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It's unjust what happened to Max. Some people in the Feds were determined to take him down, so they shopped for a venue that would be most likely to apply a very vague law against him. This demonstrates the tyrannical power of government. a key reason the bill of rights was created was to protect the rights of the people from this power. & its sad that the legal system has continuously upheld an obscenity law that clearly violates the letter & spirit of the 1st amendment freedom of speech. Nobody should go to jail for producing "patently offensive" speech. its absurd.
Its doubly absurd to convict a man of obscenity for distributing said work on the internet. As Kane rightly argues, its impossible to apply a local community standard to a world wide web. Thats exactly what happened in this case.
With that said, we all should feel somewhat lucky the court system makes a distinction between obscenity & constitutionally protected porn. People in this thread thinking the obscenity law should be more clear are asking for a hanging. The government is run by people that hate us. They passed COPA by large margins. To say these people should clarify the obscenity law is to ask them to ban us. We are just 1 conservative supreme court justice away from the govt having cart blanche over our freedom of speech. All porn laws are based on the idea of "protecting children" & i assure you the feds would ban our entire industry if not for the courts. COPA tried to do exactly that.
theoretically, the govt could stake out that florida community & try to apply the obscenity law to every adult website on the net. But it always comes down to resources, & even under the Bush white house, the justice dept did not see the wisdom of applying large resources to prosecuting patently offensive speech. So they go after only the most obvious targets. That is why Max sits in jail today.
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