"I Know It When I See It." The View from Where?

(cross posted at the Citizen Media Law Project) 
Jeffrey A. Kilbride and James Robert Schaffer are spammers.  They sent millions of unsolicited e-mails advertising pornographic web sites, and were paid a fee whenever a recipient of their e-mails purchased a subscription to one of the sites, earning a total of $1.1 million.

In 2007, Kilbride and Schaffer were convicted of violating the Controlling the Assault of Non-solicited Pornography and Marketing Act (CAN-SPAM Act) by using falsified headers and domain names in their e-mails, conspiracy, fraud, money laundering, and various obscenity charges, and sentenced to 72 and 63 months in prison, respectively.  They were also fined $100,000 and ordered to pay $77,500 in restitution to AOL and to forfeit the proceeds from their spamming operation.

Kilbride and Schaffer appealed, leading to an important decision on how the Supreme Court's standards for obscenity apply on the Internet.  U.S. v. Kilbride, No. 07-10528 (9th Cir. Oct. 28, 2009).