Still, the Thomases may not have been the best defendants to help sort out this issue. Thus, the Sixth Circuit spent little time on the jurisdiction issue. The court then moved on to the central question of contemporary community standards. The Sixth Circuit, however, concluded that this constitutional question need not be reached, since defendants in this case had a registration process in place whereby they could indeed select or reject members from their applicant lists and they could choose, based on addresses submitted, whether or not they wanted to enroll persons who lived in a community that arguably heeded different standards. Since most members of the online community are not pornography dealers, U.S. v. Thomas raises many questions and resolves very few.
Web sites are different from commercial bulletin board systems in several key ways.
Most of them are unrestricted, any person on the Internet can access the sites free of charge, pictures and text can be downloaded without permission, and no record of the process will typically be available. Assume that three hypothetical defendants are indicted in Tennessee under relevant federal statutes. Defendant One, an adult in New York, posts the same images described in the Thomas case on a personal World Wide Web site, simply wishing to share them with others. Defendant Two, a student at the University of Chicago, accesses this web site, downloads the images, and e-mails them to a friend in Nashville. Defendant Three, a UCLA professor, creates a link on his own cyberspace law web site to provide a real-life hypothetical for his students.