Re: Regulation of obscene and indecent material via Internet

["kinming Fung" <kinming@cuhk.edu.hk>]

On  8 Aug 96 at 16:47, Kent Leung wrote:

> 2)      The paper has not touched or avoided to touch the
> cryptographic issue leads to a very unfair situation.  OAT access the
> following cases might lead to different conclusion.
> 
>         A)      Put obscene material on Web page and offer to public;
>         B)      Put obscene material on Web page for his members but
>         protect
>                 from public;
>         C)      Use E-mail to send obscene material but without
>         encryption;

i discussed this with the Commissioner of TELA (in charge of regulating 
obscene materials): under the current HK laws, it is illegal to 
transmit obscene materials even between private persons or parties, so 
all A-C are indeed illegal.  However, the guilt lies totally with the 
transmitting parties--including the distributors and the taxi driver 
who drives you to buy the obscene material, if s/he knows your 
purpose--as told by the commissioner.  The receiving party is 
crime-free, just like anyone can buy from illegal hawkers and even
prostitutes; no laws against the act of buying, just the act of 
supplying.

Your D and E are interesting: is encrypted obscene material still 
obscene?  My guess: the encyption is like a opaque wrap.  Under current 
HK laws, indecent materials may be transmitted legally if wrapped, but 
obscene materials are still illegal even under wraps.  If the obscene 
materials is scrambled to a state where nobody can ever recover, then 
i think it becomes not obscene.

> 3)      The author is the originator of those material but not the
> carrier or ISP or administrators.  Therefore, the author should be
> liable for whatever material they produced. Since the paper suggest
> there should not have any pre-censorship to protect privacy, I don't
> see why code of practice just for ISP or carrier is needed, it should
> be for every author.  It is different from TV or radio where the
> service provide produce most of the material.

As explained above, under current HK laws, it seems like the author is 
not guilty, or at least most of the guilt lies with the publishers and 
distributors.  The HK government is leaning towards classifying ISPs as 
distributors of information, while they strive to maintain they are 
just carriers, like the phone company, and therefore totally not 
responsible for the content they carry.  However, the taxi driver 
example seem to imply that even the carrier is responsible, if s/he 
were properly informed that her client is using the taxi to distribute 
obscene materials.  --kin
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