Last week I told you of new regulations on “sexually explicit” material which threaten free speech on the Internet. The regulations have now claimed their first victim.

Body Modification EZine has been forced to move to Canada to avoid prosecution under the 2257 regulations and protect the privacy of its members. BME publishes photos of tattoos, piercings and other body modifications. Publisher Shannon Larratt has written a letter to his readers about the move.

As of June 24, 2005, publishing BME was made illegal in the United States, with my wife Rachel and I each facing life in prison due to our involvement in the site. In no way am I exaggerating the risk we were at. Our lawyer, who specializes in free speech issues, advised us that there was a good chance of prosecution, beating the charges would be far from guaranteed, and that if we had any sense we’d leave America immediately and tell others to do the same.

Taking his advice, we moved all of our servers back into Canada which has far broader protection of speech and the press, as well as the required privacy protections. Bringing BME back to Canada where it started cost us a great deal of time, money, and effort, but in the long run will be essential in keeping us online. Without this move it would have been only a matter of time before the site was forced to shut down, have its records seized, and seen us imprisoned. — Shannon Larratt

The Electronic Frontier Foundation posted an article explaining why 2257 will chill free speech last week. While publishers of adult pornographic content scramble to comply with the regulations, other publishers of non-pornographic content, such as BME, face prosecution and imprisonment over their formerly protected speech. The Free Speech Coalition is fighting the new 2257 regulations.

Censorship can take many forms. You’re looking at one of them. As I said last week, preventing child pornography is a laudable goal, but this regulation doesn’t do that. Instead it imposes onerous, frequently impossible, requirements on diverse groups of publishers, effectively destroying free speech and either forcing it offshore, or quashing the speech altogether.

Like this one, most government laws and regulations have one stated purpose, and then actually do something else entirely. If Congress wants to attack child pornography, then they should pass laws against child pornography, not laws against free speech.