IP Democracy: It's Still Illegal to Download Porn?

The prolific Tim Wu has this piece on Slate today, part of a fun series on little-enforced laws, that discusses how it's technically still illegal to download porn in the U.S., a fact that would come as a great surprise to tens of million of men (and a few women, I might add). Federal law makes it a crime, punishable by up to five years in prison, when someone uses a computer service to transport over state lines "any obscene, lewd, lascivious, or filthy book, pamphlet, picture, motion-picture film, paper, letter, writing, print, or other matter of indecent character."

Who could have guessed? With the exception of lewd material involving children, nobody ever gets prosecuted for downloading anything "filthy." As Wu writes:

Over the last decade, and without the repeal of a single law, the United States has quietly and effectively put its adult obscenity laws into a deep coma, tolerating their widespread violation with little notice or fanfare.

The Bush Administration has taken a last crack at getting prosecutors to bring cases against distributors of extreme content, but few D.A.s have the appetite for actually prosecuting Joe Shmoes sitting in their underwear watching videos that involve adult men and women. As Wu notes, this neglect of the law hasn't been a conscious decision on the part of lawmakers or law enforcement. It has just sort of happened.

Instead it was a combined product, over decades, of the decisions of hundreds of prosecutors, FCC officials, FBI agents, and police officers -- all of whom decided they had better things to do than chase around pornographers the way they chase murderers. Their consensus -- that normal pornography just isn't harmful in the sense that, say, drugs are -- has driven the current law more so than any official enactment.

Posted by Cynthia Brumfield on October 15, 2007 8:26 AM to IP Democracy