The future of obscenity law

[Volokh, Eugene]

	By the way, Scott Gerber's question, and my speculation about
how Lawrence might be read in 20 years, made me think:  Are we even
going to have obscenity debates in 20 years?

	On the one hand, porn has generally become more and more
tolerated; moreover, the Internet makes regulation of porn harder than
ever.  That might suggest that 20 years from now, the issue will be
largely dead.

	On the other hand, I suspect that technology will make porn more
and more troubling, even to people of moderate sensibilities (neither
hard-core culture warriors nor hard-core libertarians).  I have in mind
two likely developments:

	1.  Image recognition, generation, and processing technology
will soon, I suspect, make it easy for people to merge generic porn
(whether computer-animated or human-actor) with an arbitrary picture or
voice.  People will thus easily be able to make quite realistic-looking
porn "starring" their favorite actor, or for that matter their
acquaintances.  This is already doable to some extent with PhotoShop,
I'm told, but I expect that 10 or 20 years from now (if not fewer), the
technology will be much more advanced and plug-and-play, and this will
quickly become the preferred mode for most porn consumers.

	I suspect that many people who don't much mind their neighbors
viewing porn might mind more if they (or their wives or daughters or
sons) are the "stars" of that porn.  Perhaps there won't be much that
can be done about it, but I think people will get really upset --
especially when the porn is distributed beyond its creators (which could
be actionable under variants of "right of publicity" laws, but may be
practically hard to stop), but perhaps even when it's produced and
consumed in the same home.

	2.  Virtual reality setups -- I'm talking here 3D pictures,
sound, tactile sensation, and enough AI-based interactions to emulate
human behavior and speech during sex (an easier matter, I suspect, than
emulating human behavior more generally) -- will make the consumption of
porn an ever more enjoyable and consuming experience.  I'm tentatively
skeptical that the use of porn causes a great deal of social problems
today (though I haven't done serious reading on this, so I might be
mistaken).  But the use of virtual reality porn might cause considerably
greater problems, as sexual relationships, especially among teenage and
early 20s boys, are increasingly displaced into this cheap, easy-to-get,
emotionally undraining, and infinitely variable (from a visual
perspective, though obviously not from an emotional perspective) mode of
sex.  The upside, of course, is that you can't get pregnant or get an
STD from virtual reality sex.  The downside is that you can't learn how
to build a romantic relationship this way, either.  Plus, as a political
matter, I suspect that a lot of people will be much more upset about
thinking about their 15-year-old boy in a VR booth than about their
15-year-old boy looking at normal computer porn.

	These are all conjectures, of course, based on my generally
understanding of computer technology (and my best guesses about human
sexual interests, and especially male sexual interests).  I haven't
looked into where existing specifically pornography-creating technology
is on either of these fronts.  But it would shock me if option 1 won't
be available within 20 years, and I suspect that pretty effective
versions of option 2 will be available within 20 years, too.  So we
might not be done with obscenity battles just yet.

	Eugene