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From: Gene Spafford <spaf@CS.PURDUE.EDU>
Subject: Mars was not "Censored"
Date: Sat, 20 Oct 90 14:11:52 EST

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I'm against censorship in pretty much any guise.  I'm opposed to people who
try to have gif images pulled from sites soley because of their
sexually-oriented content.

However, if I were running a news site, I would not carry the current
alt.sex.pictures newsgroup, nor would I have an archive of the images.

This is not a contradiction in terms.

First off, I am not trying to have anyone else's collection of images
pulled because of the subject matter, nor am I trying to prevent others
from seeing those images.

So, if I'm not against the subject matter of the material, why would I
prevent their transmission through my site and storage on my disk?

Reason number 1 is most of those images were scanned in from magazines and
films that have active copyright protection.  Scanning them in and
transmitting them around is a violation of copyright.  Not only is that not
legal, I don't view it as proper to infringe on copyright.  Storing those
images is an infringement.

Reason #2 is the quality of most of those images is poor compared with the
original.  If you want stuff like that, almost any bookstore or videotape
rental place has the originals.  Or, you can order by mail.  I don't see
the value of tying up bandwidth and storage to transmit poor copies of
material that is generally available elsewhere.

If the machine was a personal machine, I wouldn't keep the images because I
have no use for them.  They may (or may not) be interesting to look at some
of them once, but after that I don't see any use for them.  And as things
go, I barely have enough free disk on most of machines as it is.   If the
machine was a shared machine, this reason would need to be explored with
the other users, but it holds with most people I've talked with about these
images.

The bottom line is that there may be legitimate reasons not to have these
images or carry newsgroups or mailing lists containing them.  I think
prudes are dangerous, but I also realize that everyone declining to have
these images online is not automatically bowing to censorship or forbidding
their presence because of content.

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