Dr Who and porn
Some people actualy honestly believe that the puriticinal zealots that run the government are so evil that they actualy traveled backward through time in a diabolical plot to push their victorian minded view of sex off onto everyoine else. Remember, 2257 was writen in 1988. But now I have witnesed the argument that time travel foward through time was also part of the plot.
It comes from no less that Regina Lynn in an article for wired.com where they say the true hidden purpose behind 2257 is not actualy abotu fighting child porn, but an underhanded sneek atack by the government to try and shut down the website YouPorn. Since the content is generated by the user comunity, there is no way to verify age of anyone pictued on thw website. Theirfore, any law trying to mandate checking of age is realy just a sneeky way of making life so dificult for the website that they would have to shut down.
Peopel that get paid to write abotu sex and the internet should know better. Lets skip over the fact that 2257 was writen under the Reagan adminstration. The reason people are up in arms about 2257 is because the expantion that happened causing the record keepoing requirenments to become tougher. That was in april of 2003.
Well ….. No it wasent. The record keeping requirements remained exactly the same. The part that got expanded was the medium of delievery, not the record keeping requirements. Before, 2257 only applied to print magazines and video tapes. After it got applied to the internet.
But hey, whats a few distortions of facts between friends? Just for the sake of an argument lets say that the changes actualy were to the record keeping requirement and not to the form of media. That still leaves one major problem. The expantion of 2257 happened in april of 2003. The website YouPorn didnt exist untill August 2006.
Anyone actualy keeping up with the facts of the matter would obviously see the error in timeline continuity here. But why bother with the law of cause and effect when its just so much more fun to cry and panic about how we are living in a facist police state. Oh boo hoo hoo! The evil government is out to destroy all sex as we know it.
But just for the sake of an argument, lets say the people in 2003 were actualy able to travel foward through time to 2006 and see the creation fo YouPorn. Could they have writen this law in an effort to opress YouPorn?
No again! The situation has already come up with print publications and was settled in 1998. Sundance Associates made magazins that ran swingers ads. People would send in photos of themselves to go with their ads and Sundance Associates printed them. The courts decided then that user generated content wasent the responsibility of the publishers.
The more general instance is wether or not a website can be held responsable for the iligeal acts of its users. In general they cant. The foundation on this idea starts with Cubby v. CompuServe that held that it was the users comiting the crime that were to blame for the crime. Not the owners of the media where that crime was commited.
It works in the oposite direction too. In Perfect10 v Visa the issue was regarding a website that had stolden immages from Perfect10 and was using Visa to let users pay for viewing. In this case it was the users (visa) being held libel for actions of the website (porn pirates). But here again it was ruled that no third party libality exists.
2257 simply aint going to impact YouPorn. And its silly to claim that the ~true~ reason behind 2257 was a sneeky atack againt YouPorn. Not only is it not posible under US law, it is not posible under Enstines lwas either.