In his defense, Defendant relies upon the testimony of an expert witness, Professor Gary Richardson, in order to show the Court that his work has serious literary, political, and artistic value.*fn8 (Docs. 165-4 at 67-90, 165-5.) Professor Richardson is a Professor and Chairman of the Department of English at Mercer University. Professor Richardson previously received a Fulbright Scholarship and is a decorated academic in the field of English and literature. Professor Richardson concluded, in his expert opinion, that Defendant's body of work had literary, political, and artistic value. (Doc. 165-5 at 34-36.) Professor Richardson describes Defendant's stories as love stories, "basic romance plots," and "science fiction." (Doc. 165-4 at 80-81.) While Professor Richardson acknowledges that the predominant themes in Defendant's work involve "social mores" and "may be considered taboo," he testified that these are incidental to Defendant's greater efforts to "undertake an artistic rendering." (Id. at 84.) These themes, including graphic and explicit incestuous sexual abuse, rape, torture, and murder of prepubescent children and young girls, are according to Professor Richardson, a form of "reader entrapment" which reflects his intent to generate political interest. (Id. at 85.)

During his testimony, Professor Richardson also described Defendant's use of complex literary techniques within his body of work that develop the characters and further the plot line;*fn9 including, interpolated tale (the use of competing narratives) and complex resonances. (Id. at 87.) Professor Richardson, as an expert in literature, urges the Court to consider a deeper level and "close reading" of Defendant's work and examine the pornographic "visual gaze" and "central consciousness" are complex "variations on narrative point of view." (Id. at 88.) According to Professor Richardson, Defendant's work "reflects serious thought and serious artistry." (Doc. 165-5 at 4.) Among his reasons in support of his conclusion that Defendant's body of work contains literary value are, for example, Defendant's use of inversion of a biological reality in the story entitled "Rapesuzy." There, Professor Richardson points toward Defendant's use of science fiction-including the use of nanobots-as he explores the complex and timeless themes of the nature of love, the difference and relationship between love and sexuality, and how society is disposed to interact sexually with the rest of the world. (Id. at 6-7.) For these reasons, Professor Richardson concluded that "under a narrow definition" Defendant's work does have serious literary value and further that "from the standards of people who study literature, [Defendant's] stories would manifest serious literary value."*fn10 (Id. at 19, 22.)

Stated in other words, Defendant's short stories are not entitled to a heightened evidentiary standard, as a matter of federal constitutional law, because he believes them to be intrinsically literary, capable of joining the ranks of great classical erotic literature such as Ulysses, Tropic of Cancer,and Lolita.*fn5 See Bench Opinion at 9-12 (Discussion of why the Court concludes that Defendant's short stories, when taken as a whole, lack serious literary, artistic, political or scientific value). Accordingly, though the Eleventh Circuit was not convinced that the musical composition Nasty could speak for itself, this Court has far less trouble declaring that Defendant's sexually explicit narratives, with their only tangentially related plots, can speak for themselves.

This story contains very graphic violence against a very young child. If such things bother you (and they do me) I advise against reading this. The story is based upon a line that ran through my head one night, and I couldn't get it out [...basic description of the very taboo subjects included in the story... ] FINAL WARNING !!!! If you think the previous description is based; the actual story is much worse! I strongly advise you to skip this one.

A district court judge rule this week that a Louisiana woman could hang her Christmas lights in the shape of a middle finger, as a nasty holiday “greeting” to her neighbors. Police initially threatened to arrest Sarah Childs for her illuminated display, but with the help of the ACLU, Child won her suit against the city.

That Mediaite summary is slightly exaggerated, because she didn't quite "win" the lawsuit yet. The judge just granted a temporary restraining order prohibiting police from stopping the display, with a full hearing to take place in the New Year. However, the judge does say it's likely that she's going to win:

The Court finds that Defendants' continued efforts to prevent Plaintiff from displaying her holiday lights will result in an infringement of Plaintiff's rights of free speech and due process, and that the Plaintiff has demonstrated a likelihood of succeeding in her argument that this infringement is impermissable under the First and Fourteenth Amendments of the Constitution.

After she contacted the local ACLU for help with a lawsuit, the city officers issued her two unrelated tickets that attorneys call a “collateral attack”: one for obstructing the flow of traffic as she was walking down the street and another for disturbing the peace while singing a song about her fight with neighbors in her driveway.

The line between obscenity and eroticism is hard to pinpoint, and varies from community to community. In general, the process of analyzing whether a work is obscene includes asking whether the content violates the community standards of the local geographic area where the material was published. Thus, for most media, publishers of potentially obscene content must choose the communities into which they publish, or face criminal charges from the least tolerant communities. But for online media, the Supreme Court remains undecided whether the obscenity analysis should use the local community standard. The Court’s doubts stem from the Internet’s global reach and lack of control over who receives free online content. For example, if a work is nationally-available online, and is judged using the same legal standard as in other traditional media, any local community offended by the content has the power of a heckler’s veto to make the publisher liable for distributing obscenity.

This Article explains why the use of a new online technology resolves the question of whether local community standards should be used to judge online content. Called geotargeting, the technology creates borders on the previously borderless Internet, which allows publishers to specifically target geographically localized communities, thereby excluding areas where the material might lead to criminal charges. This new power to publish potentially obscene materials only to selected communities drastically reduces the constitutional concerns of applying traditional obscenity law to online content.

In a victory for free speech, PayPal today announced plans to revise their content policies to allow Smashwords writers full freedom to publish and sell legal ebooks.

This is a victory for all writers and readers. It removes credit card companies, banks and payment processors from the business of censoring legal fiction. It creates a new precedent that should allow other payment processors who have previously discriminated against legal fiction to relax their policies.

It will make more fiction more available to more readers. It gives writers greater freedom to express themselves. It gives readers more freedom to decide what they want to experience in the privacy of their own imagination.

First and foremost, we are going to focus this policy only on e-books that contain potentially illegal images, not e-books that are limited to just text. The policy will prohibit use of PayPal for the sale of e-books that contain child pornography, or e-books with text and obscene images of rape, bestiality or incest (as defined by the U.S. legal standard for obscenity: material that appeals to the prurient interest, depicts sexual conduct in a patently offensive way, and lacks serious literary, artistic, political or scientific value).