Lessig’s Bad Code for Porn

Stanford Law professor Lawrence Lessig makes a daft suggestion: require adult content providers to wrap <porn> ... </porn> around the naughty stuff, and direct brower developers to ignore such tags unless a parent approves.

This fails in the same way domain schemes such as .xxx or .adult fail:

  • There can be no universal standard for defining content inappropriate for minors,

  • and such a regime would be easily gamed by anyone wanting to use the government to censor content they don’t like.

    The technique is simple, just find a friendly jurisdiction and seek an injunction forcing anyone providing content about birth control, sex education, rape prevention, gay rights, and anything else controversial to wrap it in the aforementioned porn tag.

  • Besides, the parental control would be routed around faster than you can say DVD Jon.

Ugh, bad idea Professor, just walk away.

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This entry was written by Bill Humphries and posted on August 31, 2004 at 12:00 am and filed under culture. Bookmark the permalink. Follow any comments here with the Atom feed for this post. Both comments and trackbacks are currently closed.