This is one of those things that has defined what is / is not "obscene", and hence the limits of free expression & pornography both on the internet and broadly speaking.
This is interesting for 5 reasons
> The United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit has ruled in United States v. Kilbride that a "national community standard" should be used for the Internet, but this has yet to be upheld at the national level.[13] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miller_test
ie there's an (US-)internet-level level of what's OK and what's not OK (for example : feet?) that the US justice system wants to base their rulings on, though they haven't figured out how to do this. Who will get to define what is and is not porn, on the internet? Is some kind of ethereum oracle up to the task? Chatgpt?? 4chan??? godhatesfags.com????
If the current supreme court is willing to go back and roll back roe v. wade, the miller test might also be up for grabs.
Although we are not bound by the miller test here in canada, we're going through this exact issue right now wrt #s210 . And what happens in the US has a tendency of coming north . . .
The actions of which this case is resolving the legality of, is yet another thing that happened in 1971 #wtfhappenedin1971
> "serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value"
Is also likely what legalized Lenna's picture for standard use in image processing. It paved the way for playboy centerfolds to be used for because they uh had 'scientific value to computer science' yeah that's it.