This newsletter is sent free of charge to FSC members and supporters. For personal contact, call 1-800-476-7813.

Free Speech X-Press
Delivering Weekly Censorship Updates to the Adult Industry

Vol. VI, No. 11, January 30, 2004 -- A Member Service of the Free Speech Coalition
__________________________________________________________
Free Speech X-press is researched and edited by Kat Sunlove and Layne Winklebleck.
Copyright 2004 Free Speech Coalition. Permission to reprint granted to FSC members; please give credit.
__________________________________________________________
VISIT OUR WEBSITE FOR FSC MEMBERSHIP INFORMATION
http://www.freespeechcoalition.com
__________________________________________________________

FTC PROPOSES CAN-SPAM TAG FOR ADULT
WASHINGTON, DC -- The Federal Trade Commission has announced the proposed mandatory tag for commercial e-mail containing sexually explicit material as required by the Controlling the Assault of Non-Solicited Pornography and Marketing Act (Can-Spam), signed by President Bush in December. The proposed mandatory tag is "Sexually-Explicit-Content."

Under the law, the phrase would be required in any adult-related e-mail, allowing recipients to recognize and easily filter such e-mails before viewing them. The agency plans to solicit public comment on the label before making a final decision February 17.

As part of its proposal, the FTC would require senders to include the label in e-mail headers and within messages, as part of a virtual "brown paper wrapper."

The wrapper would be what a recipient would initially see when opening a message containing sexually oriented material, according to the FTC, meaning that "no other information or images" would be visible at first.
From Stefanie Olsen, CNET News.com, 1/28/04
http://news.com.com/2100-1028-5149613.html?tag=nefd_hed __________________________________________________________

CENSORSHIP AT CBS
NEW YORK, NY -- Representative Bernie Sanders, an Independent from Vermont, has sent a letter co-signed by 26 other congressmen to CBS President Leslie Moonves, criticizing the network for refusing to run a Super Bowl commercial from the activist group MoveOn.org.

The 30-second spot depicts children performing a series of adult jobs -- washing dishes in a restaurant, manning a garbage truck and working in a factory -- before posing the question, "Guess whos going to pay off President Bushs $1 trillion deficit?"

[See the ad at http://www.moveon.org/cbs/ad/

The network rejected the MoveOn.org ad based on its policy against advocacy advertising, which it said was designed to prevent those who could afford to advertise from having undue influence on "controversial issues of public importance."

In the meantime, however, CBS is accepting Super Bowl ads from the White House's Office of National Drug Policy, which was responsible for the ad last year linking casual drug use to terrorism.

MoveOn.org has accused the network of censoring political speech even as the President prepares to sign into law a bill beneficial to CBS.

"It looks an awful lot like CBS is playing politics with the right to free speech," Move-On.org staffers wrote in a note Thursday to the group's 2.3 million members around the world.

Actually, the bill in question, passed recently by the Senate, caps the Fox and CBS networks at their current levels of reaching about 39 percent of the national audience. This supersedes the Federal Communications Commission's decision to lift the cap to 45 percent from 35 percent. Some lawmakers had wanted to roll the increase back completely.

Ads for this years Super Bowl are costing an average of $2.3 million each to air on television's most-watched event. MoveOn.org can afford the tab. The Berkeley-based organization has raised more than $4.5 million since mid-September, most notably from New York-based financier George Soros and Cleveland-based Progressive Insurance CEO Peter Lewis, who are making MoveOn.org the engine through which they'll support a Democratic nominee against President George W. Bush this year. The money was not enough to get a spot during the Super Bowl, however.
From Josh Richman, The Oakland Tribune, 1/29/04
http://www.oaklandtribune.com/Stories/0,1413,82~1726~1914074,00.html
And from Reuters, 1/28/04
http://www.reuters.com/newsArticle.jhtml?type=entertainmentNews&storyID=4233690
__________________________________________________________

ANTI-SPAM IDEAS TOUTED BY MICROSOFT
AVOS, SWITZERLAND Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates has promised that the problem of spam will be gone within two years, thanks to three new technological strategies under development at Microsoft. Two of the new ideas enable e-mail users to keep spam out of their computers by having the machines reply automatically to any e-mail messages from senders not in the mail list of the e-mail program installed on the computer. The replies would include a request to solve a problem that could be handled by a person but not by a computer. Having to reply to the reply would presumably deter those who send out millions of junk e-mail messages while still allowing legitimate new e-mails from individuals to get through.

A third strategy, which Gates said was likely to arrive later but be the best long-term solution, would require that e-mail messages sent by strangers come with postage attached, the equivalent of a postage stamp

.
"If the sender is your long-lost brother," he said, the payment can be declined, costing the sender nothing. But recipients who want to fight spam would always accept the payment if the incoming mail appeared to be spam, making the sending of such messages uneconomic.
From The New York Times, 1/26/04
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/01/26/technology/26gates.html?pagewanted=all
__________________________________________________________

DVD-CODE TRADE SECRETS CASE DROPPED
SAN JOSE, CA -- The DVD Copy Control Association (DVD CCA) has dropped its long-running lawsuit against programmer Andrew Bunner. The group had charged Bunner with violating trade secrets by putting a DVD cracking code called DeCSS online. The move came one month after an appellate court in Norway upheld the acquittal of Jon Johansen, the Norwegian teen who actually cracked the DVD encryption code. He had been charged with data break-in.

