The NY Times reports:
. . . in 1999, Congress made it a crime to sell “crush videos” and almost all other depictions of unlawful cruelty to animals.
The conduct itself is disgusting, of course. But the law does not criminalize the cruelty, which was already illegal in all 50 states, only its depiction. By making such expressions illegal — adding a new category of speech to the very few that are entirely unprotected under the First Amendment — the law raised profound constitutional questions about whether and when the government can decide that some sorts of information have no social value at all.
The Supreme Court is likely to address those questions soon in the case of Robert J. Stevens, a Virginia man sentenced to 37 months in prison under the law for selling videos of dogfights . . .
