ICANN approves .XXX red-light district for the Internet

Sun Mar 27 11:03:06 UTC 2011

See http://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc3675.txt.

Thanks,
Donald
=============================
 Donald E. Eastlake 3rd   +1-508-333-2270 (cell)
 155 Beaver Street
 Milford, MA 01757 USA
 d3e3e3 at gmail.com

On Sat, Mar 26, 2011 at 6:21 PM, William Herrin <bill at herrin.us> wrote:
> On Sat, Mar 26, 2011 at 5:43 PM, John R. Levine <johnl at iecc.com> wrote:
>>> US Code TITLE 18 > PART I > CHAPTER 71 > § 1470
>>> http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/18/usc_sec_18_00001470----000-.html
>>
>> That law includes the phrase "knowing that such other individual has not
>> attained the age of 16 years."  That's why porn sites have a home page that
>> asks you how old you are.
>
> In court, willful negligence is generally the same thing as knowing.
>
>
>> As far as I can tell from looking for case law,
>> all the 1470 cases are basically child molestation cases where the 1470
>> count was piled on in addition to the real charges, unrelated to kids
>> looking for porn sites.
>
> It gets messy because obscenity hinges on local community standards.
> But that's the rub -- as a porn purveyor  you can't know what the
> community standards are in the user's community. Not many examples of
> web sites being taken to task for web content, not yet, but lots of
> examples of mail-order porn owners having a really bad year year,
> legally speaking.
>
>
>> So, in short, there's no problem for .XXX to solve.
>
> Suppose, just for the sake of the argument, that a statute or
> precedent came about to the effect that a community which permits
> access to .xxx sites (by not censoring the DNS) implicitly accepts
> "that kind of thing" isn't obscenity under local law. Further, suppose
> its found that the individual in such communities circumventing the
> technical safeguards in place to censor his access to .xxx is solely
> liable for such access, that the porn purveyor is -presumed- to have a
> reasonable belief that said individual's activity was lawful... merely
> because they access the site using the .xxx extension.
>
> Suppose, in other words, it comes to be that an internet porn purveyor
> is protected from local community standards for obscenity so he need
> only worry about staying away from stuff that's illegal in his own
> back yard. Where the prosecution has to support a claim that the site
> is accessible other than through the .xxx name in order to survive an
> early motion to dismiss.
>
> -Bill
>
>
>
>
> --
> William D. Herrin ................ herrin at dirtside.com  bill at herrin.us
> 3005 Crane Dr. ...................... Web: <http://bill.herrin.us/>
> Falls Church, VA 22042-3004
>
>