free speech

Some thoughts on "Fair Use," 2257, and Stop Porn Culture's pornographic slide show

Stop Porn Culture is an organized effort on the part of a number of antiporn-feminist scholars and activists to convince people that pornography is harmful to society (and especially to girls and women) and to get them to swear off porn and to challenge other people's use of it.

Stop Porn Culture (SPC) is also a traveling porn exhibition. In fact, not only is it a traveling porn exhibition, it is a distributor of free pornographic images. Lots of them. Lots of the most hard core of them.

Some sex worker advocates that I respect tremendously, like Ren of Renegade Evolution and Blog for Pro Porn Activism (BPPA) are out there, dedicated and loud, calling SPC out on its failure to comply with a US law that distributors of pornography must follow. That law, known by its shorthand section number (2257) requires producers of pornography to maintain records of performers' identities and ages, and to make those records available for inspection by law enforcement officials. SPC does not do this. These advocates are also calling SPC out on its use of the copyrighted images without permission from the copyright owners or consent of those depicted in the images.

I sympathize. It is galling to watch SPC use the work of the people they most claim to despise, and to freely distribute images they think nobody else should be able to distribute. And it is especially galling to watch them talk about the exploitation and humiliation of the women in the images all the while continuing to humiliate those same women by publicly exposing in and then condemning their work.

We have been following an interpersonal conflict at the University of New Mexico that centers on issues of due process, graduate student-faculty interaction, sexual freedom and the right of both students and faculty to private lives. (If you're new around here or you need to get caught up you can see all of our previous posts on the matter here.)

One of the things that made it difficult to appreciate all of the layers of the conflict was a lack of access to primary source documents. We have now received a copy of the March 10 letter from the Deputy Provost to those who had petitioned for a review, by the Faculty Senate Ethics and Advisory Committee, of the extramural activities of one of the professors. After carefully considering the content and implications of this we have determined that it is in the public interest to publish that letter here in its entirety. In doing so, we were aware that extracts had appeared in the media. (You can click here for a PDF of the scanned letter or click on the images below.)

When people have only partial information there is a tendency to fill in the blanks with rumor, speculation and misinformation. We are publishing this letter to ensure that people are aware of the facts relating to the two reviews undertaken by the university administration. We appreciate that a number of members of faculty remain deeply concerned about the acts they sought a review of, and we respect both their right to hold those views and to raise them under University policies on the reporting of suspected misconduct. Nevertheless this is the second review the University has conducted of this complaint, and absent new evidence, little can be gained and much lost by pursuing this line of action. As the letter states, the matter is now "concluded" from the Adminstration's point of view. The observations and conclusions reached by the Provost's Office are congruent with our own observations based on interviews of the people involved and the documents examined.