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The Slippery Legal Slope of Cartoon Porn
Posted by
timothy
on Mon Dec 29, 2008 07:55 AM
from the in-a-perfect-world-the-topic-would-not-arise dept.
from the in-a-perfect-world-the-topic-would-not-arise dept.
BenFenner writes "Two out of the three Virginia judges involved with Dwight Whorley's case say cartoon images depicting sex acts with children are considered child pornography in the United States. Judge Paul V. Niemeyer noted the PROTECT Act of 2003, clearly states that 'it is not a required element of any offense under this section that the minor depicted actually exists.'"
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[+]
Australian Judge Rules Simpsons Cartoon Rip-off Is Child Porn 612 comments
An anonymous reader was one of several to note a bizarre story in which an Australian judge ruled that drawings can be child porn. In this case, it was knock off drawings of the Simpsons doing naughty things. Good thing they're going to be censoring the Down Undernet soon. Who knows what damage this could cause.
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Uhh, yes it does... (Score:5, Informative)
The act defines a "child" as a "person":
(2) the term âchildâ(TM) means a person who has not attained
the age of 18 years and isâ"
ââ(A) under the perpetratorâ(TM)s care or control; or
ââ(B) at least six years younger than the perpetrator;
Plus as some cartoons are over the age over 18 like the Simpsons for example. They're 20 years old as a point of fact.
Re:Uhh, yes it does... (Score:5, Insightful)
Plus as some cartoons are over the age over 18 like the Simpsons for example. They're 20 years old as a point of fact.
So I can legally masturbate furiously to a video of a 10-year old being having sex with her father that was filmed eight years ago? Awesome! No seriously, there might be a logical fallacy in what you said.
Parent
Bad Summary (Score:5, Informative)
It's a bad summary.
The opinion makes it clear that the child pornography charges were related to the actual child porn he received, while his convictions related to the anime and emails were obscenity convictions. This is an important distinction.
In Miller v. California, the United States Supreme Court held that the First Amendment did not protect obscene speech, and that such speech could be banned by the government. However, the test for whether speech is obscene is so broad that very little pornography is subject to regulation. According to Wikipedia (since I'm too lazy to look it up on Findlaw), the three prongs of the test are:
* Whether the average person, applying contemporary community standards, would find that the work, taken as a whole, appeals to the prurient interest,
* Whether the work depicts/describes, in a patently offensive way, sexual conduct or excretory functions specifically defined by applicable state law,
* Whether the work, taken as a whole, lacks serious literary, artistic, political or scientific value. (This is also known as the (S)LAPS test- [Serious] Literary, Artistic, Political, Scientific).
If each if these prongs is met, then the work is obscene and may be banned.
In contrast, in Ferber v. New York, the Supreme Court held that child pornography is never protected by the First Amendment, regardless of whether it is obscene. The rationale being that the government has a compelling interest in preventing the sexual exploitation of children, and that by its nature child pornography causes injury to the children involved in its production.
So, in brief: child porn involving actual children--always illegal because actual children are injured in the process. Images and stories of children having sex--illegal if obscene. Whorely was convicted under an obscenity statute, rather than a child pornography statute.
--AC
Parent
Re:Bad Summary (Score:5, Informative)
The opinion makes it clear that the child pornography charges were related to the actual child porn he received, while his convictions related to the anime and emails were obscenity convictions. This is an important distinction.
That's not true - two of the three charges were child pornography charges, including one of the two in respect of the drawn images. Under current US law, drawn images are treated exactly the same as real child pornography (but only if they're either obscene or "depict an image that is, or appears to be, of a minor engaging in graphic bestiality, sadistic or masochistic abuse, or sexual intercourse, including genital-genital, oral-genital, anal-genital, or oral-anal, whether between persons of the same or opposite sex; and lack serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value" - anything which isn't has 1st amendment protection). Note that there is no requirement of obscenity under the second criterion; I doubt this is generally in issue, but it's possible there are circumstances under which it could be.
Technically, the charge regarding the drawn images was under 1466A rather than the actual child porn statute, 2252A, but it's only a technical difference - 1466A basically just says that the images are treated exactly the same as real child porn would be under 2252A.
The other charge regarding the drawn images is indeed an obscenity charge, more specifically one of importing obscene materials. In this case, by "import" they really mean "download from the internet" - the law in question specifically states that downloading from the internet counts as importing. (So putting this in "YRO" may actually be appropriate. Shock horror!) I suspect this law has far wider implications than just child porn.
