XXX, on a small screen near you

Pornography on mobile phones has been in the news a lot lately, but this ZDNet article is worth pointing to for its thoroughness. In addition to pointing out the desire of companies such as Playboy to move into the mobile market and the wariness of US telcos to provide the content on their service, Evan Hansen points out that people have already been charged for showing pornographic videos in the inadequate privacy of their own cars.

As for legal issues with mobile devices: “Legal experts said public viewing of porn on a mobile device does not raise novel issues of law. “If someone were to flip open a magazine on a bus or an airplane, it would raise exactly the same issue,” said Eugene Volokh, a constitutional scholar at UCLA who has written extensively on the First Amendment. “This is a case of exposing someone to material that they don’t want to see.” No federal law bars such display, Volokh said, but some states might bar the practice, for example, under statutes meant to prevent harm to minors.”

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