opinion

Label This!

Labeling of adult entertainment websites has been a hot topic for many years. There has already been three bills introduced to Congress, with the Cyber Safety for Kids Act of 2007 being the most recent. This, and other bills, call for mandatory labeling of websites.

There are three methods of labeling: Using a TLD like .XXX which has been proposed by Congress before, use of ICRA labeling, use of ASACP’s Restricted To Adult (“RTA”) labeling. I will quickly run through the three choices.

1) .XXX TLD = bad = dead

2) The use of ICRA for labeling comes up naturally, so I wanted to review the steps in adding a label to a website.

You can play along at home by going to the labeling generator link at: https://www.icra.org/label/generator/

First thing it asks for is to enter the URL to your website. I would suggest putting in a bogus domain to test.

If you click the XXX site green button, it will auto-fill choices but, won’t allow you to check in the Context box: This material appears in an artistic context (some industry attorneys would probably want you to have that box checked in reference to obscenity issues).

After what seems to be a straight forward process of checking off the appropriate boxes, the next screen (Step 3), then asks you to enter your name and email address, because they need to send you a file that contains your label.

It used to be that you could get the ICRA text tag right from the site, but now they have gone to a registration mode, where they want to collect your contact information. Most may not have a problem with that, but it does show a change in their policies.

You need to register your URL/domains with ICRA for the labeling, for which they will have both manual and automatic processes to check your websites

ICRA’s label is free to use.

3) ASACP’s RTA label information can be found at https://www.rtalabel.org and you can simply copy/paste this text (the greater than and less than symbols removed to allow viewing in html) : meta name="RATING" content="RTA-5042-1996-1400-1577-RTA" into all of your web pages in the header section. No registration, no classification is needed and the label is free.

You can decide which labeling method to use or wait for Congress to tell you.

Fight the labelation without representation!

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