Parent
Re:Bad Summary (Score:5, Informative)
Here's a link to the opinion: http://pacer.ca4.uscourts.gov/opinion.pdf/064288.P.pdf [uscourts.gov]
Here's the language from the opinion:
Counts 1-20 charged Whorley with using a computer on March 30, 2004, to knowingly receive obscene cartoons in interstate and foreign commerce, in violation of 18 U.S.C. 1462. The 20 cartoons forming the basis of those counts showed prepubescent children engaging in graphic sexual acts with adults. They depicted actual intercourse, masturbation, and oral sex, some of it coerced. Based on the same cartoons, the jury also charged Whorley in Counts 21-40 under 18 U.S.C. 1466A(a)(1) with knowingly receiving, as a person previously convicted of illegally downloading child pornography, obscene visual depictions of minors engaging in sexually explicit conduct. In addition, the grand jury charged Whorley in Counts 41-55 with knowingly receiving, on March 11 and 12, 2004, 15 visual depictions of minors engaging in sexually explicit conduct, in violation of 18 U.S.C. 2252(a)(2). These counts were based on lascivious photographs of actual, naked children. Finally, the grand jury charged Whorley in Counts 56-75 with sending or receiving in interstate commerce 20 obscene e-mails during the period between February 5, 2004, and April 2, 2004, in violation of 18 U.S.C. 1462. The e-mails described sexually explicit conduct involving children, including incest and molestation by doctors.
By my read, the key factor that made these prosecutions legitimate from a First Amendment standpoint is not that they were "child pornography," but that they were obscene.
--AC
Parent
Re:Uhh, yes it does... (Score:5, Funny)
what is the two year old wearing?
Parent
Re:Uhh, yes it does... (Score:5, Insightful)
Who gives a shit about the cartoons, The Son Of A Bitch was/is a child predator and got what he had/has coming, he'll pay for it in the pen!!! "Whorley also received digital photographs of actual children engaging in sexual conduct and sent and received e-mails graphically describing parents sexually molesting their children."
He is not a child predator. The adults acting in the photographs he received are. He just has a sexual fetish that is not shared by most of the rest of us, one that provokes fear in a lot of parents.
Parent
Re:Uhh, yes it does... (Score:5, Insightful)
Becaauuuuse, it's bad precedent. Suppose someone has raped, tortured, and murdered over a thousand children. He get charged for those crimes, and in addition gets 20 years in prison for driving 62 on a 60 mph road. You may say 'who cares such a conviction is ridiculous, the guy deserves to rot in prison for the rest of his life', but it sets bad precedent for all of us, not just the 'villains'.
That's why the cartoon-related conviction matters.
Parent
At what level of detail (Score:5, Insightful)
does it become illegal? Two stick figure drawings with a caption "10 year olds" would be considered illegal if you didn't pencil in some shorts? Madness.
Re:At what level of detail (Score:5, Insightful)
One best reconsider following Bart's imposition to eat his shorts, or at least drawing such a thing.
So I assume these judges have signed affidavits of concern with respect to the depictions of a clearly naked Bart Simpson in the latest (and so far only) Simpsons movie? Right?
What, you mean they haven't? They are only trying to selectively enforce their misinterpretation of the law? Shudder.
Parent
Re:At what level of detail (Score:5, Informative)
Wrong. Naked isn't equivalent to pornographic. If Bart had been depicted in a sex act, that could be considered pornographic. Nudity alone isn't sufficient.
Parent
Re:At what level of detail (Score:5, Insightful)
Makes me wonder, actually? Remember the Muhammad cartoon controversy? Some people actually tried that trick with stick figures then as well; wonder what will happen now.
This will be the true test of free speech in the West - going not against the taboos of another society, but against ones of our own. Count me a pessimist on this one...
Parent
Two Words: (Score:5, Insightful)
Pedophilia and child pornography are morally reprehensible to most people, not to mention damaging to those exploited in its production. It's also worth pointing out that COPA and PROTECT are two prime examples of how our system of government fails to do what it set out to achieve.
COPA basically stated (among other things) that your first amendment right to free speech was null and void when the content of that speech was fictional child pornography. The supreme court ruled COPA unconstitutional [wikipedia.org], and rightly so, due to the fact that COPA very specifically abridged free speech; something the first amendment [wikipedia.org] very specifically states Congress does not have the power to do.
