Soylent had always been fascinated with the weird and macabre; he's been collecting books and images for a decade. But he never really intended to become a poster child for anti-censorship. In fact, Rotten.com evolved rather haphazardly: Soylent purchased the URL back in 1996 simply because he liked the name, and decided to throw up a few "joke pictures." But people flocked to the images and remembered the site's name, including Howard Stern, who brought the site to mainstream attention when he sang its praises on-air. In September 1997, when Soylent posted a controversial photo of Princess Diana's supposed corpse, his reputation was sealed. Though the photo was called a fake, its sheer existence, along with Soylent's decision to take it public, inspired horrified editorials in the global press.

Since then, it's been a cat-and-mouse game between Soylent and the world's moral arbiters. Rotten.com was a lightning rod during the 1999 controversy over the Child Online Protection Act, a law that would have required all controversial online material to be censored from the view of children. When Donna Rice Hughes testified before Congress in 1999, she used Rotten.com as an exemplar of the "violent and bloody" horrors from which children should be shielded. As a result of this and other complaints, Soylent has given in to the "child protection" lobby in one important way: Some of his photos, including his library of cadavers and nude celebrities, now require an adult-verification I.D. number.

Under current American laws, Rotten.com could potentially be shut down for obscenity, but Soylent makes the contention that his site isn't obscene at all, since it has literary, political and historical value. Sure, he may display a photograph of Marilyn Monroe's blotchy corpse, but he also has biographical information about her. He posts regular political commentaries, blunt and offensive as they may be, along with a daily "this day in history" feature that chronicles notorious episodes (bombs, mass murders, court cases) of the past. It's a tenuous justification -- an "I read Playboy for the articles" for online smut addicts -- but so far no one has called him on it.

Soylent concedes that his site is "like a shining beacon of what children shouldn't see on the Net," but he argues that it's up to parents to monitor what their children see online. After all, says Soylent, there's absolutely nothing on his site that you can't also find in your local library or on television; in fact, that's where he gets much of his material. "If you watch the Discovery Channel or the Learning Channel, you see pictures of dead bodies, cadavers of famous people," he says. "Horrors are sprinkled throughout life, and I see no problem with concentrating them. If you want, we could go down to the bookstores and find pictures of cadavers for you -- it's very easy. It's not possible to write a law to make it impossible to display that stuff, even for minors. It's too much of a slippery slope to take."

As you might expect, this view is shared by Dr. Michael Wong Chang, the pseudonymous proprietor of BonsaiKitten, a Web site now featured on Soylent's site. "The dichotomy between exploiting 'distasteful' subject matter in the guise of information and exploiting it as entertainment is artificial and hypocritical. Lurid details of human fault and misery are published in the 'mainstream' media for exactly the same reason that certain people exchange this material informally -- to titillate the viewer," says Wong Chang.

The guardians of free speech online tend to agree. However distasteful the images may be, we can't limit the freedom to display them, says Cindy Cohn, legal counsel for the Electronic Frontier Foundation. "In general, people who have unpopular speech are the vanguards of protecting the rest of our speech," she says. "Just because it's in bad taste doesn't mean you get to censor it. Almost by definition the people who carry the standard for the First Amendment are the ones who have unpopular speech; after all, we wouldn't need a First Amendment for popular speech."

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