A trade group for the adult entertainment industry will appear at the Supreme Court on Wednesday in its challenge to a Texas law that requires pornography sites to verify the age of their users before providing access – for example, by requiring a government-issued identification. The law applies to any website whose content is one-third or more “harmful to minors” – a definition that the challengers say would include most sexually suggestive content, from nude modeling to romance novels and R-rated movies.
They’re the arbiters of what is “harmful to minors”.
Well yeah, they’re experts in hurting children.
Yeah, they would just say that those public domain works or open source repositories teach minors undesirable knowledge of some sort or compete with commercial software vendors and/or entertainment providers.
That can be weaponized, though. US government publications are public domain. So is the Bible. We’d at least get to watch members of the Texas government tie themselves into knots worthy of a game of Twister as they try to argue that those texts are harmful on a porn site but not anywhere else.
Who says that they would argue that they are not harmful anywhere else? Remember, the bible used to be only read by priests in Latin and interpreted to the masses and many governments would love to have less transparency as you can see in their opposition to freedom of information type initiatives.
It isn’t in their best interests to threaten the loony Christian sects that are one of the right wing’s favourite brainwashing tools. Members of those sects rely on authority figures to “interpret” the Bible for them instead of actually paying attention to its content, but if you try to take it away from them, they’ll throw a fit like a toddler does when you take away a toy they’ve been ignoring. Restricting access to the Bible in the present day would make religious brainwashing more difficult and create more people who actually think for themselves, which is anathema to bad governments like Texas’.