A trade group for the adult entertainment industry will appear at the Supreme Court on Wednesday in its challenge to a Texas law that requires pornography sites to verify the age of their users before providing access – for example, by requiring a government-issued identification. The law applies to any website whose content is one-third or more “harmful to minors” – a definition that the challengers say would include most sexually suggestive content, from nude modeling to romance novels and R-rated movies.
Couldn’t the site just host hundreds of test pattern videos, or something else that compresses super well in order to avoid that “one-third” bar?
If I were them writing the law it would be based on viewed content. Not files sitting on servers.
The devs just need to make the top 1/3 and bottom 1/3 of the screen blank bars. Boom, sight never contains more than 1/3 questionable material. As an added benefit, sales of old 4:3 monitors would go through the roof.
Fascism wants an internet where you have to verify your identity to use it at all. Capitalists want the same, and they’ve already built a turnkey totalitarianism mass surveillance precursor to big brother on behalf of neoliberal “democracies”. They will 100% finish the job for fascism. This was always the endgame of mass surveillance.
I’m a capitalist, and that’s not what I want.
jokes on you, it doesnt matter what you want as a “capitalist” its what Capitalism as a system wants. Kind of like voting for a politician who doesnt do everything you like.
Capitalists shouldn’t want the same. You can’t sell advertisements with “a million viewers” if you have to be honest about 990k of those being bots.
You’re applying very 1990s thinking to internet advertising. They have ways of telling which ads lead to clickthroughs and sales. You say “We got 100 million viewers!” They say “cool, we’ll run ads on your program and give you five cents every time the unique link in those ads results in a purchase.”
No one is paying per sale. Click through, sure.
The law applies to any website whose content is one-third or more “harmful to minors”
So … Infowars, Fox News, OAN, Answers in Genesis, JW, Texas.gov … right?
Or, all the porn sites should just put huge amounts of public domain works and open source repositories on their sites, so that less than one-third is “harmful to minors.”
Pretty much every social media site would probably count too.
They’re the arbiters of what is “harmful to minors”.
Well yeah, they’re experts in hurting children.
Yeah, they would just say that those public domain works or open source repositories teach minors undesirable knowledge of some sort or compete with commercial software vendors and/or entertainment providers.
That can be weaponized, though. US government publications are public domain. So is the Bible. We’d at least get to watch members of the Texas government tie themselves into knots worthy of a game of Twister as they try to argue that those texts are harmful on a porn site but not anywhere else.
Who says that they would argue that they are not harmful anywhere else? Remember, the bible used to be only read by priests in Latin and interpreted to the masses and many governments would love to have less transparency as you can see in their opposition to freedom of information type initiatives.
It isn’t in their best interests to threaten the loony Christian sects that are one of the right wing’s favourite brainwashing tools. Members of those sects rely on authority figures to “interpret” the Bible for them instead of actually paying attention to its content, but if you try to take it away from them, they’ll throw a fit like a toddler does when you take away a toy they’ve been ignoring. Restricting access to the Bible in the present day would make religious brainwashing more difficult and create more people who actually think for themselves, which is anathema to bad governments like Texas’.
“Flood the zone with bullshit” can work for both sides.
4chan
4chan will be okay, it hosts /pol/, a nazi board.
Can’t they just threaten to release Republican’s porn accounts? We know they got them.
It’s like the pro-democracy version of the Ashley Madison hack.
That would be hugely illegal, so no, they can’t threaten that.
E: people, tone down your anger. I never said I like these Republican shitheads, I said companies cannot legally publish personal information about their customers. And they can’t.
Saying “Pornhub should just, like, break the law, mannnn” is not a serious position. It’s not going to happen for obvious reasons.
I guess I should’ve seen this coming. It’s far more fun to be angry than to be realistic.
Anybody being realistic knows that sites like pornhub cannot legally release personally-identifiable information about their users without consent.
Honestly, I feel like I’m chatting to climate change deniers here or something.
It’s not illegal at all, what are you talking about.
How the fuck is that not illegal? Companies cannot just release private information about their users.
The US doesn’t have a full-blown GDPR, but it still has laws about what companies can do with people’s data. They can’t just publish information about specific users without their consent. It’s honestly laughable you think that’s legal.
They absolutely can publish non protected information and none of that is actually protected.
Of course it is protected.
Membership is not protected status, any company could publish their membership roll unless their agreements specifically say they cannot and that’s very rare.
No they can’t. Please stop making stuff up.
Pornhub cannot go around publishing info about specific accounts holders, such as their name and job.
It’s actually insane that you think that’s the case.
without their consent
You didn’t read the tos update, did you.
They can just do it without threat as there is nearly no privacy laws.
Just create a hackersona by taking a random Joker card from Balatro, and make it look like a hacker attack.
“harmful to minors”
Indeed, I find that few things have done more to ruin my sense of common decency than HC Andersen’s The Emperor’s New Clothes and that’s a story all about public nudity.
Did you bring that up because it’s such a good analogy for the Trump presidency? I feel like I’ve been inside a version of that story since about 2020
I guess we’re about to see how many favors they’re going to give to the fundigelicals. Whee.
My guess is they side with Texas (because they’ve had too much normal adjudication lately), citing some impropriety statute from the Dutch Puritans circa 1683 as their core precedent, followed by pointing out that there’s no federal law that supercedes it, so neener-neener.
I guess all the corruption and moral collapse allows me, who has absolutely no clue about law, to actually have educated guesses how important cases are voted.
I simply ask myself “how would a bad person decide?”
Don’t read this unless you’re 18!
You read it, didn’t you? But your 49! Dang dude! C’mon.
Perverts…
Wait, which group?
why would anyone challenge this law to a hostile court so the texas law becomes landmark and set precident
I think you make a good point. Choosing your timing for a Supreme Court ruling is important. But the court is likely to be hostile for a very long time, and the businesses bringing the case are probably reeling from having to block half of the US market, so they can’t wait forever.
