Lets hope not if they (the feds) are :thumbsup:Quote:
Originally Posted by Squirt
Regards,
Lee
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Lets hope not if they (the feds) are :thumbsup:Quote:
Originally Posted by Squirt
Regards,
Lee
There should be a blacklist of people not to work with because of known CP affiliations.
Damn maybe I should have kept my mouth shut on that!Quote:
Originally Posted by Lee
[Edited by Lee]
Squirt, ive edited your post because ive made the people who you mentioned aware of it and they are working on the issue at the moment.
I see no reason to drag their name through the dirt at the present time ;)
Hope you understand.
I totally and completely agree with you that we shouldn't ever justify content involving underage guys or girls. As I stated above, given the chance I *would* vote to curtail that speech, but i would still feel odd about any decision curtailing speech, no matter how repugnant.Quote:
Originally Posted by Squirt
I wasn't calling you an idiot, if that's what you mean by "thanks for the kind words." I said anyone who does what you say you are worrying about is an idiot. In other words, lumping sexual depictions of two concenting adults in with anything else. I'm really, really sorry you took it that way, I definately don't think you are an idiot at all, and I highly respect your opinions.Quote:
Originally Posted by boyfunk
As far as your question, i really don't know what I think about that. There is a drastic difference though between depicting or faking forced sex, and depicting sex with those who couldn't possibly give concent, like children and animals. I understand what you mean about a line in the grey being easily pushed toward the black or white once it's drawn. It's not really something one person could have the answer to, like you said everyone's opinion of offensive is different.
Since when did obscenity laws apply to text? I'm not sure whats more fucked up, the stories or FBI interpreting the obscenity law so broadly.
For any1 still hosted in the states, Chilihost's amsterdam hosting is most kick ass. Talk to Luke... sales@chilihost.com.
ap.
Strange that your post promoting Chilihost is intact....Quote:
Originally Posted by _ap_
but my post showing what he hosted was edited
interesting
Being hosted offshore offers no protection to webmasters from obscenity charges whatsoever, anyone else notice how 2 of the 3 sites that were raided last week were hosted OUTSIDE the US?Quote:
Originally Posted by _ap_
Squirt,
There is a vast difference between recommending Chilihost and what you posted, thats why it wasnt edited ;)
Like it or not, we do still have innocent until proven guilty mindsets in the US ;)
Regards,
Lee
I know you feel my frustration regarding that situation.Quote:
Originally Posted by Lee
What I posted was two questions and a link to the host information to a **** site. There is no judgement in that. Had it been any other host I would have done the same, as I have in the past.
I just hope the "I have no responsibility for what I host" defense isn't used.. because after you know you have a responsibility. IMHO
And like wise, If found guilty, does this mean you, with pre-warning, have assisted in the promotion of CP?Quote:
Originally Posted by Lee
No idea bud im not an attorney lolQuote:
Originally Posted by Happysucks
I would however suspect that would be the case, perhaps Chad could enlighten us as to what the legal ramifications of 'prior knowledge' would be in an obscenity case :)
Regards,
Lee
No, I don't "know that". I happen to believe in maximum freedom for all individuals. Stories are legal, no matter what. That's the bottom line.Quote:
Originally Posted by Squirt
Well now you know. Fictitious stories are protected.Quote:
Originally Posted by Squirt
Um.. No...Quote:
Originally Posted by MisterMark
Not quite sure where you base your 'ficticious stories are protected' comments on but that certainly isnt the case especially when they involve CP, the case above set a precedent.Quote:
Civil libertarians are rallying behind a Columbus, Ohio, man who was sentenced to seven years in prison on pornography charges for writing his fantasies of torturing and molesting children in a private journal -- even though he did not disseminate the material.
The fictitious stories that Brian Dalton, 22, a previously convicted child pornographer, wrote in his diary about three 10- and 11-year-old children caged in a basement were so disturbing that the grand jurors who indicted him asked a detective to stop reading them after about two pages.
Free speech advocates in Ohio and elsewhere say they, too, are appalled by Dalton's grotesque fantasies. But they are hoping to prepare a constitutional challenge to the broadly worded state law that sent Dalton to prison earlier this month, because it covers not only photographs and other images of real children but the written expression of imagined thoughts involving fictional children.
What's more, they said, there was never evidence that the material was intended for anything except Dalton's private use in the confines of his home.
"It's really dangerous," said Raymond Vasvari, legal director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Ohio. "These are the jottings of a man who kept his fantasies entirely to himself. He didn't try to distribute them to anyone."
Dalton, who was on probation for a 1998 conviction for pandering pornographic photos of children, was charged with pandering pornography after his probation officer found the 14-page diary entry during a search of his home.
In a plea bargain, Dalton pleaded guilty on July 10 to one count of pandering obscenity involving a minor and was sentenced to seven years in prison and an additional 18 months for violating his probation. Another count in the indictment, which would have added five years to his sentence, was dropped.
