SAN JOSE, CA – A Milpitas, CA, man who once served prison time for transmitting child pornography via a computer bulletin board service was indicted Wednesday on charges he mailed obscene materials across state lines.Robert Alan Thomas, 52, once dubbed “the Marquis de Cyberspace,” faces four federal obscenity counts: three relating to mailing obscene matter and one count of “engaging in the business of selling or transferring obscene matters.” The charges sprang from Thomas’ operation of the businesses Amateur Action, Amateur Action BBS, AABBS and AmateurAction.net, which offer for sale DVDs “containing pissing, fisting, peeing, golden showers, BDSM, extreme insertions, squirting, spanking, kinky fetish and more,” according to the website. The subject DVDs were mailed during December 2006, according to a statement released by the U.S. Department of Justice.
“The indictment states that the films in question depict bestiality and other sexually explicit content,” according to the DOJ statement.
The indictment, registered with the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California in San Jose, has yet to be made available.
The case is unusual in that it was filed in California’s northern district, which is not generally a hotbed of obscenity prosecution. In addition, the prosecution will not be conducted by local attorneys but by a federal prosecutor on the Washington, DC-based staff of the DOJ’s Obscenity Prosecution Task Force.
Thomas is no stranger to federal prosecution. In 1994 he and his wife were convicted of transmitting obscenity from California to Tennessee via the Amateur Action computer bulletin board service. He was sentenced to 37 months in prison. Subsequently, he was prosecuted for sending the same images to Utah, where he pleaded guilty to transmitting child pornography and received a concurrent sentence of 26 months. The cases made national headlines because they were the first to be prosecuted in the emerging, pre-internet world of cyberspace. The media dubbed Thomas “the Marquis de Cyberspace.”
If convicted of the current charges, Thomas faces a maximum penalty of five years in prison on each. The DOJ also seeks the forfeiture of various assets belonging to Thomas, including certain allegedly obscene materials and all property traceable to the proceeds of the alleged offenses or used to commit the offenses.
