Cockfighting and the Internet

Advanced consulting and Marketing , the company that broadcasts cockfights on the internet filed suit in federal court in Miami on Tuesday to challenge largely untested federal law that makes it a crime to sell depictions of animal cruelty regardless of whether or not it was legal where it happened so long as it was illegal where the depictions were sold. The only exceptions to this rule are depictions of animal cruelty which are for serious religious, political, scientific, educational, journalistic, historical or artistic value.

However, this raises a First Amendment issue; specifically, whether or not the government can ban depictions of illegal conduct as opposed to the conduct itself. Additionally, the company says it broadcasts the cockfights from Puerto Rico, where they are not illegal.

This federal law, enacted by President Bill Clinton in 1999, was to be narrowly interpreted, and its constitutionality is currently at issue in a case before the federal appeals court in Philadelphia, in which a Virginia man was sentenced to three years in prison for selling videotapes of dog fights.

Eugene Volokh, professor of law at the University of California at Los Angeles believes the law is unconstitutional: “The speech does not fall into any existing First Amendment exception.” This seems to hold true, particularly because the principle of the law, as written, would ban the depiction of criminal events by humans which are shown on YouTube or any other media network.