Marty Rimm

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Marty 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 scrutinized by a number of critics who concluded that they were seriously flawed. The level of hysteria was compounded when 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 mis-interpreting Rimm's data to mean that "83.5 percent of all computerized photographs available on the Internet are pornographic." [3]