“Sex on the Internet?,” they all said. “That’ll never make any money.” But computer-geek-turned-entrepreneur Gary Kremen knew an opportunity when he saw it. The year was 1994; domain names were free for the asking, and it would be several years yet before Henry Blodget and hordes of eager NASDAQ day traders would turn the Internet into the Dutch tulip craze of our times. With a quick e-mail to the domain name registrar Network Solutions, Kremen became the proud owner of sex.com. He registered the name to his business, Online Classifieds, and listed himself as the contact.
Kremen v. Cohen, 337 F.3d 1024, 1026 (9th Cir. 2003).
The above is the opening paragraph of a Ninth Circuit opinion authored by now-Chief Judge Alex Kozinski; a favorite among libertarians and good-humored legal scholars alike.
As part of a rotation where appeals court judges are occasionally assigned to criminal trials, Kozinski was slated to preside over the federal obscenity trial of “shock-porn” filmmaker Ira Isaacs. The charges brought are for distributing pornography depicting bestiality, defecation, and probably a myriad other forms of kink (the case was brought after pressure was put on the DoJ by the Fundies).
