It has been about five days since Max Hardcore started serving his four year sentence for various obscenity convictions. I have to say it bothers me greatly.

Here is the big problem with Max’s conviction.

You can argue that Max pushed the enveloped, fucked with the bull and got the horns. I personally don’t like his content, but in that area I find most hardcore stuff kind of nasty and prefer the more softcore stuff. Call me old fashioned, but jerking off to a hot naked girl is fine by me. If it is hardcore I want at least the illusion that she is having a good time.

But this isn’t about what I want to jerk off to.

Some of the things Max got convicted for were videos of his that were on the internet. Those videos were also simply trailers for other full length videos. Now the law says to find something obscene you have to take in the work as a whole, not just small pieces of it. That didn’t happen here. They saw a very short trailer and used that to make their decision and toss him in jail.

COPA is gone, but some of the rulings of COPA linger. One of those rulings by the US Supreme Court is that you can use local standards when judging something that is on the internet. What this means is that if the convictions Max received for the movie trailers on his website are not overturned during his appeals any small conservative town in the nation can go to any MPG gallery you may post, watch your 30 second video clip and drag your ass into court, get a conviction and lock you away.

That is wrong.
The US Supreme Court was wrong with their ruling. Local community standards should not apply to the internet.

The court that handed Max convictions based on his movie trailers was wrong as well.

If those convictions are left to stand it could open a can of worms that could make things very ugly for this industry.

Love or hate Max. Love or hate his content, this is something everyone in this business should be paying close attention to.

ICM, the company that has petitioned ICANN for the .xxx domain TLD and been twice denied has filed a petition for a full independent review of their application. Since the last application ICANN has relaxed its rules on how they admister TLDs and they have new chaiman of the board who in the past has supported the idea of a .xxx. Those new factors could come into play with this review.

I still feel that it will again be denied, but you never know. If it is approved look for the gold rush to hit as webmasters scramble to buy up the best domains.

Here is more info on it
http://www.circleid.com/posts/86179_icm_registry_xxx_domain_independent_review_icann/

Ill keep you posted as this story unfolds.

COPA is a law that has been kicking around the Internet for close to 10 years now. Originally COPA was a series of new laws that were set forth to help protect children on the Internet. Like most of those laws, the people who wrote them have no idea what they are doing so they ended up writing a law that is far overreaching and does more harm than good. In this case part of the COPA law would require any site that contained content that is "harmful to minors" to restrict access and require a credit card as age verification to get into the site. Of course this part of the law was aimed at the adult industry, but since there was no explanation of what "harmful" meant it included all kinds of different sites.

The lawsuits have been flying ever since. For the most part the judges have always ruled that existing filtering software does a good enough job that this law is not needed. In its most recent appeal the US government argued that at least half the households in the country with children don’t have any filtering software so this law needs to be in place to protect them. So basically they were saying that if you decided to actually do your job and monitor your kid on the Internet you were still not doing enough. The appeal was, of course, denied. Yesterday the US Supreme Court refused to hear the case. That refusal should pretty much put a nail into the coffin of this law.

Maybe the government will find some other creative way to bring it back for another appeal, but this last appeal was pretty far reaching and desperate so it looks like this part of COPA is finally dead. Good riddance.

The election was held recently and as everyone knows Obama won. There was a consensus that any democrat would be better for our industry than a republican, especially one that is a very right leaning conservative. During the Clinton years obscenity prosecutions were pretty much non-existent and the industry was left alone to do its thing. Now that we have a liberal democrat going back to the white house can we expect that attitude to return? Maybe. No politician is "porn friendly." None of them are gonig to rush to our defense, but if you look back on history democrats seem to be a little less uptight about us.

There are rumors about who Obamas attorney general will be now. He was an assistant AG under Clinton and now there are some worries because there are letters he wrote to some people about prosecuting obsenity. I personally am not too worried. The letters he wrote also include in them the prosecution of child porn which I (and everyone I know) strongly support. These letter were also written to conservative leaders who want to hear things like this and they were written in 1998 after which nothing happened to our industry. I feel the letters were mostly meant to convey that the administration was adament about going after CP and the added in regular porn as a way to appease some conservative watchdog groups.

In the end the AG is under the guidence of the president. I feel it is pretty unlikely given the state of the country that Obama would make going after us a priority. But as I said, no politician is for us, so I reserve the right to keep my fingers crossed. I guess within the first 6 months or so of his presidency we will find out more. I feel good about Obama being elected and think the next four years will be better for our industry than the last 8, but I guess time will tell for sure.

Max Hardcore AKA Paul F Little was found guilty of 10 counts of obscenity a few months ago. His sentencing came this week and got 46 months in jail plus fines and he will have to serve 3 years probation when he is released. The judge did allow him to remain free until a prison is determined. He will be appealing immediately. He had to wait for the sentence before he could even file the appeal so this is just the next step in the process, however it sounds like the way it things look he may end up in prison while his appeal is being carried out.

This is the first time a porn producer has been found guilty of obscenity while the distributor was given immunity. Little even argued that he had no idea they were sending his material through the mail since he doesn’t handle distribution himself. While I may not be a fan of his content, 46 months seems like a long time for this and it could set a very dangerous precedence. Some of the counts he was convicted on were simply trailer clips on his website. The law clearly says you have to take the work as a whole so they shouldn’t be allowed to convict him on just clips. I imagine that will be a big part of his appeal.

I hope he eventually beats this. Even if his content was extreme and turns a lot of people off you have to keep in mind that the battles for free speech are fought on the fringes. Once the extreme stuff has been beaten down, you know the softer more mainstream stuff is next.