Joe Obenberger |
02-18-2016 04:03 PM |
Write these kinds of narration to accompany photo galleries with edgy, hard images where there is some concern about obscenity issues. Provide a text link for every image, sequentially leading the viewer to the appropriate part of the narrative. Then sell these stories to websites that concentrate in the hardest material out there.
The theory is that, if the site is ever charged with obscenity, the work must, under the law of obscenity, be judged as a "work as a whole". The adjoining link shows unmistakable intent to associate each image with a stream of consciousness rendition of the performer's experience. (Of course, nothing requires any particular viewer to follow the link to visit the narration that the site producer intends as accompanymanet. But this puts the work as a whole issue on much better ground that the previous, failed, argument that each website must be considered together with an image to determine the "work as a whole" regardless of whether there is evidence that there is some unity or purpose in the arrangement of the site.) If that narration approaches dealing with emotion, feelings, individual worth, pride, embarrassment, future consequences, etc. it is likely to be regarded as so closely associated with the image as to be part of a composite work, and if decently written, that composite of image and text may be enough to amount to what the law of obscenity calls "serious value". If a work possesses serious value, no matter how prurient the nature of the content, no matter how patently the depictions offend prevailing social constraints concerning the graphic-ness of the depiction or description, as a matter of law, it can't be criminally obscene. This is because our First Amendment values will not permit the criminalization of any work that contributes in a serious way to a broad conversation about humanity, the conversation that starts in our culture in Mesopotamia and Greece and Egypt. It does not to be Pulitizer Prize material. It just has to deal with the human issues in a serious way that is somehow beyond mere sexual excitation.
Go make some money with that encouragement.
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