'Conservative' Supreme Court? Are you joking?

The Supreme Court Helps Facilitate Degeneracy

Court Protects Web Porn...

US Supreme Court Supports Child Porn?

Here's what really happened.

Ultimately, the Supreme Court didn't rule on anything. They upheld an injunction against a six-year-old law that has yet to be enforced. That law is entitled the Child Online Protection Act, or COPA. COPA was hastily written and passed by both the Senate and Congress, in retaliation to the demise of the Communications Decency Act of 1996. The Communications Decency Act was ruled unconstitutional by the High Court.

COPA became law in 1998 and was judged unconstitutional by first, a district court and then by the Third Circuit Court of Appeals in 2000. The Supreme Court first heard the case of Ashcroft vs the ACLU in 2002. In this hearing, the Justices upheld the injunction and sent the case back to the Third Circuit. Again, the Court of Appeals ruled that COPA was unconstitutional because it was too broad and it limited free adult speech.

You can read the entire text of COPA here.

Primarily, COPA says this is illegal content:

"...''material that is harmful to minors'' means any communication, picture, image, graphic image file, article, recording, writing, or other matter of any kind that is obscene or that -

(A) the average person, applying contemporary community standards, would find, taking the material as a whole and with respect to minors, is designed to appeal to, or is designed to pander to, the prurient interest;

(B) depicts, describes, or represents, in a manner patently offensive with respect to minors, an actual or simulated sexual act or sexual contact, an actual or simulated normal or perverted sexual act, or a lewd exhibition of the genitals or post-pubescent female breast; and

(C) taken as a whole, lacks serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value for minors."

It's spectacularly difficult to apply Community Standards to the World Wide Web. What's more, I'm personally concerned about the pervert who wrote section B. Nevertheless, it was the Community Standards nonsense that stuck in the craw of the the Third Circuit Court.

That wasn't enough for the current Supreme Court. They wanted more and they made the Third Circuit work for it. The Third Circuit reviewed COPA and found other problems with it. The law covers only commercial sites. It says nothing about Newgroups, P2P Networks or WAP porn. The law makes no protection or offers any provisions for education/information-based free sites. There are an awful lot of websites that help teens with sexuality issues and concerns. Some of the plaintiffs in the case were City Lights Bookstore, Sexual Health Network, American Booksellers Foundation for Free Expression, OBGYN.NET, Salon Magazine and the Electronic Privacy Information Center. Further, the Third Circuit pointed out there were less restictive ways to protect children from online smut.

Under COPA:

"Whoever knowingly and with knowledge of the character of the material, in interstate or foreign commerce by means of the World Wide Web, makes any communication for commercial purposes that is available to any minor and that includes any material that is harmful to minors shall be fined not more than $50,000, imprisoned not more than 6 months, or both."

The Supreme Court agreed that there were indeed, less restrictive ways to protect children from online porn. The primary methods being parental supervison and filtering software.

What does the adult Internet industry think of this latest blow to COPA? We're relieved. The law could have effectively killed the free porn site. Our industry is having problems with our main credit card issuer, VISA. If we had to comply -by requiring a credit card number as entry- we'd be fucked because VISA says they aren't in the age verification business. Then again, it's probable that we'd all move our businesses and servers to non-US locations. COPA says nothing about world-wide enforcement. Resultantly, formerly legal adult sites would go underground..

As an industry, we agree with the Supreme Court.

There are better ways to protect your kids. COPA has nothing to do with child porn or child predators. COPA is about protecting kids from legal adult content meant for legal adults. We're not in the shadows trolling for your children. We don't want your fucking brats on our pages. They don't have credit cards.

There's just so much. So many crimes. So many different scandals. It's hard to pick one treason over another.

But I don't want to talk about crimes. I want to ask you a question.

Do you know the Presidential oath? Here it is:

"I do solemnly swear that I will faithfully execute the office of President of the United States, and will to the best of my ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States."

Here's a picture of Bush taking the oath:

Here's an mp3 of Bush taking the oath:
Bush Oath

Currently, Mr. Cartmell is a financial backer for Michael Wilson's as yet unreleased film, "Michael Moore Hates America". Wilson was having trouble funding his movie until Cartwell came along to save the day. Now the two are working to get "Michael Moore Hates America" into theaters this August or September.

If I were Wilson I'd find another backer.

Brian Cartmell used to work with Seth Warshavsky back in the early days of Internet porn. He helped run Internet Entertainment Group, better known as IEG. You know IEG. They're the ones that released the "Pam & Tommy" video.

Some news reports claim he was president of IEG. Cartmell states he was a mere employee. Nevertheless, Cartmell was involved enough with Warshavsky to be named in a lawsuit -brought by the toy maker Hasbro- against Internet Entertainment Group, Ltd., Brian Cartmell and Internet Entertainment Group, Inc. Hasbro sued IEC et al, for illegally devaluing the trademark CANDY LAND. IEG had been serving smut off a site using the popular children's game name as a domain. Cartmell was the Technical Contact on the domain's WHOIS info. Hasbro won their suit and got their domain. Cartmell moved on to exploiting .cc extensions in 2000.

What the hell is a .cc extension, you say?

Here's how domain names work. Take the URL http://yourpage.com:

A) The http or www portion is a protocol. This bit tells the user's browser what type of server to look for. There are different types of servers such as email servers and ftp servers. The http:// directs the browser to a document on a web server.

B) The middle part of a URL is called a Second Level Domain. This would be the yourpage in the web address. This is the domain name a webmaster registers. This one is the unique identifier for a web site.

C) The last extension is referred to as a TLD or Top Level Domain. The most familiar TLDs are .com, .net, .org, .edu, .mil and .gov. There are other TLDs of which .cc is one. This TLD is classified as a Country Code. You've seen Country Codes before such like .co.uk for British dot coms and .co.nz for New Zealand dot coms. .cc is the Country Code for Cocos (Keeling) Island.

Cartmell, like many from the domain gold-rush, was sure that major corporations and domain sellers would aggressively vie for possession of these shitty TLDs at $100.00 a pop. That was 2000. This is 2004 and Country Code TLDs are still shitty. Cartmell sold his enic.cc company to Verisign and moved on to the Spam filtering business.

Now Cartmell owns and operates SpamArrest. When you email a user with a SpamArrest account, you have to go through a two-step email process in order to be approved by the SpamArrest filter. It's a great service but unfortunately, Cartmell got off ot a bad start with SpamArrest. Turns out his big marketing campaign consisted of collecting the email addresses of those sending internet mail to SpamArrest users. SpamArrest got spanked. They don't spam anymore, except within confirmation emails.

Who likes SpamArrest as a service? Adult webmasters do! If it's any consolation to cyberporn haters, nobody gets more spam than an internet pornographer. In fact, the web's busiest free image gallery site, The Hun is a SpamArrest client.

Who do you think is selling SpamArrest? As far as I can tell from their Affiliate Agreement, there's no policy forbidding sales from a sexually explicit page. Perhaps there are no adult webmasters promoting the service with adult pages. But you can be sure there are adult webmasters promoting SpamArrest from non-adult pages.

Anyway, I guess this posting is an open letter to Michael Wilson. If I were you I'd find another backer. If not for your personal morality, then for a sense of fairplay. Do you honestly think that if the media found out "Fahrenheit 9/11" was funded by a former big wig at "Girls Gone Wild" they'd give Moore as fair a shake as you seem to be getting?