appeals court said that there was no example of what the plaintiffs had in mind.
So what we need to resolve the whole issue is one valiant defender of civil rights to selflessly browse through porn illegal in their locale?
Any program relying on (nontrivial) preemptive multithreading will be buggy.
1. Murder. Does it really seem reasonable to allow a state to define murder? Should a state be allowed to say that killing poor people for sport is ok?
I think that few societies are going to allow outright killing for sport, simply because that tends to, y'know, make civilization collapse and all that.
However, I could see a state allow, say, dueling between two consenting parties. I think that it would probably be a bad idea, but that's not the point. Dueling *was* legal in the civilized world for quite some time, and society seemed to keep functioning.
2. Obscenity. Does it really seem ok for a state to be allowed to allow child pornography?
Absolutely. I personally don't have any problem with child pornography, per se.
The only practical grounds I'm aware of for making possession of and production of child pornography illegal is because of possible concerns that the production industry will result in sexual abuse of children (a whole different ballgame). The rationale behind making possession a felony is that some of those who possess child pornography will be funding that industry. It's similar to the rationale behind making it a felony to possess controlled substances. It's not that you're directly hurting someone else, it's that you're funding people that society has deemed it valuable to squish.
Direct damage from child pornography? When National Geographic goes to Africa or somewhere and takes a picture of a bunch of people, including kids, in the nude squatting around a campfire, said kids somehow avoid being grieviously damaged.
In Romeo and Juliet, Juliet is thirteen and both being married and having sex. It's just a function of the current social norms on what is approved of in terms of sexual activity and things related to sexual activity in today's society.
I don't think that any states *are* going to legalize child pornography, even given the option. It tends to piss off a lot of people who adhere to said social norms. But as for it being okay for a state to choose its own laws here -- sure, I don't see why not.
3. Wealth Distribution (taxes). This one I guess I can't think of a good argument against, because there's no fundamentally inescapable coercion involved, as is the case with all the others.
States do make their own tax laws.
As for federal tax, we tried having a federal government that couldn't tax people very early on. See the Continental Congress. It flopped financially.
4. Theft. Same argument as murder. Weaker if you're only going to consider non violent thefts.
If it's so obvious, why not allow the states to make that obvious decision?
What about situations like theft to retrieve stolen property?
5. Rape. Same argument as murder.
Same counterargument.
6. Slavery. Should a state be allowed to make it's own decision about slavery?
Yes, I think so, though I don't think I'd go to war over the point.
morally, should be decided by the most global authority available, which in the case of US states is the federal government.
Morality is just the current set of social norms. It's kind of silly to use it in an argument about whether social norms should be enforced.
Any program relying on (nontrivial) preemptive multithreading will be buggy.
And making an ill informed comment.
Read the thread, take a second to understand why it has nothing to do with what you posted, and then try again.
Hint: we were discussing literalism and the Consititution.
"The government grants you rights, not the other way around."-- beav007. Yes, these people really exist...
There are rules about display of potentially offensive magazines in stores. There are rules about billboards, but IMO they ought to be stricter. Fine, put racy billboards in the red-light district, but I don't want to see them when I'm driving through on the interstate. Some libertines are not content to coexist - they are determined to coerce everyone into their own image. (And yes, the same could be said of some social conservatives.)
Assuming you are not a smoker, how would you like it tobacco companies could release various smokes into the commons at your shopping mall for marketing purposes. While smokers and some non-smokers (especially ex-smokers) may enjoy the smell, many non-smokers find it anywhere from unpleasant to nauseating. This is how those of us who haven't established the addiction feel about porn.