Obscenity Crackdown -- What Will the Next Step Be?

[Dave Farber <dave () farber net>]

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 

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