Due to the fact that Congress's fast one wasn't able to slip by the Supreme Court (whose job is to filter out this bullshit), they changed a couple of words and relabeled COPA as the PROTECT act. PROTECT, like its predecessor, also abridges free speech by again making fictional work, which is deemed morally reprehensible by the majority of voters who reelected the folks who pushed the bill through----er, wait a minute...
This is the most prime example I have borne witness to of flagrant abuse of power by the Congress in my life:
1. Congress passes law.
2. Supreme court says "wait just a fuckin' minute"
3. Congress changes wording on law, renames and repasses it, while supreme court bickers over previous law.
4. ????
5. Congressman Asshole wins reelection for being "Tough on Crime." (also known in politics as "Profit")
As long as anything is morally reprehensible enough, Congress can throw the bill of rights out the window to enforce their agenda while the flak takes years to tear its way through the judicial system only to finally be struck down by one court or another.
Just goes to show that politics really can be a system that clogs down on its own bullshit as long as there's enough of a popular opinion in the first place to ramrod the shit past its initial threshold.
Parent
How do they prove it? (Score:5, Insightful)
If it's fantasy, you can say the depiction is as old as you want. It's not real, rules of reality don't apply, at all.
Disclaimer (Score:5, Insightful)
So a disclaimer at the bottom that all characters pictured are based off real adults who are merely very young looking would make it safe?
Ok, so if I draw a picture of a person having sex with a sentient machine (non-human like, lets say a 1m cube with a penis sized hole in one side) and that machine is only 10 years old according to the crappy fan-fic I write about it, does that make it child pornography?
Oh wait, I know how to use up more of the courts time, where were those rule 34 pictures of ALF and the simpsons I had laying around...
Re:Disclaimer (Score:5, Funny)
(non-human like, lets say a 1m cube with a penis sized hole in one side)
Companion cube, indeed.
Parent
Re:Disclaimer (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Re:Disclaimer (Score:5, Funny)
I find your ideas eroti..err.. intriguing and would like to subscribe to your newsletter.
Parent
And the point of these laws is? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:And the point of these laws is? (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
Re:And the point of these laws is? (Score:5, Insightful)
Well, it is. Most (real) child porn of today comes from the former east bloc and far east asia. Ever tried to arrest someone in that area?
While people drawing porn come from all over the globe, just prosecure the ones in the western hemisphere and it sure looks like you're doing something about the problem. You don't, actually, the kids in Russia and south east asia are still being exploited, but you're doing SOMETHING.
Parent
Re:And the point of these laws is? (Score:5, Insightful)
"I was under the impression that the reason for child pornography laws was to protect children from exploitation. "
No. They're there to pander to the braying mob and instill a climate of fear. This does nothing other than having police chasing shadows, diverting their attention from real abuse cases. Very counterproductive.
It may not be possible to prosecute the people [for committing crime X] if they are in a foreign country, but you can help to reduce their market by prosecuting the people who buy their products.
This tactic was a roaring success in the war on drugs. In fact all drug dealers went broke during the first Reagan administration, and now there are no drugs to be had anymore.
Parent
Re:And the point of these laws is? (Score:5, Insightful)
The problem with our current laws is that the cases you describe are lumped together with cases of teenagers sending dirty pictures of themselves to their (girl/boy)friend. It's like stopping a bank robbery by nuking the entire city.
Parent
Re:And the point of these laws is? (Score:5, Informative)
Apparently you haven't been listening [google.com].
Parent
Re:And the point of these laws is? (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
Re:The point of these laws is power (Score:5, Insightful)
Laws against child pornography are an easy route to power
It's also difficult to oppose a law against child pornography without sounding like you're endorsing child abuse, especially when you're a public figure, so these measures usually are passed without much opposition.
Parent
Re:And the point of these laws is? (Score:5, Informative)
"Arguably, banning the drawing of such things, and dissemination of such cartoons discourages sickos from watching the cartoons and being encouraged."
There is no evidence for the argument that viewing child porn cartoons increases the risk of a person molesting a child. There is evidence to the contrary, however. Hall, et al. (1995) [ipce.info] found that "arousal to pedophilic stimuli does not necessarily correspond with pedophilic behavior", Freel (2003) [oxfordjournals.org] found that "if someone is fully inhibited from sexually abusing children, no amount of emotional congruence, sexual arousal, or blockage will lead them to abuse children", while Sheldon & Howitt (2008) [direct.bl.uk] found that "fantasy deficit may be involved in contact offending against children."
