CENSORED BY U.S. GOVERNMENT

They're not that new. What gay.com is complaining about is 18 USC 2257, the Tracy Lords law. It passed in 1988. It lives, as amended, here.

Recently the Attorney General's office promugated proposed regulations relating to enforcement of the law. I dunno whether this link will survive for long, but I found the proposed regs in the Federal Register, here.

Haven't looked through the regs yet, but I guess Gonzales is proposing that personals sites which publish photos of actually sexually explicit conduct be required to do the same inquiries and recordkeeping as other businesses which publish such photos. So gay.com will have to pull down the photos of people masturbating unless or until they can ascertain that each person depicted in them is an adult.
 
Does anyone have any specific, definable objections to the law or to the proposed regs, or is everyone just going to keep whining that freedom and liberty are wholly done away with because of a possibly overbroad recordkeeping requirement?
 
Tony said:
False dichotomy.
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I agree, it was. Partly your fault, though.

Government is about law.
All laws infringe on freedom, some justly, some not.

You implied that this was one of the unjust ones. You did not elaborate as to why this this is so. Therefore, any position taken by inference is no worse than yours.
 
Gwyn ap Nudd said:
A compromise of sorts has been reached between the Justice Dept and the adult entertainment industry
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Interesting. Perhaps Jeff Gannon pulled a few strings by pointing out that all his White House "contacts" might end up in the "bookkeeping" records required by his site (hotmilitarystuds.com).

Imagine a former White House "journalist" working for a non-existant news agency, while simultaneously running two gay porn sites and after having been cleared by the Secret Service to enter the White House when there were no press conferences. They're apparently not thinking too far ahead on this one, but no one has ever blamed them for too much foresight!
 
Rob Lister said:
You implied that this was one of the unjust ones. You did not elaborate as to why this this is so.
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Sorry, I figured it was pretty apparent. I think this law is unjust because it interferes with an individual's right to express themselves.
 
Tony said:
Sorry, I figured it was pretty apparent. I think this law is unjust because it interferes with an individual's right to express themselves.
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But it doesn't. All it requires is that the expressors prove that all the actually sexually explicit photographs or videos are exclusively of persons over 18 years of age.

This is a much, much, much smaller restriction on speech than, say, the federal government's control over wine labels or their requirement that brokerage houses get outside approval before running an ad or their requiring pharmaceutical companies to either not name the use of a product or to list all the side effects in each ad. And yet no one opens threads saying "Free the Winemakers" or "Justice for Merrill Lynch."
 
manny said:
But it doesn't. All it requires is that the expressors prove that all the actually sexually explicit photographs or videos are exclusively of persons over 18 years of age.
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Which is a restriction. The onus is on the government to prove that the expressor is under 18. It's called innocent until proven guilty.


This is a much, much, much smaller restriction on speech than, say, the federal government's control over wine labels or their requirement that brokerage houses get outside approval before running an ad.
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Wine labels? Brokerage houses getting outside approval? What are you talking about and how does it relate to internet porn?

or their requiring pharmaceutical companies to either not name the use of a product or to list all the side effects in each ad.
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So honesty in advertising is a bad thing?

And yet no one opens threads saying "Free the Winemakers" or "Justice for Merrill Lynch."
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Perhaps because the situations aren't as analogous as you claim?
 
Tony said:
Which is a restriction. The onus is on the government to prove that the expressor is under 18. It's called innocent until proven guilty.
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Not sure if you're opining on what the law should be or what it is. If the latter, you are factually incorrect. The record-keeping provisions of 2257 have consistently been upheld by the courts, as have various other provisions requiring various other parties to maintain records which demonstrate the truthfullness of what they say.

Wine labels? Brokerage houses getting outside approval? What are you talking about and how does it relate to internet porn?
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They are restrictions on speech which are much more onorous than those imposed on producers of actual sexually explicit content. Let's leave the brokerage houses out for now unless you really want to go there -- it's too complicated to explain and frankly I was dumb to include it. If you are a producer of wine with alcohol content in excess of 7%, you have to get your label approved, in advance, by the federal government. You send them a sample and they tell you if it's OK. If it's not, you have to redesign it. Much more restrictive than simply having some records in the office to demonstrate that you're not a child pornographer. In addition, wine lables are required by law to state that consumption of alcohol by pregnant women increases the risk of birth defects, even if the producer does not believe the statement. The government forces specific speech on people simply because of their trade. And everyone thinks that's perfectly OK.

