Reply #23: It's my impression [View All]

[bloom]

that obscenity laws used to be - and maybe still are to some extent based on community standards.

So you have some communities allowing strip clubs and have billboards advertising them and others do not.

Seems to me the internet - and it's lack of community standards is doing a lot to ramp up what would not have been tolerated previously.

As the original poster mentioned - porn in the 50's and 60's was fairly tame, comparatively. It's been since the internet that it seems that constraints (community standards) have been abolished.



On edit - community standards argument:

"More recently, the contemporary community standards construction was challenged in United States v. Thomas (44) on the ground that the on-line world had created a de facto national standard. The case involved a northern California couple who had been operating a computer bulletin board system which provided sexually explicit photographs. After providing access to an undercover United States Postal Inspector in Tennessee, they were indicted and convicted under 18 U.S.C. § 1465 (45) for knowingly using a means of interstate commerce to transport obscene material. On appeal, the Thomases argued that the court below had improperly instructed the jury to apply the local community standards of Memphis rather than a new definition of community "based on the broad-ranging connections among people in cyberspace."(46) They argued that under the traditional conception of local standards, their inability to control access to their bulletin board materials would force them to censor their materials to the extent necessary to protect themselves from prosecution in the community with the most restrictive standards. This argument distinguished previously known forms of distribution which could be limited to certain geographic communities (such as magazines) from on-line distribution which is an everywhere-or-nowhere undertaking. As the Sixth Circuit observed, however, the facts did not present a situation where the defendant bulletin board operator had no control over the geographic areas in which his materials were distributed. (47) Accordingly, the court correctly held the Thomas’s conduct indistinguishable from the distribution of obscene materials through magazines or the mail. (48) Whether the same rule would be applied where an Internet content provider could not bar access to citizens of sensitive communities is a question that remains unanswered."