The prosecutor, Ron O'Brien, declined to comment on the Dalton case. At the time of Dalton's plea, he called the case a breakthrough for child pornography prosecution. In 1990, O'Brien defended Ohio's 1989 law governing obscenity involving minors before the U.S. Supreme Court, which upheld it.
Dalton was charged under that law. (Ohio has a separate obscenity statute that requires dissemination of pornography.)
First Amendment advocates concede that they face an uphill battle before they can challenge Dalton's conviction on constitutional grounds, because he must first successfully petition the court to allow him to change his guilty plea.
Courts often are reluctant to allow plea reversals without compelling reasons such as proof of coercion or incompetent legal representation. Dalton's lawyer, Isabella Dixon, has said her client "felt it was in his best interest" to plead guilty, but she has not commented on what she advised him to do.
If Dalton is allowed to change his plea, two key constitutional issues in obscenity law could be examined, civil libertarians said.
The first is whether child pornography is limited to images or whether, as Ohio's pandering law asserts, it includes "any obscene material that has a minor as one of its participants or portrayed observers." The Supreme Court has held that child pornography is limited to images, but it has agreed to hear arguments this fall about whether computer-generated images of children engaged in sex constitutes child pornography if no actual children are involved.
Free-speech advocates said they also want to test whether child pornography is illegal if it is simply possessed without an intent to distribute. The Supreme Court has suggested that even private use of pornography should be prohibited when the need to protect children from pedophiles is of such overriding importance to society that it should be balanced against First Amendment rights.
Vasvari said the arguments for Ohio's 1989 law banning possession of obscene material involving children are a throwback to a pornography standard abandoned more than 30 years ago.
At that time, the Supreme Court moved away from the "bad tendency" theory, which held that the mere possession of obscene material incites the possessor to commit illegal sexual acts. That standard was supplanted in 1969 by a legal test requiring that the obscene material present a clear and imminent danger to children.
"For 30 years the bad-tendency concept has been dead, and this [the Dalton case] is an attempt to resuscitate it," Vasvari said. "They want to punish people for what might happen and not what happened. They are criminalizing a man's thoughts just because he got caught putting those thoughts into his private diary."
Vasvari said he hopes Dalton decides to file a petition to withdraw his guilty plea. He said the ACLU will follow the case closely and "if there's an opportunity to weigh in, we'll do it."
Gary Daniels, spokesman for the National Coalition Against Censorship, said his New York-based group was also looking for an opportunity to help contest the Ohio law as overly broad.
Daniels said the fundamental idea behind child pornography laws is to protect children. Images of children engaged in sexual acts are regarded as proof that real -- not imagined -- children were abused, he said.
"But what we're talking about here is a man who did not even attempt to disseminate his fantasies about fictional minors who came solely out of his imagination," Daniels said. "To arrest, convict and sentence someone on that basis is straight out of the thought police. It's an egregious violation of freedom of expression."
However, Bruce Taylor, president of the National Law Center for Children and Families, said, "the Ohio law doesn't say he can't have those thoughts, those fantasies. It just says that he can't commit them to writings or images that become child pornography, because there's a likelihood he could act on them in the future."
Taylor, a former Cleveland prosecutor who said he handled more than 600 obscenity cases, contended that the law clearly has evolved to a point where courts agree that in order to eliminate child pornography, First Amendment rights have to be balanced in favor of protecting children.
Some privately held written material, Taylor said, "incites pedophiles to molest and seduces kids to be victims."
"Child pornography doesn't stay in your sock drawer. It gets a life of its own and is acted out eventually. Kids get hurt by its mere existence," he said.
Janet LaRue, senior legal studies director of the Family Research Council, which battles child pornography, said that while she regards Dalton as potentially dangerous to children, she does not believe his diary entries are illegal under Supreme Court decisions.
"I think you could win this one in your sleep under existing case law," she said.
LaRue said the law, as defined by the Supreme Court, requires images of children in sexually explicit circumstances and the active dissemination of those images.
The kind of fantasies that Dalton admitted writing in his diary might provide a prison psychiatrist with a reason to keep an offender confined past his scheduled release date if they were found in his cell, but current law does not warrant conviction and imprisonment of a person for writing pornographic fantasies in the privacy of his or her home, LaRue said.
"I think he [Dalton] is potentially a very dangerous man," she said. "But at the same time, we do treasure the First Amendment and this seems to me to be a case of punishing a person's thoughts."
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp...¬Found=true
Regards,
Lee
You have stories involving real children that are obscene and are not protected, according to the Supreme Court anyway. (i.e. Adult users sharing their real life encounters with minors)Quote:
Originally Posted by MisterMark
I don't know you, or have anything against you.. I'm just making a point you might not have realized before.