from the the-real-agenda dept
Scores of organizations from across the anti-pornography movement have filed amicus briefs supporting the state of Texas and Attorney General Ken Paxton in a U.S. Supreme Court case dealing with his state’s draconian age verification law. In 2023, members of the Texas legislature adopted House Bill (HB) 1181, which explicitly singles out online adult platforms by requiring age-gating measures and health “warning labels.”
The Fifth Circuit erred in its ruling on HB 1181. Instead of applying strict scrutiny to review the law’s implications on protected speech, the court applied rational basis review, a lower standard of review. Since HB 1181 is a content restriction that censors speech the First Amendment otherwise protects, Supreme Court precedent says it should apply strict scrutiny. This error by the appeals court was so concerning that outgoing U.S. Solicitor General Elizabeth Prelogar filed an amicus brief supporting vacatur, asking the court to send this case back to the Fifth for the application of strict scrutiny.
However, this common sense approach is missing among those supporting Paxton’s defense of the law at the Supreme Court. A review of the amicus briefs on the docket supporting Paxton reveals a who’s who of censorial social conservatives and populists. Not surprisingly, the Age Verification Providers Association (AVPA) filed an amicus brief supporting Paxton. AVPA is a trade group representing companies, such as Yoti, that develop and market age verification software to clients, including online pornography companies.
Another amicus filing is led by 24 predominantly Republican state attorneys general who believe that legal pornography isn’t necessarily entitled to First Amendment protection. They argue that this type of expression pushes the so-called “ambit” of what falls under the First Amendment’s compass.
The attorneys general additionally argue:
The attorneys general insinuate that pornography companies are attempting to skirt regulatory and legal commitments. Unfortunately, they urge the high court to simply overlook decades of its own precedent on First Amendment case law. Doing so would be irresponsible and plays into the hands of critics of the legal pornography industry who wish to see this entertainment sector censored entirely.
Meanwhile a set of Republicans in Congress, led by Sens. Mike Lee and Josh Hawley, call internet porn a “plague” in their filing. Most of the lawmakers attached to this brief include less-than-serious politicos like Lauren Boebert and Dan Crenshaw, who are often tied to Christian nationalist causes. Similar to the attorneys general, the MAGA members of Congress offer an outlandish explanation on current First Amendment case law.
They argue:
This irony shouldn’t be lost upon you. Here, these lawmakers, elected by people who entrust them to protect their interests, outwardly believe that an adult lacks the right to privacy and anonymity for simply looking at age-restricted content. And, in no way, does such a sentiment supersede the rights of adults or minors. For example, Josh Hawley falls squarely in the camp that thinks LGBTQ young adult literature is “pornographic” and should be subject to similar content restrictions. Applying such a broad assumption undermines the level of safety and concern these lawmakers claim to have. It is also some of the lawmakers attached to this amicus who believe stupid concepts like how big tech makes minors gay or trans on purpose.
Other amicus filings by parties supporting Paxton are just as ill-informed. One group that filed in support of Paxton is the so-called “child’s rights” group known as Them Before Us. Founded by the conservative journalist Katy Faust, this group is on the cutting edge of transphobic campaigning and pseudoscientific fearmongering about IVF and surrogacy. Faust’s group says they “[protect] every child’s right to their mother and father,” and they do so by repeating bigoted tropes about trans people.
Also on the docket is an amicus filing led by the Council on Pornography Reform, which washed-up former child actor Ricky Schroder founded and leads. Schroder’s group, the Public Advocate of the United States and other ultraconservative legal funds further spew the weak legal argument that “freedom of expression” is anathema and that the First Amendment should only apply to “political speech.” I covered these nonsense peddlers for Techdirt before.
Fun fact: the Public Advocate of the United States is classified by the Southern Poverty Law Center as an anti-LGBTQ+ hate group. This is also true for several other groups that filed amicus briefs supporting Paxton’s defense of rational review.
Organizations tied to Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation’s policy platform for Donald Trump’s second term, also filed amicus briefs for Paxton.
As a reminder, the Heritage Foundation president, Kevin Roberts, called for pornographers to be imprisoned and for the First Amendment rights of porn companies, LGBTQ+ activists, and teachers to be revoked via his foreword in Project 2025’s policy treatise, Mandate for Leadership.
Christian nationalist groups are in full force here.
