More laws to burden your brain

Rotten.com: our gapingmaw.com and other sites shut in anticipation of 2257
Amended Section 2257 recordkeeping regulations go into effect at midnight tonight. The federal law requires website owners to keep records documenting, among other things, that "every performer portrayed in a visual depiction of actual sexually explicit conduct" is over the age of 18.

In anticipation, porn sites and others that offer adult content are preparing to make their sites compliant -- or taking them offline. Today, several sites in the Rotten.com family are going dark for that reason, including ratemyboner.com (like amihotornot for amateur snapshots of a particular male anatomical part in a particular state) and gapingmaw.com (which you could call an industrial-strength grossout blog).

Section 2257 is ostensibly aimed at preventing the exploitation of minors in pornography. However, some free speech advocates argue it provides the conservative Bush administration with the power to silence other websites deemed offensive. Here's the full text of the law: Link to U.S. Code : Title 18 : Section 2257.

And here is the full text of the enabling regulations which are more widely contested than the US code itself: Link. The amendment was signed into law last month by US Attorney General Alberto Gonzales.

A message on gapingmaw.com -- which wasn't a porn site, per se, but did include some sexually explicit images -- says:

CENSORED BY US GOVERNMENT 18 USC 2257

Yes, that is correct. The things that used to be here, the very funny things that you want to read, have been made retroactively illegal by the US government, in a side-handed attack on the pornography industry.

We might mention that the material here isn't even pornography as you normally think of it -- this site is just adult humor, in essay format, with some illustrations. The government is mandating that we meet certain bookkeeping requirements, ones impossible to meet for this site. Never mind that those requirements do not actually gain the public anything. This is the strongest attack on free speech since the passage of the CDA, and oddly, the media seems to have hardly noticed. The penalty for not abiding by these bookkeeping requirements is five years prison.

The regulations were promulgated by Alberto Gonzales, US Attorney General appointed by George Bush. If you voted for Bush, this is your fault. If you think this country is free, you are sadly mistaken. No nation has freedom when it is run by religious zealots.

The adult biz advocacy group Free Speech Coalition (FSC) filed a lawsuit last week challenging 2257, and AVN has more on that: Link. Here's an article on adult news site XBiz about last-minute compliance preparations in the porn world