Tennessee has a new law restricting online pron.
Only sites with age verification are allowed.
Will I be penalized (no pun intended) if I view such a site?
Will the site’s owner?
If the site is based out-of-State, is it enforceable?
What effect would the use of a VPN have?
It goes into effect July 1st so, need answer (relatively) quick.
I cannot speak specifically to TN, but Pornhub is just IP banning people in protest instead of doing any verification. Other “mainstream” sites might do similar things, small sites probably not.
It’s as enforceable as sites choose to comply, and if the owner thinks they can get into trouble they might do it. PH seems to think so, and I have to click a age thingy when I visit Cabela’s website even though I don’t live in California because of their law.
VPN would get around it and everyone should have one anyway (IMHO).
First thing Tennessee does is post the image of the violaters to the public state website indicating that they are violators:
Bosda Tricor is a pron user
You can read it law here. It looks like it was pushed back to January 1, 2025.
Also, I assume this is normal, but they’ve already provided estimates for the amount of money they’ll spend jailing people for this.
They’ll need about $4m to set up a forensics computer lab, $2m/yr to run it and about $30k, per year, per inmate. The number of inmates is unknown but they assume it’ll be “significant”.
IIRC, the porn site’s problem isn’t the age verification, it’s that they have to “retain any personally identifying information of the active user after access to the content”. I thought I had heard someone from one of these companies saying that they’d have no problem with the end user verifying their age on their device and their device then giving the website the OK. They don’t want to be storing user’s personally identifying info.
It appears that the criminal liability is on the part of the porn hosting company. So companies that fear the arm of TN law will put up some age verification system and/or just refuse Tennessee IP addresses. Porn sites hosted out of various central/eastern European countries and similar locations will not care because Moldova isn’t going to extradite anyone to Nashville over this.
The practical effect will be to push more users to sketchy .ru style domains where they’re at greater risk of malware and the porn is more likely to be non-consensual.
Nah, a website isn’t public enough. How about something bigger? (Probably NSFW Whitest Kids U Know sketch)
Never mind, realized this is GQ.
Moderator Note
This is getting into advice on how to break the law, which isn’t permitted here. You are free to discuss how banning IPs by geolocation gets broken by those using a VPN, but don’t actually recommend breaking the law to anyone. I know it’s a bit of a fine line, but basically you can discuss how things work but you can’t discuss how to intentionally violate the law.
ETA: You can also discuss whether or not using a VPN to circumvent IP geolocation actually violates Tennessee law, and if so, under what circumstances does it do so.
OK, I meant more in a general context, not relating to porn or any law.
The issue could be that anyone involved with a web site could be charged in Tennessee. Presumably then if they set foot in the USA, the other state could arrest them and extradite them to Tennesse? I vaguely recall some situation where someone from California ran a site that violated the law in a central USA state. Even though they, their servers, etc. neve set foot there, the aauthorities proved that the content was downloaded in the state and therefore they could be charged and extradited.
Doesn’t extradition generally require that the act also be a crime in the extraditing jurisdiction?
Cabela’s? Is it about the long underwear photos? I’m not seeing what would be age restricted about Cabela’s website.
Possibly because of firearms?
You can’t actually mail-order normal guns anyway, but I suppose Cabela’s has some black powder replicas and hunting rifles, etc… Not sure why California would care, but who knows.
CA AB 2511 made gun websites put up a 18+ verification. Cabela’s and Scheel’s and others sell a bunch of other stuff, but it can pop up anyway on the front page.
Though I wonder if also I’m so close to the border they think my IP is CA.
You’re probably thinking of US v. Thomas (1996), which also involved Tennessee. They ran a bulletin board in California that distributed porn, and were convicted of violating Tennessee’s community standards on obscenity, and the conviction was not overturned.
It is the precedent set from that ruling which is pretty much what enables one place in the US to attempt to regulate a website in another place.
What unintended pun did you intend to punny up? I’m not seeing it…
The word “penalized”, as I understand it, derives from an anatomical term.
Good thing the SDMB is a place of learning.
from Latin poenalis “pertaining to punishment,” from poena “punishment,” from Greek poinē “blood-money, fine, penalty, punishment,” from PIE *kwoina, from root *kwei- “to pay, atone, compensate”
Joke etymologies are fun until someone tries to use one in earnest.