Although dropping the lawsuit leaves unresolved the question of whether the code constituted a protected trade secret, other rulings may have made the case unnecessary. Soon after the DeCSS software emerged, Hollywood studios sued a number of Web publishers in federal court, arguing that Johansen's software violated provisions of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. Just one of those defendants, 2600 publisher Eric Corley, ultimately fought the lawsuits. He lost, after a federal judge ruled that he could not post the DeCSS code, or even link to it online.

The ruling in the Corley case ultimately made the Bunner case redundant, since the code was already illegal to distribute, attorneys said. If it had pursued its case further, the DVD CCA would have also risked prompting a ruling against it, since the California Supreme Court had expressed skepticism in its last ruling that there were any trade secrets to protect.

The DVD CCA said it will pursue other avenues in protecting its code, including possibly filing patent infringement suits.
From John Borland, CNET News.com, 1/22/04
http://zdnet.com.com/2100-1104_2-5145809.html
And from May Wong, The Associated Press, 1/25/04
http://www.mercurynews.com/mld/mercurynews/business/technology/7794560.htm
__________________________________________________________

FCC GETS TOUGH ON INDECENCY
WASHINGTON, DC A day before a congressional subcommittee planned to examine the FCC's enforcement of indecency rules, the commission proposed a fine against Clear Channel Communications totaling $755,000. The penalty was for objectionable segments of "Bubba the Love Sponge," which aired on radio stations in four Florida cities. The segments ran 26 times, so the commission proposed fining Clear Channel the maximum possible $27,500 for each airing, plus an additional $40,000 fine for record-keeping violations at the stations.

The segments included graphic discussions about sex and drugs that were "designed to pander to, titillate and shock listeners," the FCC said. One segment featured the cartoon characters Alvin the chipmunk, George Jetson and Scooby Doo discussing sexual activities.

The commission also proposed a $27,500 fine against Young Broadcasting of San Francisco Inc. for airing a man exposing himself on its "KRON 4 Morning News" show.

During the news show, one of the performers from a theatrical show titled "Puppetry of the Penis" briefly exposed himself. The performers appeared on the TV show wearing only capes. The FCC said the station should have expected that such a display could occur and should have taken steps to prevent it.

FCC Chairman Michael Powell last week called for Congress to increase the maximum fine for indecency from $27,500 per incident to $275,000. He said the latest fines show the FCC is serious about pursuing penalties but needs the threat of larger fines to get broadcasters to toe the line.

Not to be outdone, FCC Commissioners Kevin Martin and Jonathan Adelstein have called for the FCC to fine stations for every indecent "utterance" rather than for every show or segment. That would produce much larger fines.

Commissioner Michael Copps was the only member of the five-person FCC to oppose the fine against Clear Channel. He said the penalty was not severe enough, suggesting instead that the FCC consider revoking the stations' licenses.
From Jonathan D. Salant, The Associated Press, 1/27/04
http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/artandlife/
apother_story.asp?category=1404&slug=FCC%20Obscenity%20Fine
__________________________________________________________

GROUPS FILE AMICUS BRIEF ON COPA
WASHINGTON, DC -- The Center For Democracy and Technology, joined by a broad coalition of organizations representing Internet companies, publishers and others has filed a "friend-of-the-court" brief with the Supreme Court challenging the Child Online Protection Act (COPA).

As outlined in previous X-Press reports (See "Supremes to Hear Harmful Matter Law," X-Press, 10/17/03), COPA would make it a crime for anyone, by means of the World Wide Web, to make any communication for commercial purposes that is "harmful to minors" unless the person has used technological means to prevent access by minors (such as requiring a credit card). The case is Ashcroft v. ACLU. Oral argument is scheduled for March 2, 2004. The Court's decision is likely to be issued in late May or June of this year.

CDT argues that the most effective way to protect children online, and the means least restrictive of free expression, is by putting resources at the disposal of families and teachers that allow them to control what children see and do online.

This emphasis on education and user control has been confirmed by two major, independent studies commissioned by Congress: the COPA Commission, a study mandated by the COPA law itself, and a report of the National Research Council (NRC) of the National Academy of Sciences.

While the CDT brief emphasizes that "Harmful to minors" is a legal category that includes a wide range of social commentary and health information that is legal for adults to view, Aschroft v. ACLU could hardly be more important for the future of adult entertainment on the Internet as well. COPA would impose criminal and civil penalties of up to $50,000 per day for violations.
From a CDT Policy Post, 1/26/04
http://www.cdt.org/mailman/listinfo/policy-posts
The coalition brief is at http://www.cdt.org/speech/copa/20040115amicus.pdf.
The NRC study, "Youth Pornography, and the Internet" (2002), is at http://www.nap.edu/books/0309082749/html.
The 2000 report of the COPA Commission can be found at http://www.copacommission.org/report/
__________________________________________________________

Upcoming Events

MAR 3-7, 2004-- Lifestyles, Miami Radisson Hotel http://lifestyles.org/

MAR 24-27, 2004 -- Nightclub and Bar Owners' Expo Las Vegas http://www.nightclub.com

APR 26-27, 2004 Celebrate Free Speech Lobbying Days, Sacramento, CA, 800-476-7813

JULY 24, 2004 Night of the Stars Location to be announced, 866-FSC-9373

Subscriptions to Free Speech X-Press are FREE to FSC members. Contact us at Sunlove@direcway.com or 800-476-7813.