Why do they ban affiliates from New York? Surely a New Jersey affiliate or any number of other non-New York affiliates can still sell into New York?

I usually avoid all remotely political conversations on industry boards, but can someone explain to me how the taxpayers are covering the costs of smoking? Big businesses, which buy overpriced insurance for all their employees, may have some costs if they want to insure poor risks, but they are already getting a tax break for paying in insurance, rather than money, anyway. We could close that loophole any time and get healthcare to rightprice in this country via the market, plus doctors would save money and be able to lower prices for not having to maintain staff to dunn deadbeat insurance companies.

The only reason the taxpayers have to worry about covering those costs is that insurance companies use your premiums to make investments and hope you don't need a payout too soon. A large percentage of America's billionaires made their dough by getting initial real $$$$ to play with from owning an insurance company. Which I would be fine with, except that, when they lose, instead of accepting that is how the market works, the AIG types cry to the government for a handout.

Yes, there are a small number of people on SSI or MediCal and similar programs getting free healthcare. Many of those sorts of programs require at least a pledge not to do drugs and drink and I'd be fine with it if they added cigs. I believe in freedom, but, if you take money from someone, then I think you become subject to what they want you to do with it.

Well, the state convinced a judge that an affiliate in the state was the same as having an actual store in the state. A "physical presence". Therefore, should not be exempt from collecting sales taxes on sales, like any other store. Thats why if you buy something on Amazon and have it delivered to a NY address, you have to pay tax. Overstock.com already bans affiliates from NY.

It's not hard to imagine that carrying over to any kind of sale, especially in NY where some services are already taxed.

An international mandatory .xxx would have much better effect. Simply shut down all domains who do not comply and are not "authorized" (like pirate sites).

Most porn today, which kids are exposed to, are naturally those sites who do not charge for the porn, like infringing sites. Doing this, will also have an effect on the numbers of and amount of content on legal sites, because the industry would not have to "compete" with massive dumps.

Well the bottom line is no matter where you stand on the free porn issue is that if we as a community can't come up with something to protect minors from viewing hardcore porn then the Governments will. Do you honestly believe that showing full length very graphic porn vids where anybody any age can get them would last forever?

I sure hope not. It is not good for anyone, on any level.

After having read the bill I can confidently say it will likely not pass and if it does pass it will be shot down by the courts before it goes into effect.

In the quick read I made this bill doesn?t appear to apply to free porn at all. In order for it to apply to your situation you have to be selling the subscription yourself or be some type of payment processor. If you?re an affiliate or a Tube site that doesn?t directly sell the membership the law would not apply. So the pay site tour itself would not be allowed to show trailers or pictures but the affiliate could show anything they wanted and the tube site could show the entire movie. It would actually strengthen the affiliate model IMO. I suppose it would impact tube sites that are selling premium memberships as they would have to eliminate those if they wanted to keep giving free porn away.

The bill is a lot different than the old COPA bill in that it requires you the site owner to come up with a foolproof way to conduct age verification. The system you devise must be able to pass an independent audit (that you pay for) and upon passing the audit you would receive a certificate which you could show to your payment processers to prove that you?re in compliance.

Mainstream outlets like cable is getting more and more hardcore. You can also get PPV hardcore porn on cable with the click of a button. (just a remote not a mouse). Sure its more prevelant online than off. But the point I was making is that what happens in the YOUR HOUSE, in many cases can not be prevent by ME. It is up to you. It is up to you to make sure your child is not watching porn on TV or the computer. When your child goes into MY physical store then the burden is on me to not sell to them. Big difference, you can't compare what happens in the home vs what happens outside of the house.

Hell you wont even need to live here or be a US citizen. Just have a lay over at an airport in the US as you are traveling from one country to another and you could be arrested. This would be no different than gambling laws.

now cmon, there you go making sense again! :1orglaugh

Most smokers don't die before 65. When one turns 65 in the US they get medicare. Medicare is paid for by the taxpayers. When you work 1.45% of your paycheck goes to give medicare to some old person. Your employer also pays an equal amount. Up until now the amount of money that comes in from medicare taxes has been enough to pay for all the costs. Not anymore. Costs are going up. Part of the reason is because people that have smoked and now need expensive treatments. Well benefits aren't going to get cut because that's political suicide, so the only solution is to increase the medicare taxes that come out of the paychecks of those that work.

Also although insurance companies charge higher premiums to smokers that doesn't compensate for all the extra expense smoking has. So the rest of the cost is paid for by the non-smokers.

