One correspondent suggested that a porn crackdown is needed because of the prevalence of porn spam:
Prior to spam, porn was only available if you really wanted it. If you didn’t want to watch it, turn the channel, don’t buy the magazine, don’t rent the video. But spam changed that. Now porn shows up in your house whether you want it or not. The only way to get rid of it is to get a spam filter and potentially eliminate valid email.
I sympathize with the correspondent’s concerns — but I don’t see how the solution matches them. The government isn’t prosecuting porn-spammers, even though it may well be easier to convict them (if you can catch them), since there’s a good argument that a defendant’s sexually explicit marketing to unwilling viewers can be considered part of what makes the actions “patently offensive” under “contemporary community standards.” It’s prosecuting porn producers.
Ah, one might say, but we have to prosecute the porn producers rather than the porn spammers, because we can’t catch the spammers. My point exactly: You can’t catch the spammers, because many of them are overseas. If you lock up all the U.S. producers, the same spammers will be pushing either the same product or a slightly different product the same way. So we get lots of prosecutorial time and effort invested, with virtually no effect on the amount of porn spam.
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