Mainstream Globe & Mail coverage of 2257

By RUSSELL SMITH

Thursday, July 14, 2005 Updated at 8:49 AM EDT

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A new federal law in the United States has the entire pornography industry worried.

This law, numbered 18 USC 2257, was approved by the U.S. attorney-general on May 17, and was revised in June. The law will not come fully into effect until legal arguments against it, currently under way, are completed. The purpose of the law is to increase control over Internet porn; it aims to do this by tightening regulations on record-keeping. Specifically, it requires all producers and secondary producers of sexual material to maintain detailed records of the age verification of each performer. "Secondary producers" means, of course, webmasters who recycle pictures and video clips. It means that anyone who puts an ad for an existing videotape on a website, using a still picture or even the box cover from that video tape, has to contact each of the performers who appeared in the movie, verify their ages and keep records of their proof-of-age documents. It also means that any amateur exhibitionist site, or swingers site -- of which there are thousands, all over the world -- must now be responsible for checking and keeping records of the ages of all the couples who submit pictures and personal ads. Most of these are free for users, rather like bulletin boards, and so are simply going to have to shut down in the absence of resources to maintain these checks.

Before now, stringent age-verification and record-keeping were of course required for any primary producer of pornography, but if you wanted to buy an existing piece of porn and put it on your website, you could trust that the original producers were responsible for all that, and that any investigators could go to their records in an instance of doubt. Also, an on-line swingers magazine was not thought to be a "producer" of porn (the individual contributors were the producers, and so were responsible for their own record-keeping).

This turnaround -- which is retroactive to images produced as far back as 1995 -- has the whole industry reeling. There are furious legal debates going on over the Web, and defiant promises of resistance to this purported government repression. A massive lawsuit against the government has been launched by the Free Speech Coalition.

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This is not surprising. What is amazing is that the mainstream media have not even noticed. In order to comment on this upheaval, you have to admit that you have been looking at porn sites, and journalists have been so far unwilling to do this -- much less express any sympathy for the pornographers, who are going through their lowest ebb of popularity since the Victorian era. But this law affects sexual expression all over the globe, not only because the United States is the world's largest producer of pornography, but also because all international websites that can be seen by going through portals and other sites in the United States can now get American webmasters in trouble.

The law is obviously intended to pacify those demanding greater control over child porn on the Web -- an area in which it will be utterly ineffectual. Child porn is already illegal, and so the shadowy criminals who produce it already operate entirely outside any regulations at all. They never have kept any records; they know damn well that what they are doing is illegal.

According to Adult Video News, the U.S. porn-industry magazine, there have been four documented cases, since 1995, of underage adult performers making their way into commercial sex films. (One of these was the famous eighties porn star Traci Lords.) In each case, the performer's age had been duly checked and recorded by the film company, but the performer had used convincing false identification. In other words, the perpetrator of the fraud was the performer. Each of these cases was discovered by the film company itself, which then had to spend tens of thousands of dollars in trying to recover the distributed videotapes. There has never been any accusation from any U.S. government source that the industry has not been doing its utmost to comply with the age-verification regulations, never any accusation that the industry has not been policing itself. So who exactly is targeted by this crackdown? It's not the commercial porn industry, it's the amateurs. The swinger sites, the personal sex blogs, the amateur exhibitionist sites -- these avenues of sexual expression have been one of the most remarkable things about the Internet. I don't think anybody really knew, before the mid-nineties, just how much sexual narcissism the suburbs of the developed world contained. I don't think anybody expected so many thousands of average-looking, middle-aged men and women to be exhibitionists; I don't think anybody expected so much intense honesty -- particularly among women, who seem to be writing the majority of the sex blogs -- about repressed desire and fantasies. It's something to be celebrated or feared, depending on your perspective.

The perspective of the U.S. government is clear. If you put a naked picture of yourself or of your husband on the Web in the United States, you are now subject to the same automatic assumption of criminal activity that the commercial pornographers are, and must prove your innocence by making your records of age verification available for unannounced inspection, at your place of residence, from 8 a.m. to 6 p.m., 365 days a year. The penalty for non-compliance is up to five years in prison.

Why? What is upsetting American lawmakers about the proliferation of amateur adult nudity on the Web? Just what exactly was wrong, morally or criminally, with a goofy site such as Rate My Boner? It was a site whose subject matter was all pictures submitted by amateurs, whose ages were unverifiable. It has now had to shut down. Who was it hurting? What exactly is the current hysteria about child porn about -- is it about protecting children, or is it about finding excuses to prevent consenting adults from doing embarrassing things with each other?

Smith is sometimes on, sometimes way off. Last month, in his column, he attacked Jazz in favour of Classical, which he calls Art Music. Real jerk that week.

Pity he didn't make it clear that 2257 does not apply to the rest of the world. He could have talked about the migration of porn sites to Canada.

I have a couple of web host clients. They are hiring staff; the porn biz is going crazy.

He also goofed on Traci's underage stuff; it was before 2257. It caused 2257. And he gave no credit to Canada's underage porn queen, Alexandra Quinn.

But not a bad article.

Good article.

Someone send it to Oprah.