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| (Excerpted) Heather Corinna, publisher of the online erotica magazine Scarlet Letters, was told about COPA by her lawyer and immediately filed paperwork to join the ACLU lawsuit. "When we were first made aware of COPA, I had to do quite a bit of educating to other Webmasters and to artists who contributed to our site and ran their own pages," says Corinna. "COPA seems to have been proposed and carried out in such a way as to keep the public from being informed, and without a lawyer to do research, I believe most people are -- because other information is not available -- gleaning their information from the ACLU and opposers like myself." Adds EFF's Fowler: "We need to have informed policy discussion. We can't have laws like COPA being passed attached to spending bills, where there's just no discussion, no clear understanding of the medium ... The fact that they [erotica Webmasters] don't know about COPA really illustrates how ineffective Congress was in passing that law, because they didn't send a message to anyone, except for people who believe there is a problem ... The producers of erotica weren't part of this discussion at all. "In the past, when we've had this same discussion about adult material in the print world, we've had really large publishers who have tremendous amounts of money and power and have asserted themselves in the dialogue," says Fowler. "And that didn't happen in this case." That's because the publishers of most erotica sites are not giant corporations with public relations departments and lawyers. Most are not even mid-sized companies. And rarely are they highly profitable, an important distinction between erotica sites and their hardcore cousins in the booming Web porn industry. In fact, a significant number of sites are run by couples working out of their homes. Online erotica is a true cottage industry, and as such, relies on exceptions like Corinna to spread the word about potential threats. Corinna spends more than 60 hours weekly of unpaid time producing and promoting Scarlet Letters. She is driven by her belief that sex is sacred. "Our culture suffers greatly because it devalues sexuality on many levels." Cathy Winks, a pioneer in the women-produced erotica genre and co-author of the recently published The Woman's Guide to Sex On the Web, adds that America's cultural attitudes toward sex could be partly responsible for the complacency regarding COPA. ©2000 New Times, Inc. All rights reserved. |
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