Paxton’s defense of HB 1181 is being defended by people you’d expect to support anti-pornography laws, in general. These amicus briefs highlight the true intention behind the anti-porn movement: to remove anything remotely sexual, even if it’s legally not pornography, from the culture by any means necessary. Age verification might be argued as a child protection measure by the vast majority of these folks. But, as discussed here and by their own admission, that’s just lies.
Michael McGrady covers the tech and legal sides of the online porn business.
Companies: age verification providers association, avpa, free speech coalition, public advocate of the united states, them before us
from the gaming-like-it's-1929! dept
Yes, it’s that time of year again! We’re gearing up for the latest edition of our annual public domain game jam, Gaming Like It’s 1929! We’ve been running these game jams ever since 2019, when new works began entering the public domain in the US for the first time in over two decades, as a way to highlight the creativity that comes from a robust and growing public domain. Starting on January 1st, 2025, we’ll be doing it again to celebrate works from 1929 that are finally losing their copyright protection after nearly a century.
As in past years, we’re calling on designers of all stripes to create both analog and digital games that build on works entering the public domain. There are plenty of interesting works to draw on, including:
- Written works by Agatha Christie, William Faulkner, Mahatma Gandhi, Dashiell Hammett, Ellery Queen, Virginia Woolf
- Art by Salvador Dalí, Edward Hopper, Frieda Kahlo, Tamara de Lempicka, René Magritte
- Films including Blackmail, The Cocoanuts, The Skeleton Dance, St. Louis Blues
- Music by Irving Berlin, Noël Coward, Duke Ellington, George Gershwin, Cole Porter, Bessie Smith, Thomas “Fats” Waller
- Other characters including Buck Rogers, Popeye, and Tintin
And that list only scratches the surface – there are lots more 1929 works, from the famous to the obscure, and we even have a prize for the best game with an obscure and unexpected source of inspiration.
If you’re interested in games, the public domain, or both, we encourage you to get involved – whether or not you have any experience as a game designer. There are lots of great tools available that let anyone build a simple digital game, like interactive fiction engine Twine and the storytelling platform Story Synth from Randy Lubin, our game design partner and co-host of this jam (check out his guide to building a Story Synth game in an hour here on Techdirt). And an analog game can be as simple as a single page of rules. For inspiration, you can have a look at last year’s winners and our series of winner spotlight posts that take a look at each year’s winning entries in more detail.
The game jam will run through the month of January, 2025 and at the end we’ll be choosing winners in six categories, and awarding a choice of prizes from Techdirt and Diegetic Games. You can read the full rules and other details, and sign up to participate, on the game jam page over on Itch.io. Every year we’ve been blown away by the creativity on display from designers who enter the jam, and we know this year will be no different! See you in January, when Gaming Like It’s 1929 begins.
from the sad-ending dept
If you haven’t been following along on our posts about a trademark dispute between the famed Ravinia Festival Association (RFA) and Ravinia Brewing for the last decade or so, here is a quick synopsis. The RFA operates the Ravinia Festival outdoor music venue north of Chicago. “Ravinia” isn’t a fanciful name, as locals here know. It was the name of a neighborhood that was eventually annexed by what is now Highland Park. Despite that fact, the RFA managed to acquire a trademark for the name “Ravinia” and has since selectively wielded it to slap around other local businesses. One of those was Ravinia Brewing, which the RFA sued 2023 for trademark infringement, despite a previous agreement between the two parties that allowed the brewery to use its name.
That case was settled this past summer, with Ravinia Brewing agreeing to change its name and some branding, with the RFA pledging to help out with the rebrand efforts. The extent of what that help would entail went undisclosed publicly. Despite that nicety, this was a case in which trademark bullying worked, as the brewery chose not to fight the good fight, which had the possibility of getting these bad trademarks canceled.
And now the brewery has revealed its new branding. And… it’s only marginally different?
I write this post for two main reasons. First is to bring this story to a close, with the unhappy ending of the brewery having to actually change its identity over this whole stupid non-issue. Second is to highlight just how much trouble results like this cause for the bullied entity.
Signage has to be changed. Inventory in stock has to be rebranded, or simply tossed as a loss. The logistics around what to do with beer that is already in other venues with the old branding has to be ironed out. And one of the locations that particularly irritated the RFA is simply shutting down entirely.
That is a real establishment providing real jobs to real people in a real Chicago neighborhood that just, poof, goes away. All because the RFA wielded a geographic trademark that either never should have been granted in the first place, or at least should have been narrow enough that a music venue and brewery could coexist with one another peacefully.
Not all stories have happy endings, of course. But seeing that play out here in my backyard still sucks.