Obscenity Law

[Err]

The most ridiculous law ever made and enforced.

Obscenity by legal definition is: an act, utterance, or item tending to corrupt the public morals by its indecency or lewdness.

This problem has serious implications, because if an act or an item is deemed obscene, it is not protected by the First Amendment (free speech). There goes your rights! This is the case for a famous video on the internet which featured two females and a certain household item (most people know what I'm talking about). It's a video which, by law, is deemed obscene and is illegal to distribute. The issue I have with this obscenity law is that for something to be found obscene the following has to be true:

Originally Posted by http://www.answers.com/topic/obscenity

The basic guidelines for the trier of fact must be (a) whether the "average person, applying contemporary community standards" would find that the work, taken as a whole, appeals to the prurient interest [...], (b) whether the work depicts or describes, in a patently offensive way, sexual conduct specifically defined by the applicable state law, and (c) whether the work, taken as a whole, lacks serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value.

Which of course means if your community finds the work obscene, it's not protected by the First Amendment, and makes you a criminal. It's been argued that the morals of the "community" on the internet has no definition since it encompasses anyone from any place. But prosecutors have gotten around this by limiting the internet's area of the accused, to the three surrounding counties. Then base their materials on current morals of those communities. I believe anyone can do whatever they want on the internet and offline and not get in trouble for it, given that they confirm that the material is being directed to the target audience (e.g. for adults only, or away from children). No one should say what is deemed obscene since that will differ from person to person. They cannot just make something legally obscene because a certain group of people didn't like it.

What do you think? Right or wrong?

[SRhyse]

If obscenity laws were a 'right or wrong' thing, there likely wouldn't be an issue with them in the first place .

There's no accounting for taste, which is why it's so difficult to do legally. The fact that it can deeply affect people and does so pervasively, however, means that a legal attempt to do so does need to be made, if only to keep people from rioting about it.

The internet's hella new, and the laws made to handle things like obscenity and offension were made to deal with completely different mediums that are hella old. Any time in recent history where 'the law' and 'the internet' have met on the street, it tends to turn into a Loony Toons themed scramble with alot of smoke and sound effects, but not a whole lotta substance; the internet always comes out on top, however, cause it's young and new and full of energy and numbers, while the laws trying to make sense of it are tired and few, and limited to their respective countries. I honestly like the anarchy of it, but I respect those that don't.

Personally, I think anyone that can be offended is at fault for being insecure and have a poor sense of self. If an attempt needs to be made to let people better choose what they are and aren't affected by, however, and it's easy enough to implement (which it often is), I think the way obscenity in videogames has been handled with more informal groups like the ESRB is as of yet the most affective way to deal with it. Basically, letting everything run free within a very broad sense of morality, and having the existing legal systems only step in when those freely operating entities like the ESRB are caught with their pants down, like with the Hot Coffee thing. (I'll leave how horrifically the Hot Coffee thing was handled aside, but I do agree that it was a moment that the law needed to step in to keep the peace, despite keeping the peace in ways that ended stupidly.)

So, in a nutshell-

-I think being offended is dumb, but respect and help those that don't to be better equipped to be less offended, if only because I believe it's wholeheartedly important to them.

-I think in situations like parenting, giving people the right to choose what does and does not affect them and their children is a pretty easy thing to do, and am always more than happy to help them to that affect when the costs involved aren't retarded.

-I also think the best any current legal system on the planet can do within the next 5 years in regards to obscenity laws is to only step in when people start physically running amok in the streets, raising various roofs, and generally lighting things on fire.