Interesting People mailing list archives
Obscenity Crackdown -- What Will the Next Step Be?
From: Dave Farber <dave () farber net>
Date: Tue, 13 Apr 2004 11:06:42 -0400
From: Monty Solomon <monty () ROSCOM COM> Obscenity Crackdown-What Will the Next Step Be? Issue #78 April 12, 2004 by Eugene Volokh So here's what I wonder about the Justice Department's planned new obscenity crackdown. As we know, there's lots of porn of all varieties out there on the Internet. I don't know how much of it is produced in the U.S. -- but even if it's 75 percent, and every single U.S. producer is shut down, wouldn't foreign sites happily take up the slack? It's not like Americans have some great irreproducible national skills in smut-making, or like it takes a $100 million Hollywood budget to make a porn movie. Foreign porn will doubtless be quite an adequate substitute for the U.S. market. Plus the foreign distributors might even be able to make and distribute copies of the existing U.S.-produced stock -- I doubt that the imprisoned copyright owners will be suing them for infringement (unless the U.S. government seizes the copyrights, becomes the world #1 pornography owner, starts trying to enforce the copyrights against overseas distributors, and gets foreign courts to honor those copyrights, which is far from certain and likely far from cheap). And even if overall world production of porn somehow improbably falls by 75 percent, will that seriously affect the typical porn consumer's diet? Does it matter whether you have, say, 100,000 porn titles (and live feeds) to choose from, or just 25,000? So we have three possible outcomes: ...http://www.cato.org/tech/tk/040412-tk.html
------------------------------------- You are subscribed as interesting-people () lists elistx com To manage your subscription, go to http://v2.listbox.com/member/?listname=ip Archives at: http://www.interesting-people.org/archives/interesting-people/
Current thread:
- Obscenity Crackdown -- What Will the Next Step Be? Dave Farber (Apr 13)