Martin Rimm

Martin Rimm gained notoriety in 1995 while an undergraduate at Carnegie Mellon University. He wrote an article published in The Georgetown Law Journal titled "Marketing Pornography on the Information Superhighway: A Survey of 917,410 Images, Description, Short Stories and Animations Downloaded 8.5 Million Times by Consumers in Over 2000 Cities in Forty Countries, Provinces and Territories." [1]

Prior to the publication of Rimm's research, Philip Elmer-DeWitt used it in his Time Magazine article, "On a Screen Near You: Cyberporn." [2] The story highlighted a particular conclusion claimed by Rimm that (as of 1995) 83.5% of the images on Usenet newsgroups where images were stored were pornographic in nature. Rimm's findings were quickly attacked by civil libertarians who insisted that they were seriously flawed.[3] Rimm's research was cited during a session of U.S. Congress. Senator Charles Grassley, introduced S. 892, the Protection of Children from Computer Pornography Act of 1995. As key evidence for the need for his bill, the senator is on record misinterpreting Rimm's data to mean that "83.5 percent of all computerized photographs available on the Internet are pornographic." [4]

A detailed account of this episode can be read on "Fighting a Cyberporn Panic", chapter 9 of Mike Godwin's book, Cyber Rights: Defending Free Speech in the Digital Age (Revised and Updated Edition, MIT Press, 2003).

External links

• Cyberporn Fear Storm
• The Rimm Factor by Brock Meeks
• Hoffman and Novak's Analysis
• Hotwired interviews Philip Elmer-DeWitt

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Name	Rimm, Marty
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