FC: Porn commissioners want more Net-prosecutions, convictions

[Declan McCullagh <declan () well com>]

[Or at least some of them do. --Declan]


http://www.wired.com/news/politics/0,1283,38901,00.html

   COPA: Peddle Smut, Go to Jail
   by Declan McCullagh

   3:00 a.m. Sep. 20, 2000 PDT
   WASHINGTON -- Porn peddlers should be prosecuted, say members of a
   federal smut commission.

   Conservative members of the Commission on Child Online Protection
   suggested during a meeting Tuesday that the government should shield
   Junior from dirty pictures by imprisoning owners of "obscene"
   websites.

   "I think the deterrent effect is key here," said Commissioner Donna
   Rice Hughes. "One of the main reasons we are seeing so much activity
   in the area (of online pornography) is because they're not getting
   prosecuted."

   Hughes, a former Gary Hart gal pal turned anti-porn advocate and
   author, said that "one well-placed prosecution could send the message
   to the providers of this material that it's not acceptable."

   But it's not quite that simple: A federal appeals court in June
   blocked prosecutors from filing cases under a new anti-erotica law --
   ironically, the same one that created the commission. The law makes
   displaying "harmful to minors" materials online a crime.

   That leaves existing federal obscenity laws as the Justice
   Department's remaining lock-up-the-miscreants option.

   "Prosecution in a well-defined way is a good idea," said Michael
   Horowitz, chief of staff to the Justice Department's assistant
   attorney general for the criminal division and a commission member.
   "But it can't be in a splash-bang-wild, whatever-you're-going-to-hit
   method."

   Anti-porn activists in the past have lobbied the Justice Department to
   file more Net-obscenity cases, saying that the relatively few federal
   lawsuits that have been brought demonstrate that the Clinton
   administration is neglecting children online.

   The most recent variation of U.S. obscenity law grew out of the 1973
   Miller v. California Supreme Court case, which upheld a law banning
   the distribution of material that is arousing but "lacks serious
   literary, artistic, political, or scientific value." But obscenity
   laws date back much further, to prosecutions in England in the early
   1700s, and were derived from religious prohibitions against blasphemy.

   Critics say obscenity laws violate free speech rights guaranteed by
   the First Amendment.

   Edward de Grazia, one of the founders of Yeshiva University's Benjamin
   N. Cardozo School of Law, outlines in Girls Lean Back Everywhere: The
   Law of Obscenity and the Assault on Genius how obscenity prosecutions
   imperiled James Joyce's Ulysses, Lenny Bruce's monologues, and 2 Live
   Crew's lyrics.

   [...]




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