The Adult Webmaster

Just got this hot off the wire. It looks like the government is going to release actual rules to help interpret the 2257 law.

2257: Rules and Regulations to be Released Thursday, July 12th

Canoga Park, CA – The Free Speech Coalition announced today that, according to the Federal Register website, some of the rules and regulations associated with 2257 will be released by the Government on Thursday, July 12th.

Jeffrey Douglas, Free Speech Coalition Board Chair, and Reed Lee, FSC Legal Committee Chair and President of the First Amendment Lawyers Association, will discuss initial analysis of the regulations at the XBIZ Summer Forum 2257 Seminar, being held in Las Vegas this week, at 11:00am Thursday.

The availability of porn on the Internet is pretty much equivelant to sand at the beach. Nearly any search done through the portals, results with at least one result having to do with porn, even if you were looking for “toys”.

Unfortunately many unsuspecting viewers may accidentally stumble upon a porn site, without realizing what they were about to witness. Just imagine the results for “Barbie,” when nearly every stripper from the 80’s used some variation of it, as her stage name.

It is the accidental viewing of porn that has many government officials looking to regulate how adult material is delivered online. This kind of attention looks bad on the adult industry as a whole.

The only way to avoid being clamped down on by overly conservative regulators, is to actually self-regulate our sites. If we leave it up to someone else, they may be overly restrictive (.xxx tld).

Personally as a best practice, I feel that all sites need to be rated and should also have a warning page.

Warning pages actually increase site depth (SEO bonus), help prevent minors from accidentally accessing adult material and show that access was consented to.

Nobody wants a minor accessing an adult site anyways, afterall they don’t have credit cards.

Are you labeling your pages yet?

Related Links: Restricted to Adults | ASACP

Imagine the power gained, if a government had total access to the data harnassed within Google. Complete knowledge of buying trends, thoughts, questions and the people behind them. Big Brother would truelly be watching you.

Yahoo, AOL & MSN each gave the US Government access to their internal data… which is even more appaulling, considering that they are in much better positions to monitor behavior patterns. Email, instant messengers, personals, autos, finance, real estate; all on the 1st page of every Internet users browser. The portals are the front doors to the Internet.

I’m not saying the government is savy enough to know how to use this kind of data, but they are. The knowledge within the worlds most popular search engine is beyond comprehension. Fortunately Google has had the balls to standup to overreaching probes thus far.

Don’t trust that your data is secure. For the time being though, Google seems to be erring on the side of the people, so I say handle your business through them.

If you had access to the queries lurking within Google, what would you do with it?

You better be careful while constructing those links in the future. The US Government recently authorized a law (§ 2252C) making it a federal offense if you author a misleading link. Basically if you dump a visitor onto an “obscene” page, without clearly indicating the content they are about to see is “sex/porn” related, then you are breaking the law.

What is obscene you ask? Well who really fucking knows… the one thing we do know, is the law reads as such:

§ 2252C. Misleading words or digital images on the Internet

(a) IN GENERAL.—Whoever knowingly embeds words or digital images into the source code of a website with the intent to deceive a person into viewing material constituting obscenity shall be fined under this title and imprisoned for not more than 10 years.
(b) MINORS.—Whoever knowingly embeds words or digital images into the source code of a website with the intent to deceive a minor into viewing material harmful to minors on the Internet shall be fined under this title and imprisoned for not more than 20 years.
(c) CONSTRUCTION.—For the purposes of this section, a word or digital image that clearly indicates the sexual content of the site, such as ‘sex’ or ‘porn’, is not misleading.
(d) DEFINITIONS.—As used in this section—HR 4472 EAS

1. the terms ‘material that is harmful to minors’ and ‘sex’ have the meaning given such terms in section 2252B; and
2. the term ‘source code’ means the combination of text and other characters comprising the content, both viewable and nonviewable, of a web page, including any website publishing language, programming language, protocol or functional content, as well as any successor languages or protocols.’’

The law is in theory, designed to help protect children online.
I can’t imagine there are too many people targeting children to obscene material in their online adult marketing. There is really no benefit in bringing underage viewers to adult websites. Primarily because they don’t have credit cards and can’t spend any money (freeloaders). But for those few people intentionally targeting children, they need to be stopped.. so 2252c, article B is great.

I am all for protecting children, but unfortunately I forsee this law overstepping it’s bounds. Instead it may be used to censor unjustly.

Article A. (In General), is extremely “general” in that it is so wide for interpretation that this could violate the law and be a 10 year offense: Raven goes out for the army. Is it obscene? Depends on who you ask. Does it mislead the person clicking the link? Depends on who you ask. The thought-police are on patrol.

What to do? Make sure you vote for representatives who don’t have their heads up their asses and don’t promote any pornstars named Barbie.

Related Links: Goatse now illegal | 2257 What does it mean for SE | 2252c Example