Once again I don't see the logic of smoking being a "right" yet I, a non-smoker, am required to pay for a smoker's smoking related medical bills.

Look at it this way if you pay $1 per pack in "sin tax" and you smoke 2 packs a day over 40 years that $29k in taxes you paid. Getting treatment for lung cancer or heart surgery is going to cost A LOT more than that. A smoker is still getting off light. And everyone else is footing the bill.

Anyways this is getting off-topic.

And then pass laws requiring ISP to either block .XXX or force them to charge extra for it. How many people are going to call up their ISP and order the "porn access" even if it was free let alone cost extra? And I can guarantee you the ISPs would love the extra income they could get by selling access to porn sites for say $5 a month or more. Then of course when the surfer has paid his $5-$10 a month for "porn access" he's going to be a bit perplexed when some site asks him to buy a membership because in his mind he already paid for porn.

:error

You have a great grasp of our legal system. :2 cents:

Gosh, do you think they will give me a refund on the money I spent on law school?

Don't mind baddog, it's the Alzheimer's. He's like in his 70's you know.

Probably. How can a court strike down a law if it isn't enacted, someone arrested and convicted by a lower court?

Countries are already blocking porn sites, and the domain extension is irrelevant.
I am not talking about the extension, but some of the ideas. Domains can remain, but the operators should be "authorized" some way and comply with some common rules. If mandatory, worldwide, then you get rid of most of the non-commercial sites exposed to children.

The same way they did with COPPA somebody that doesn?t like the new law once it is passed goes to Federal Court and seeks an injunction from it being enforced (ideally before it goes into effect) until the constitutionality of it can be determined.

I will concede if there is an injunction it could.

If you want the long winded version of the argument it would be that there are less restrictive and equally or more effective means for the government to achieve the same goal of blocking kids from online porn. You would cite existing case law (like where the librarians lost the filters case) as the Supreme Court found that filters were an effective way to keep kids from seeing porn and you would also revisit the COPPA cases and point out how this new law is as restrictive and more restrictive in some ways as COPPA which the court found to be too restrictive. Also the lumping of porn in with the sale of Alcohol and Tobacco is highly suspect as you have no constitutional right to disseminate those materials, but you do have a right to disseminate protected speech.

I think you may have read it a little too quickly. :winkwink:

"SEC. 101. AGE VERIFICATION REQUIREMENT.
(a) PORNOGRAPHIC MATERIAL IN GENERAL.?It is unlawful for an operator of any pornographic website accessible by any computer located within the United States to display any pornographic material, including free content that may be available prior to the purchase of a subscription or product, without first verifying that any user attempting to access their site is 18 years of age or older in a manner consistent with the regulations prescribed under subsection (c)."

Unless you believe that they are specifically referring to tours on pay sites (and I think that would be giving Congress too much credit in terms of their understanding of adult websites), I'd say that free porn sites are intended to be subject to this statute, as well.

In the end, it probably won't matter much whether the bill passes, because it has a number of the same defects that COPA and COPA II had, and the courts would likely kill it for the same reasons. The authors of the bill have attempted to resolve some of those defects and to limit the scope of the materials affected by tying their definitions of "pornographic material" and "pornographic web site" to 18 USC 2257, but shoddy craftsmanship and sloppy citation marred that attempt.

For example, the definition of "pornographic web site" means "a person required to maintain documents verifying the age of persons engaged in sexually explicit conduct pursuant to section 2257(a) of title 18, United States Code."

The problem there being, of course, that Section 2257(a) of 18 USC specifically pertains to simulated sexually explicit conduct, and not actual sexually explicit conduct. With no reference to the main body of 2257 in this statutory definition, Congress will have effectively created a definition of "pornographic web site" that does not include sites that display actual sexually explicit conduct. Whoops!

Defining "pornographic web site" as a function of 2257(a) also puts that definition at odds with the statute's definition of "pornographic materials" that immediately precedes the web site definition, as the materials definition specifies that such materials consist of a "depiction of an actual human being engaged in actual sexually explicit conduct."

These are very minor errors, to be sure, and they could be easily remedied with the stroke of a pen, but to me it's pretty alarming that with all the hands that touch something like this before it is published as a bill, nobody involved in its crafting caught that...?

Congress in a nutshell, perhaps.

It was a quick read and I am speculating at this point, but I?ll tell you where this train of thought comes from namely the section of the bill that defines criminal liability:

Whoever knowingly and with intent sells or provides access to any product or service to a person under a legally specified age?

