Kilbride and Schaffer set up Ganymede as a foreign shell company in an attempt to avoid United States laws[3] and gave fake contact information both in the emails they sent and their website registrations.

The FTC and AOL claimed to have received over 600,000 complaints relating to spam emails sent by Ganymede, before they were finally taken to court in Arizona for violating anti-spam and obscenity laws.

[1] On June 25, 2007, the United States District Court, D. Arizona found the defendants guilty of 8 counts:[4] Following their conviction, Kilbride and Schaffer moved for acquittal or a retrial based on a number of arguments involving jury instructions and evidence pertaining to the obscenity charges.

This argument focuses on the District Court's implementation of the Miller Test for determining that the images distributed by Kilbride and Schaffer were obscene and therefore not protected as free speech.

The relevant section of the Miller Test states that to be obscene, "'the average person, applying contemporary community standards', would find that the work, taken as a whole, appeals to the prurient interest".

In response to the first challenge, the court cites precedent, suggesting that the "portion of the instruction explicitly and implicitly allowing jurors to consider evidence of standards existing in places outside of the district is clearly permitted under Hamling.

Citing many different opinions in Ashcroft v. ACLU, 535 U.S. 564 (2002),[7] the court builds a case that the majority of justices view local community standards as a problem when applied to the internet.