Appeals Court Undresses Porn Law:

Porn queen Traci Lords' underage undressing and sex acts portrayed in dozens of skin flicks prompted Congress in 1988 to require adult entertainment producers to keep records -- subject to warrantless inspection -- certifying that the performers are adults.

On Tuesday, nearly two decades later, a federal appeals court undressed that legislation, the Child Protection and Obscenity Enforcement Act. The 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, based in Cincinnati, said the measure was unconstitutional, a violation of the First Amendment right of speech.

Speech, in this context, is getting naked and perhaps doing the nasty before a still or video camera. The court, while noting that cracking down on child pornography is a laudatory goal, said the act was too sweeping:

This means that a married couple who videotape or photograph themselves in the bedroom engaging in sexually explicit conduct would be required to keep records, affix disclosure statements to the images, and hold their home open to government agents for records inspections.

This reach sweeps in a lot of protected speech. This includes images which amount to obscenity but are kept in the privacy of one's home and are therefore constitutionally protected speech.

Regarding the right of privacy, the court added:

This statute not only regulates a person's right to take sexually explicit photographs, but it also requires that person to identify him or herself as the photographer as well as identify the individual depicted. While an individual depicted is shown in the photograph, that person still has a First Amendment right to not provide his or her name and therefore retain a certain level of anonymity.

The statute requires the record keeping of 'sexually explicit conduct' including 'sexual intercourse, including genital-genital, oral-genital, or oral-anal, whether between persons of the same or opposite sex.' Also included are images of bestiality, masturbation, sadistic or masochistic abuse and 'lascivious exhibition of the genitals or pubic area of any person.'

The law is still in force, as the decision is likely to be appealed. The Justice Department is mulling new rules requiring such record keeping on Web 2.0 home-grown video-sharing porn sites.

The full story on Wired News is here.

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(Read Original Article - Via Threat Level.)