[Air-L] re porn, rights, emancipation course

[Sandra Braman]

Charles, 

Patrick Burkart's book PIRATE POLITICS (MIT Press 2014), on the Pirate Party, might provide a good course reading for its unique look at how what started as copyright battles turned into an actual political party active at the European Union level precisely because those involved took a liberatory stance towards their rights.  

Sounds like a great class; thanks for sharing so much detail about it.  One could actually address much, if not all, of communication law through the lens of pornography.  You could find cases involving not only what you've listed so far, but also defamation, antitrust, and so on.   

The dimension of pornography that makes it particularly valuable as a focus for a course encouraging people to think about their communication rights from a liberation perspective is that, in US law at least, "community standards" are relied upon to determine when something should be considered unacceptably obscene rather than acceptably pornographic for adults.  It is thus the one opening in the law for discussion of how to determine just what a speech community should be deemed to be and for the rights of what we might think of as speech communities.  It would be great to see someone fully develop that side of pornography law through the kind of lenses you are using in this course.  

The other issue worth looking at re porn would be not just the jurisdictional problem when it comes to what happens online (which country's laws should govern), but the fact that so much of the law is becoming globalized itself.  When laws are harmonized, which can happen through many different kinds of processes, they become like each other across state lines irrespective of differences in national legal systems or political forms.  To what extent has pornography law become globalized?  Don't know if anyone has addressed that question yet, but one would expect this area of communication law to be among those most resistant to globalization because cultural differences here are so profound.

Sandra Braman