When did porn become illegal?

[Gidan]

Husband and wife owners of a California company that distributed pornographic materials over the Internet have been each sentenced to one year and one day in prison, the U.S. Department of Justice announced.

Extreme Associates and owners Robert Zicari, also known as Rob Black, 35, and his wife, Janet Romano, aka Lizzie Borden, 32, pleaded guilty in March to a felony charge of conspiracy to distribute obscene material through the mail and over the Internet. They were sentenced Wednesday.

The couple, in their plea agreement, acknowledged distributing three videos through the mail and six video clips over the Internet to western Pennsylvania. They forfeited the domain name, Extremeassociates.com, as part of their plea agreement, in U.S. District Court for the Western District of Pennsylvania. The company is now defunct.

"Extreme Associates produced and distributed sexually degrading material that portrayed women in the most vile and depraved manner imaginable," U.S. Attorney Mary Beth Buchanan, of the Western District of Pennsylvania, said in a statement. "These prison sentences affirm the need to continue to protect the public from obscene, lewd, lascivious or filthy material, the production of which degrades all of us."

The DOJ began cracking down on Internet-based pornography in 2003, and the agency established an Obscenity Prosecution Task Force in 2005.

Extreme Associates was the subject of a PBS Frontline documentary entitled "American Porn," which aired nationwide in February 2002. That program showed nonsexually explicit portions of the filming of a video. Undercover U.S. Postal inspectors then visited the Extreme Associates Web site and purchased videotapes. Inspectors also downloaded several obscene video clips, the DOJ said.

In August 2003, a federal grand jury in Pittsburgh returned a 10-count indictment against Extreme Associates for violating federal obscenity statutes. In January 2005, a district court judge dismissed the indictment, saying that the federal obscenity statutes were unconstitutional. The government appealed, and Buchanan argued the case in October 2005 before the Third Circuit Court of Appeals.

In December 2005, the appeals court reversed the decision of the district court and held that the federal statutes regulating the distribution of obscenity do not violate any constitutional right to privacy. The case was then remanded back to the district court.

http://www.pcworld.idg.com.au/article/3 ... _obscenity

[Harrison]

wtf?

[Narrock]

Maybe they didn't have that disclaimer posted that you have to be at least 18 before viewing explicit material. /shrug

[Tikker]

i wonder what exactly made it obscene?

reading between the lines, I would kinda hope that they were doing something more than just pr0n

[brinstar]

yeah it does beg the question

just how obscene is TOO obscene?

[Jay]

The stuff flink wants to do to Ryan Reynolds = obscene

[KaiineTN]

Oh you have no idea...

[Lueyen]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Extreme_Associates

# Extreme Teen 24[1]: contains a scene of a naive supposed young girl being talked into having sex by an older man. The actress involved was over 18, however dressed and acted like a young girl.[3]
# Cocktails 2[1]: various scenes of women drinking vomit, saliva and other bodily fluids.[15] It was the director's cut version of the film that was cited in the case.[1]
# Ass Clowns 3: a female journalist is being raped by a gang led by Osama bin Laden; the journalist is freed and the gang members killed. The director's cut version also contains a scene where Jesus steps off the cross and has sex with an angel.
# 1001 Ways to Eat My Jizz:
# Forced Entry[16]: The film depicts the beating, rape and murder of women by a serial killer, who is eventually killed by a mob of vigilantes.[17] There are three scenes which graphically portray rape and murder, and women are also spat on.[3] Extreme's website called it their "most controversial movie" and "a stunningly disturbing look at a serial killer, satanic rituals, and the depths of human depravity."[18] Forced Entry was directed by Lizzy Borden and released in 2002. Again it was the director's cut version of the film that was cited in the case.

My first thought on this was that a good litmus test as to what should be considered "over the line" and hence illegal would be depiction of something that was illegal. Then I considered non pornographic material such as slasher flicks where heinous murder is depicted. By this rational I think a solid argument could be made that some movies or video games intend to depict murderous violence for the very sake of depicting it (making the subject matter very similar if not in the exact same vein) would also be illegal. Bottom line, if nothing illegal was done in the making or distribution of these films, and the legal arguments all hang on a subjective perception of what goes to far, I think it was a miscarriage of justice regardless of how revolting the actual material was. It especially bothers me that the conviction also seems to hinge at least to some extent on the director's cut versions if they were never distributed, as the case appears to be about distribution, not creation or possession, and therefore at the very least when judging the legality of the material for distribution, only the distributed material should be considered, not the pre-distribution material.

[Drem]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Extreme_Associates

a scene where Jesus steps off the cross and has sex with an angel

[brinstar]

not sure i believe angels actually exist but if they do i bet they're hot as FUCK