So honesty in advertising is a bad thing?
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Nope, not at all. But the restrictions on pharmaceutical advertising are actually a good parallel for the requirements of 2257. Pharmaceutical companies must be able to prove that any claim they make is true. Not unreasonable, right? But which requires more documentation, establishing the "truthfullness" of an efficacy claim where "truth" is subject to differing interpretations of statistics or the hard, unrebuttable proof of the age of a person in an actually sexually explicit photograph?

Perhaps because the situations aren't as analogous as you claim?
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Each situation I referenced is an example of the government placing higher restrictions on speech than the simple identification of the people in pornographic pictures.
 
I don't understand the point of these regulations. Child pornography is already illegal, as is the distribution of it, online or off. Websites hosting child pornography are already fair game to law enforcement.

Requiring all sexually-explicit photography to be accompanied by paperwork to prove it isn't child pornography won't make those sites already hosting child pornography stop. They know it's illegal. The only ones who will comply with the regulations and attempt to assemble paperwork (good luck doing that for images that are over fifty years old) are the people who are already abiding by the law.

Not to mention the fact that there is quite a bit of pornography that is obviously, plainly, clearly of solely adults. Does anyone really think that it's easy to mistake fully-developed adults in their twenties and thirties with underaged (and what exactly age is underage? 16 is the age of consent in my state, does it differ for images? And by place? Is 18 legal? 21?) children? I'm aware that there is a great deal of disgustingly-named "barely legal" smut out there, which it makes sense to require some form of documentation. But all of it? A website catering to the fetish of lesbian women in their fifties has to produce evidence that the women aren't in fact fifteen?

I'd have to say that this stuff seems geared not to stop child pornographers, who are already violating some serious laws and won't suddenly stop because of an additional regulation about paperwork. It seems designed to harrass and make difficulties for any and all adult content providers on the internet.

Of course, all of this comes along with the additional difficulties of legally defining what is pornography, what is sexually suggestive, what is art. Which of the three is a Calvin Klein or Abercrombie advertisement? Is Michelangelo's David pornographic? What about drawings or paintings? Are they held to the same standards as to providing evidence of age, albeit of fictional characters? Or would it matter if the drawing was from life? Is Joe Phillips a child pornographer for his somewhat cartoony artwork of teenagers? Or can he say they're just young-looking twenty-somethings?
 
TragicMonkey said:
Does anyone really think that it's easy to mistake fully-developed adults in their twenties and thirties with underaged (and what exactly age is underage? 16 is the age of consent in my state, does it differ for images? And by place? Is 18 legal? 21?) children?
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Tracy Lords could easily answer that one. As could many, many others but she just happens to be the [still] most famous of the lot. She was 14 or 15 when she started in the porn business. Nobody doubted her age.
 
Rob Lister said:
Tracy Lords could easily answer that one. As could many, many others but she just happens to be the [still] most famous of the lot. She was 14 or 15 when she started in the porn business. Nobody doubted her age.
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And is appearing older when actually underage more or less common than appearing one's age? Should the possibility that one person might appear older than they are put the burden on every single other person to prove they are the age they appear? No matter how old?

I suppose under that thinking, everyone should be carded whenever they buy tickets to an R rated movie or buy beer, even if they are in their seventies and have a long white beard.

The point is, before this the burden of assessing age belonged to the producers, who have a vast advantage in doing so. They have the model physically present, for starters, and will need paperwork anyway in order to pay the model. Since the requirements do NOT remove the requirement of the makers of pornography to document and prove the age of their performers, what these regulations do is ADD that same burden to the distributors, who are sometimes many steps removed from the production process, both in time and distance. If the film, picture, whatever was legal when it was made, and the makers have the documents to prove it, why does it have to be re-proven along every step of the way for the rest of eternity?
 
I suppose my objection is that requiring the web sites that host images to have the same documentation possessed by the person who created the images seems akin to requiring every book store that sells Playboy (which is almost all of them) to have the documentation that Playboy itself has on the age of the models in every image in every issue. Distributors are not producers.
 
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