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The Marquis de Cyberspace
By: WENDY COLE SPRINGFIELD
Four months into his three tear sentence for transmitting obscene
images by computer, the man the Carnegie Mellon report calls a
modern-day Marquis de Sade hardly looks like a political cause
celebre. Robert Thomas spends his day like any other inmate at
the U.S. Medical Center for Federal Prisoners in Springfield,
Missouri: cleaning the prison kitchen and laundry room and
waiting to hear whether his lawyers win get him out on appeal.
Thomas's case could well end up in the Supreme Court, where it
would set legal precedent for all of cyberspace.
Thomas, 39, operator of the Amateur Action BBS in
Milpitas, California, made headlines last year when he and his
wife Carleen, 40, were indicted for transmitting pornographic
material to a government agent in Tennessee. A jury in Memphis
wasted little time ruling that the images, which included
pictures of women having sex with animals-were obscene. But his
case raised the tricky constitutional question of which locale's
or community standards should have been used to make that
judgment: Tennessee's Bible Belt, California's Bay Area or the
virtual community of cyberspace?
Though he concedes that many might find his stockpile of
25,000 photos featuring S&M and hard-core sex distasteful, Thomas
insists he violated no laws. "I don't feel I committed a crime
because I didn't offend anybody but a postal inspector in
Memphis," he says, referring to the government official who
launched the investigation. Thomas also faces charges in Salt
Lake City of distributing images of naked children, but he insists
those images aren't sexually explicit. "They are from nudist
colonies," he says. "Many of them are family snapshots."
On-line porn certainly pays, Thomas' income last year topped
$800,000, enabling the slight, shaggy-haired Californian to indulge
in his two extracurricular passions: expensive cars and exotic birds.
Subscriptions have more than doubled (to 7,000) since his arrest.
Some of the newcomers aren't even bothering to download the dirty
pictures; they seem to be offering their $99-per-year subscription
fees as donations to the cause. The extra income will come in handy,
since the Thomas's legal bills are approaching $250,000.
Thomas didn't set out to make headlines or case law.
A former furniture mover with an interest in computers, he opened
his BBS in 1991 with 12 photos and a single phone line. He
worked hard. He regularly put in 16-hour days, sometimes staying
up all night to scan new, hard-to-find photos for his collection.
At the time of his indictment he was spending $500 a week on fresh
material, much of it sent by scouts as far away as Denmark and
Brazil. The slogan for his bulletin board came from closer to
home, however. He was inspired by a visit to Disneyland, where a
sign outside proclaims it THE HAPPIEST PLACE ON EARTH. His
computer system came to be known as "the nastiest place on earth."
Whatever else might be said about him, Thomas does seem to
have a flair for marketing. The trick, he says, is in how you
write the pitch lines that describe your pictures. "You want to
make the descriptions like a menu," he explains. "If your
selling a dry, tough steak, you want to make it sound as juicy as
you can." Among his favorite come-ons (and one of the few
suitable for publication): "Peek into the bathroom and see this
cutie sitting on the toilet!" A subscriber who chose to
download that photo would get a digitized picture of a 15-lb.
lobster.