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I'd quibble that part of people's expectations of the legal scenario reflect the vague and oft-moving ground of the community standards component of the Miller test, with the Movie Buffs case being one of the better-known limits. Miller requires not one of these prongs to be broken, but all of them. There's definitely stuff in the modern era that would fail it, but there's also a lot of stuff that's "porn" or actual-porn by normal definitions that wouldn't.
I think that's a good argument in favor of Douglass's critic of Miller's community standards -- if to the opposite valence as his original intent -- but the problem makes the law hard to analyze. The same content could well be obscene or not just by traveling a hundred miles, or thanks to a tiny fig leaf of 'social importance'.
I can understand why that might look like an attractive approach at first glance, but I think it has insufficient consideration for how the legal system operates in practice.
At the simplest level, most less-than-legit venues will just been driven outside of the United States (or operate through service run in jurisdictions outside of the United States), beyond what extent they already have moved, since meaningfully collecting judgement on a civil suit across national boundaries is effectively outside of the scope of all but the largest corporations. Even within the US, there's a lot of sites and actors that are judgement proof or effectively judgement proof.
Okay, but the central example is a teenager getting caught accessing a US-bound it's-all-just-porn site, or a rando (in the US, using a US-jurisdiction service) on social media passing/spamming porn at people. Let's assume that we're able to identify the bad actor, and that there's no complications about identification or the nature of the content. What's the process like, here?
The parents bring a (likely interstate!) lawsuit for damages. That's not entirely implausible, especially since a teenager 'borrowing' a parent's credit card, even if it's more likely to revolve around emotional harm. They've got to ante a lot more in legal fees and lawyer costs than the actual damages, and courts generally don't like actually letting all that be recovered even where, such as here, the law does allow for some such recovery, but if you want to prove a point, that's an approach people do take. Might even get an injunction requiring the vendor to comply with an age verification schema. There's some fun procedural issues -- venue, for example -- but there's definitely someone that's going to hit every one.
... what happens with all the cases that don't go every bar of that? What happens for the nuisance lawsuits? Or the sincerely believed ones that are still wrong? Hell, what happens with the times people win, without any true wrongdoing by the website provider? Maybe that's a reasonable tradeoff, but unfortunately you can't really limit the law to the sane applications.
You definitely know more on the topic than I do, my background is a class I took on copyright that only tangentially spoke on this.
That said, I think about medical malpractice lawsuits, which are notoriously difficult to win, expensive for everyone, etc. And yet the tiny amount of medical malpractice lawsuits that go anywhere have had a huge effect on how every doctor and hospital system conducts business. I guess the main difference is that medical procedures take place in a specific location in the US, and so jurisdiction is simple?
Nearer and simpler jurisdiction helps -- the US famously doesn't have interstate small claims courts -- but also the higher damages in severe cases, along with a lot of readily-available experts on best practices, and a liability insurance system that's heavily integrated (and sometimes mandatory) that makes people less judgement proof.
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