Parent
Re:Preventing the Photoshop defence (Score:5, Informative)
They may have created the image, or they may have filtered the image in PhotoShop to remove any digital signatures from the camera that took the image. Okay, Solomon, how do we settle this one?
Uh, innocent until proven guilty?
Parent
Victims? (Score:5, Insightful)
He would still be convicted for the obscene e-mail (Score:5, Funny)
TFA states that he was also convicted for obscene e-mails describing sex acts with children. Anybody else find this even more worrying than the pictures?
I guess this means you can commit a felony by posting a few choice lines on slashdot?
(Posting anon since I don't want to be associated with this subject, however remotely)
Re:He would still be convicted for the obscene e-m (Score:5, Funny)
(Posting anon since I don't want to be associated with this subject, however remotely)
Now THAT'S funny.
Parent
Re:He would still be convicted for the obscene e-m (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
I can only wonder... (Score:5, Interesting)
You're all on report. (Score:5, Funny)
Next up... (Score:5, Funny)
I call for the prosecution of Stephen King (Score:5, Insightful)
For repeated and multiple murder, for torture, both physical and psychological, for cannibalism and for a few other things that I'd have to consult my library for and reread some of his work.
And while we're at it, I also ask to have the governor of California arrested for ... well, pretty much the same crimes.
No, they didn't commit them. They only depicted and acted them. But appearantly that difference is no longer important.
Re:I call for the prosecution of Stephen King (Score:5, Insightful)
Kiss a pair of boobs and the movie's rated R. Chop them off and it's PG-13.
--Jack Nicholson.
Parent
I thought the entire argument against child porn (Score:5, Insightful)
was that its manufacture directly hurt children (the ones portrayed in it, not some abstract concept). While distasteful, virtual "child" porn, no matter how realistic, seems to be a freedom of speech which is protected under the Constitution. Otherwise, you are creating a thoughtcrime.
Also is the matter of arguing "age". Some are undeniably children, but we live in a country where 18 years old prosecuted for statutory rape of 16 years old isn't unheard of in our recent histroy. Do we really want to relegate to the prosecutors this power?
Also consider the common cartoon/anime characteristic of having an adult in mind in an essentially child like body. What then?
In summary:
-lack of victim
-Freedom of Speech, if only popular speech were to be protected, we wouln't need 1st amendment
-age ambiguities
How far we've come (Score:5, Informative)
If you're an oldster or a lawyer of the sort who can quote Dost, this may be sad but it isn't surprising.
For you young 'uns out there, listen up for a history lesson.
For a very long time in the U.S., child porn was legal. Admittedly, this point can be argued. Some say it was always illegal because it was always obscene. However, it wasn't prosecuted because the possibility existed that it could be produced in a way that was not obscene. Whether it was technically legal or illegal isn't important. The practical matter is that it wasn't prosecuted, wasn't specifically prohibited, and was easily available to anyone who wanted to send off a money order or walk into a big city adult book store.
IN the mid 1970s, the first laws were passed that said it was illegal. First amendment concerns surfaced but those were beaten back with the argument that producing it required that a crime be committed by an adult against a child. You couldn't produce child porn without actually raping a child. By the early 1980s, it was pretty much illegal everywhere in the U.S., though simple possession didn't get outlawed everywhere, uniformly until then. Even now, there have been major nations that didn't outlaw simple possession until recently. Simple possession didn't become illegal in Brazil, for example, until this year.
The U.S., though, was a different case. By the mid to late 1980s, the stuff had been mostly stamped out. In fact, immediately before the rise of the ubiquitous home internet connection, nearly all child porn sold in the U.S. was actually sold by the United States Postal Service as a part of sting operations.
In some of the early court decisions, the first amendment concerns were dismissed with the explicit allowance that depictions of underage sex for artistic purposes could continue unhindered as long as the actors involved were of age. At the time, the example often cited was "The Last Picture Show."
Since then, things have gradually changed from the sensible to the insane. The changes have been far too many and too complex to outline here and each change has been rather gradual. As the law now stands (IANAL, etc.) literally any picture of a child can be considered porn if a prosecutor can convince a jury that it was produced or possessed for prurient purposes. Nudity is not required. Sexual activity is not required. Prosecutors are willing to proceed on the flimsiest basis when motivated by stupidity or politics, sometimes successfully (the Pierson case, as a lead-in to prosecuting WebeWeb), sometimes unsuccessfully (as in the attempt in Oklahoma to criminalize the highly regarded movie "The Tin Drum.")
