Quote:
Originally Posted by basschick
the written word is not always safe from legal prosecution. while people use the word "obscene" to mean sexually explicit material, obscenity is actually a crime - often quite a big one. it has a very iffy definition "patently offensive by contemporary community standards" and it's not just a crime in the u.s., btw.
|
It doesn't just mean "offensive by community standards"--it also means "lacks serious literary, artistic, political or scientific value." (A.k.a. "the SLAPS test.") A work can be horribly offensive to a lot of people and still have serious value in one or more of those categories.