What is the relationship between the CDA and obscenity laws?
Prior to the CDA, federal obscenity law already applied to material distributed on the Internet, as the Amateur Action case illustrates. Under that law, as interpreted by the 1973 Miller case, obscene materials are those which are (i)prurient and (ii)patently offensive under contemporary community standards and which (iii) lack significant scientific, literary, artistic or political (“SLAP”) value. Cases in recent decades have indicated that only visual images–photographs and films–will be held obscene under this standard, as pure text is always found to have at least minimal literary value. The CDA makes illegal a large zone of speech which obscenity laws don’t touch–material depicting or describing sexual or excretory acts or organs, which is not prurient, but is patently offensive to somebody, even though it has SLAP value.
