Also backwards for privacy and security. If anything, sites should be prevented from collecting identifying info unless absolutely necessary.
[0] https://capitol.texas.gov/tlodocs/88R/billtext/html/HB01181H...
> (6) "Sexual material harmful to minors" includes any material that:
> (A) the average person, applying contemporary community standards, would find, taking the material as a whole and with respect to minors, is designed to appeal to or pander to the prurient interest;
> (B) in a manner patently offensive with respect to minors, exploits, is devoted to, or principally consists of descriptions of actual, simulated, or animated display or depiction of:
> (i) a person's pubic hair, anus, or genitals or the nipple of the female breast;
> (ii) touching, caressing, or fondling of nipples, breasts, buttocks, anuses, or genitals; or
> (iii) sexual intercourse, masturbation, sodomy, bestiality, oral copulation, flagellation, excretory functions, exhibitions, or any other sexual act; and
> (C) taken as a whole, lacks serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value for minors.
This is the part that really concerns me, to be honest. The main meaning of "prurient" is "characterized by an inordinate interest in sex."
The main reason this concerns me is because some people believe LGBTQ issues to be inherently sexual; and thus this law could be used to suppress general LGBTQ content as well as pornography. It depends on who enforces it and who interprets it, of course. But when you consider it in light of the hundreds of anti-LGBTQ bills filed this year alone, it just worries me.
As with all "offensiveness" laws.
etsy has the wildest stuff.
edit: maybe this is common knowledge, but I was pretty surprised when I was shopping for a chopping block last year.
> What counts as a porn site?
are really stale, and too often sophistic attempts at obfuscating what is rather clear.
If banning the production and distribution of pornography is not possible with an outright ban, strangling this monstrous industry through onerous regulation is a pretty good tactic. And it's not new. Israel effectively requires citizens to ask for permission from the state to view pornography, for example, while also using pornographic content against what it regards as its enemies (e.g., pornographic broadcasts from a captured TV station in Ramallah some time ago).
In the US, you are dreadfully wrong. Also, obscenity has a very specific, and strict, definition. The second prong under the Miller test is:
> Whether the work depicts or describes, in a patently offensive way, sexual conduct or excretory functions specifically defined by applicable state law
There is a large amount of porn that isn't going to satisfy this prong because it's not going to be sexual conduct--fetishes like BDSM could well fail to depict any sexual conduct whatsoever. It wouldn't surprise me if less than half the videos on PornHub were actually considered obscenity under the Miller test.
> If banning the production and distribution of pornography is not possible with an outright ban, strangling this monstrous industry through onerous regulation is a pretty good tactic.
Sorry, you don't get to curtail constitutionally-guaranteed free speech just because you don't like it, and "strangling [...] through onerous regulation" is no more viable a vehicle than an outright ban is under strict scrutiny.
> Whether the work, taken as a whole, lacks serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value.
Some people prefer to effectively exclude "porn" from this by definition, but I don't think that aligns with mainstream use of the term, and I also doubt that those people are using a similar standard to what would apply in a First Amendment case.
Sure it is. It's just speech some people don't like.
Just because some other government makes a shitty restrictive law doesn't mean the US should make shitty restrictive laws.