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Friday, July 11, 2008

Obscenity Trial Stopped Due to Judge's Obscene Website

A US obscenity trial was halted last month when lawyers discovered the judge for the trial had posted "obscene" images on his own website.

Ira Isaacs is a known smut-peddler who deals in the trashiest of trash: scat, bestiality, etc. This moron calls what he does "art," but as any thinking individual knows, the only idiot that calls pornography "art" is a pornographer. Nevertheless, Isaacs was set to defend his "fetish" porn at his obscenity trial, which started in June.

At the trial, jurors were expected to view several hours of truly base pornography. Isaacs is charged with transporting the materials across state lines and pornography - specifically bestiality and scat "fetish" shit (ha!) - is in no way, shape, form, or fashion Art. The only reason this is not an open and shut case is because Isaacs intends to abuse the First Amendment to further his own ends. While some do this to garner fame and notoriety, and others do it just to challenge the law (because they can), Isaacs and his fellow pornographers do it to recuse themselves of any moral obligation to anyone; this is all about money and has fuck-all to do with Art.

However, jurors were interrupted midway through a film about women who eat shit (literally) and told the trial was to resume the following Monday, due to a "possible conflict of interest."

As it turns out, presiding judge, Alex Kozinski, just so happened to have a lot of adult-oriented material on his own website, including a picture of a naked woman painted like a cow and some scat "fetish."

Kozinski later told a legal website that his film editor son admitted to uploading much of the material and that its intent was humorous, but the trial was still delayed. Kozinski then recused himself from said trial, which has continued.

There are a lot of things we can take from this, but let me note firstly that I am not against pornography, per se; I am against the porn industry - and there is a difference. If you want to show your goodies on film, more power to you; if you want to charge people to see your goodies on film, I might even stand in line; the pornography industry is run by creeps too jaded to be called "perverts" who lure and entice young people into signing-away their image and the acts they perform for a pittance (which seems princely to the struggling youths at the time) and then profit off those rights in perpetuity. There are no sex-workers unions for the pornography industry and it has been shutdown at least twice in the past several years due to AIDS/HIV outbreaks. There is no porn "star" who receives residuals for their "performances," excepting those who run their own lines or production studios (and possibly some of the bigger names who are under contract - not sure about that).

I honestly see no real conflict of interest here. So what if Kozinski likes a little raw footage? Most of the content on his site did have humorous elements and none of it was any different than most of the crap friends and family forward me! Further, there is a huge difference between viewing said smut and creating it; if Kozinski's site had been rife with self-produced/created pornographic content - regardless of the nature (fetish, hardcore, whatever else) - then there would certainly be a conflict of interest, but since it was not, this whole thing was blown way out of proportion as it was not truly relevant to the trial.

The main thing to note here is that there is no "privacy" online. If you upload secure documents to a secured server to be held in a private folder, someone can still get to them and figure out how to see them! Deleting them will not cover your tracks, and the content will still be accessible for... basically ever.

Kozinski did the best thing in this situation and I applaud him for that: he took responsibility for the matter (admitting that, though his son likely uploaded most of the content, he had also uploaded some content of an adult nature), disabled all public access to his personal site, and recused himself from the trial.

The irony here is, in a legal trial focusing on Freedom of Speech, the judge's own First Amendment rights were denied him and used against him to force him off the bench!

© C Harris Lynn, 2008

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