Using Google to determine community standards for obscenity

NYT: A Florida defense attorney plans to use Google to demonstrate that “community standards”  include what the neighbors are surfing — orgies as well as recipes, dildoes as well as car prices. The attorney plans to suggest that what his client is providing is no worse than what his community is searching for.

Editorial: This approach is not that much different from a law review article from some years back that suggested that the best way to determine the community standard of the Internet for purposes of obscenity prosecutions was to, well, survey it. Focus the survey on a particular area rather than the Internet as a whole, and there’s the Florida attorney’s approach. The law review author wrote, “Survey data may well be the best way to assess community standards, since a jury, absent such data, will likely apply a standard based on the particular beliefs of those twelve individuals.” See Rebecca Dawn Kaplan, “Cybersmut: Regulating Obscenity on the Internet,” 9 Stan. L. & Pol’y Rev. 189 (1998).