Originally Posted by kane

Sure thing, you still have to go into a porn store to see what they are selling, like you said even if everyone in town already has a pretty good idea. And yes, they do have to follow the law of the land. But this is because they are part of that community. The internet is not part of that community. It is part of the globe.

From what I understand some of the convictions Paul got were for sending obscene material through the mail. Others were for movie trailers he had on his site.

I would argue in both cases there is no community involvement. With a porn store you still see it. You see people coming in and out of it. Some might say it is an eyesore or that it attracts "undesirables." With the internet there is none of that. If I go to the Max Hardcore website and order a DVD, it is sent to me and I watch it, there is no community involvement. They don't see a building, a business is not operating in their city, they simply are unaware of my actions. With that type of situation there should be no community standard applied. If they want to outlaw certain types of porn then you can argue that people are buying illegal material online. In this case it would be no different than buying cocaine or a fully automatic machine gun. These things are illegal and there are clear cut rules to this. That doesn't go with porn. With porn you don't know you are breaking a law until it is broken. Sure, now you can say that if you produce something like Max does that you could end up in trouble, at least in that community.

IMO unless they could prove that Max knowingly had these DVDs sent through the mail he shouldn't be blamed for how or where they were shipped. As for the internet stuff, as I said before I don't think a community standard rule should apply. If the federal government wants to define in exact terms what they think is obscene, fine. They will never do that though.