Letters to the Editor
-
Uh, oh
Does this mean I have to start watching "Barely Legal" videos with some guilt-ridden apprehension?
-
Please spare us
First the hunt for the Great Britney Videos, now the never-ending search for web porn.
Mr. Manjoo has demonstrated to us once again that his job is searching for cheesecake and sleaze on the internet.
Granted, lots of America spends a lot of time in this pursuit, but he is the only one I know about who actually gets paid to do it. While pretending to some sense of high-minded reporting.
Good God, this man needs a boss.
-
Manjoo's performing a service
Thaddeus Crummy belched:
Granted, lots of America spends a lot of time in this pursuit, but he is the only one I know about who actually gets paid to do it. While pretending to some sense of high-minded reporting.
Good God, this man needs a boss.
Grow up, for God's sakes, he already has one! Manjoo is performing a valuable service by keeping 'Muricans informed of laws being shut down that never should have been enacted in the first place.
Here's a clue: If you have such a problem with him, DON'T FRICKIN' READ HIM!!
How's that for a revolutionary thought?
-
To droogoy
If you've got a problem with my letter, then DON'T FRICKIN' READ IT. How revolutionary is that?
Certainly, don't respond to it as disrespectfully as you did.
And why should I care what you think, anyway?
-
The anti-porn crowd isn't going to fight this...
their too busy trying to get the whole shebang outlawed. As for the government going after porn, why are you surprised? it's not like they have any real problems to worry abo-oh, wait, never mind.
-
By the way:
Farhad,
You will have to produce the birth certificates of these two anols (lizards) you portrait in this public web site, and they better be 18 years or older, otherwise you are going to the slammer for kiddy P0rn.
Also the animals better be paid fair practice rates for this line of work, or you will hear from PETA re: Animal exploitation.
You have been warned!
-
Why it's important
You may remember back when this whole WWW thing started, a quote started making the rounds that went, roughly, "Freedom of the press only applies to people who own printing presses. And now everyone owns a printing press."
And at first people said "Wow. Cool." And then most of us quickly realized that the reason most of us didn't own printing presses was that most of us didn't have anything to say that was worth printing, and we went on about our business. But the people who do own printing presses and the people who would like to control what you hear and see (because controlling what you say is un-Constitutional) didn't say wow, and they didn't say cool. They said "Shit. We have to do something about this." And Congress proceeded to attempt to regulate the Internet as if it was the most natural thing in the world to do so (it wasn't), and they used the same methods and laws they had been using to regulate TV and publishing for years to do it, placing incredibly high barriers in the way of freedom of speech in any medium that had permanence.
And permanence and distribution are the key to all of this. Poor people have always been free to express themselves in almost any way they wanted, but only rich people could make it last forever and distribute it beyond a small circle of friends. The First Ammendment was the American Kama Sutra, a bone tossed to the proletariate so they could entertain themselves while only the wealthy were able to make their free speech mean something, because only they could do it in a way where anyone could hear them. That's what changed, and that's what this fight is all about.
Does anyone really think that in a world where a woman can get a judgement against her for over $200,000 for filesharing no one would ever go after an individual for posting pictures of himself spanking his monkey on a DIY porn site? Until this ruling, speech itself was less protected than the monetization of speech. Now we have a precedent that says that speech and the monetization of speech are 2 totally seperate issues that have to be treated as such, and that furthermore distribution plays no role in determining if speech is protected. We've never had that before, and it was 15 years overdue. And that is news.
So thanks, Farhad. You have gone a long way towards redeeming yourself after that Britney Spears guy thing.
-
Infinitesimal victory
Maybe I'm wrong, but wouldn't this:
"The court implies that requiring only commercial producers of porn -- people who intend to make money from it -- to maintain records might not violate the First Amendment violation."
...mean that if such a law was passed, sites like YouPorn would have to keep records, and of course they couldn't, and they'd shut down anyway. Not a real victory for "Web 2.0 porn", just a stay of execution. Make no mistake, if this ruling stands, such a law WILL be passed, almost certainly in September of an election year. The only gain here will be that high school students taking pictures of each other's dirty bits with iPhones won't have to photocopy their driver's licenses.