If you look at this language it seems to be saying criminal liability only attaches if you sell or provide access to a product service and the typical affiliate doesn?t do that.

Furthermore looking at the definition of ?operator? provided in the bill.

OPERATOR.?The term ??operator?? means a person who provides products or services online whose sale is limited by applicable law to persons 4 over the age of 18 or with regard to alcohol, over the age of 21.

The typical affiliate wouldn?t be an ?operator ?because he or she isn?t selling or providing products or services. Fanciful arguments aside about a 15 image galley being a product it seems to me to be a real stretch to attach criminal liability to someone that isn?t dealing directly with the end consumer.

Even the section you posted seems to lead me to believe they are targeting pay site tours as this was included as an example:

including free content that may be available prior to the purchase of a subscription or product,


I agree that all of these defects could be cured by a couple stokes of the pen, but then the bigger problem for the proponents would be as you mentioned passing constitutional muster when the Supreme Court has already defined adult filters as an effective means to keep minors from viewing porn online and COPPA as having gone too far.

Cal's trouble is with online gambleing, not porn. It will be resolved.
Duke

Not bad right? :thumbsup

The "free content" part only applies if the purpose of the free content is to upsell a membership. If I put a bunch of porn on my website just because I like to give out free porn then according to this it's NOT a violation. Otherwise Google, Yahoo etc could be in violation. Typical Congress trying to be slick to avoid same issues with COPA and not pissing off Google but still fucking up none the less.

As an adult webmaster I would just have to adjust to the changes. I already have over 10,000 old AVS sites waiting to be listed.

CyberAge part 2

This could save the industry

time to dust off the Cambria list?

Question...how does requiring age verification do anything to eliminate free porn. Just because one may have to produce a credit card does not mean that one has to charge that credit card...does it?

well i don't have to worry about this shi, so glad i am not living in the USA

But to be honest as long as our three big brothers area around i am sure we are save.

Let me introduce you to them, i am sure you already know them.

Google Bing Yahoo

They will solve this in a heart beat.

In all honesty? I'd go back to buying DVDs.

We wouldn't have to if someone would come over here and kill all da jesus people for us.

It won't, and everyone knows it. Only a complete fucking moron would believe otherwise. You can't regulate a global industry. It is because of these fucking christians, the ones who actually view more porn than everyone else, who are behind this shit. They want to see liberals in jail and the FUCKING bible replacing the constitution.

Yeah, if the industry was confined within the USA. No US laws will shut down the hun though.

I would like to know what they define as 'porn content'. I am strictly softcore. I wonder if Playboy style nudity would be considered 'porn'.

Well who gets to define what is and isn't adult content? Can Maxim publish a magazine on the web with boobie shots? How do free (to the viewer) sites handle this?

in germany we have FSK16 and FSK18 - FSK16 is soft with showing boobies (and pussy with closed legs, no pussy lips) which is free to access by everyone. FSK18 means everything from showing pussy up to full hardcore which can only be accessed after passing age verification. and credit card does not count as valid tool for that.

What does count as a valid tool?

You have to mail in your birth certificate and a vial of blood for the DNA test.

I understand where you are coming from, but as I interpret it (and I could very well be wrong), the language you quoted is stating that it is unlawful to provide minors access to material that would be illegal to sell to them. This is consistent with the laws of the brick and mortar world; it is not any less illegal to give a minor cigarettes, alcohol, porn or any other age-restricted material than it is to sell that material to them. My assumption is that Stupak (or whomever wrote the bill on his behalf) would like that same construction and logic applied to online porn via this bill.

I also don't think it is fanciful to suggest that pornographic pictures and/or videos are a "product" within the context of the statutory language here, because (to me) the language is geared to describe the nature of the material that the statute applies to -- namely materials that are illegal to sell to minors. IMO, the statutory language does not limit the illegality to the actual sale of such materials, it is stating that it is unlawful to provide online access to products that are illegal to sell to minors.

(I don't think I've worded this explanation particularly well, but hopefully it still makes sense...?)

It would also be consistent with 2257 and other laws pertaining to pornographic materials to consider free porn a 'product.' For example, affiliates who display free content subject to 2257 regulations are considered "producers" under the definitions provided in the current iteration of 2257, despite the fact that the plain language definition of "producer" would not appear to include someone who merely displays content that was created by a third party.

At any rate, it's all a non-issue until/unless this bill passes, and I wouldn't be too surprised if the bill is never even debated, much less brought up for a vote.

- Q.