Porno Copia

Renaissance art theorist Leone Battista Alberti was well known for his theories of "the copia" in painting. In his great oeuvre on technique, De Pictura, he argued that you can, in fact, have too much of a good thing, if the rhetorical occasion doesn't warrant the visual displays of excess and virtuosity that may otherwise be filling the frame.

Earlier in the week Judge Alex Kozinski was in the news here on Virtualpolitik for his public statements against screening software and his fascination with online cultural traffic in general. Now it appears that the judge will be required to remove himself from a high-profile federal pornography case because his use of web technologies apparently violated judicial decorum, since he published a number of questionable files that showed bizarre sexual curiosities. A reporter from The Los Angeles Times has revealed that the judge posted a number of graphic and sexually explicit images to his personal website in "Alex Kozinski suspends L.A. obscenity trial after conceding his website had sexual images." Only those who knew the names of folders in his directory could easily access this material, but the posted images were nonetheless publicly available, and Kozinski's trove included mp3 files of copyrighted songs as well.

The judge has since told some contradictory stories about these images, many of which he acknowledged to be ones he was familiar with and even thought of as humorous items to share with friends who were online. Now he is blaming some of the content on the handiwork of his son. He has also asked an ethics panel to look into his own case.