I'm not a big fan of Paul Little (the few minutes I've spent with him on several occasions convinced me that he's an ultimately harmless boor) but he should not be looking at jail time. Yet in this (U.S.) society, all rationality has flown right out the window where this subject is concerned.
Here are my two main points (and, incidentally, this is why I know so much about the subject):
1. If you value civil liberties, you need to know about child porn. It's the boogey man, just like "commies" back in the 1950s, that is used as an excuse to build freedom-destroying infrastructure into our laws and communications systems.
2. The original definition of child porn that justified outlawing it included one central tenet - that producing it requires adults to rape children. Nowadays, a large (probably the overwhelming majority) of child porn is produced by children for the consumption of children and there are no adults involved at any stage. If you have a 12-year-old with a web cam in their room or a digital camera built into their cell phone, there is a much-larger-than-you'd-like-to-admit possibility that you're providing a home for a child porn production studio.
Combine those two things and we're looking at a situation where child porn can be used to criminalize a huge portion of the populace. Forgive me for drawing parallels where
Re:How far we've come (Score:5, Interesting)
Where did your point number two disappear? When did a nude photo become "porn" in any sense? Are we going to start burning 12-15th century paintings now, because they "depict child porn"? Destroying Greek and Roman statues? Hell, even the Sistine Chapel [easyart.com] might be in trouble. Those cherubs look a pretty young...
Parent
Re:How far we've come (Score:5, Interesting)
That's, imo, a hugely insightful question. My answer is also just my opinion.
I believe we lost that point (defining CP as absolutely requiring that a child had to be raped to make it) when we criminalized simple possession. The problem is we didn't know we had lost anything when we did that.
In the context of the time, criminalizing simple possession was obviously the right thing to do. Back then, the only way to get CP was to buy it. If you possessed it, you had to have bought it. If you bought it, you were giving money to people to encourage them to rape children. That's bad, no matter how you look at it.
Nowadays, things have radically changed. Most CP isn't bought; it's found. Most CP isn't made for monetary profit; it's made by kids messing around and by adults who are seeking self-validation for their perversion by producing and releasing the material. Thus, possessing CP no longer encourages it to be made. If we were just now getting around to outlawing it, we probably wouldn't because outlawing possession no longer has any real purpose, i.e. outlawing possession no longer does anything to encourage or discourage production.
In response to this, lots of other justifications have come along to keep possession illegal. There's the grooming argument; pervs can show their porn to little kids, thus convincing the kids that this behavior is normal. There's also the "continuing rape" theory that says children in CP are raped again, mentally, every time someone looks at the CP in which they appear. That second argument is just goofy-stupid and I dismiss it out of hand. The first argument, however, probably has some small (very small) merit and is enough for me to argue that no change in the legal prohibition against possession is necessary.
The problems arise when we accept any of these arguments *separately* from the original requirement that kids have to be raped to produce the stuff. If, for example, we accept that the possession of any material that can be used to groom children for abuse should be legally proscribed, then we are forced to look the other way when the forces of anti-freedom start outlawing anything they claim can be used for that purpose. They can outlaw text, drawings, photos - literally anything - if we allow the argument that anything that has the potential for misuse should be outlawed.
Since we, as a society, have accepted that the definition of CP no longer requires children to be hurt, we have opened the floodgates. Anything that a legislator considers icky enough can be outlawed. Anything that offends a prosecutor can get you arrested. Thus, things that were previously just dismissed as being, at worst, in bad taste can now result in people doing jail time. Take a picture of kids in the bath or your 10-year-old topless on the beach while vacationing in Brazil? You're risking your freedom. Use a computer to make a picture of some non-existent person who's apparently short and undeveloped? Same story. All a prosecutor has to do is convince a jury you got some kind of sick jollies from the process of creation and, wham-bam, you're in jail.
If you want to define an exact point in time, you should probably look to the early-1980s U.S. Supreme Court case where a film showing shirtless boys counting money on a bed while an adult male got dressed in the background was found to be CP. Given the overall context of the case and the implication of the film that the boys had just been paid for sex, the court held that neither nudity or sexual activity was necessary for the harmful-to-kids production of child porn. Really, though, it was a long process to get to this point. Short of Barack's oldest girl making a porn vid with her best friend and releasing it to the world, I can't imagine anything that could awaken the general populace to the notion that you really shouldn't call something child porn unless it involves grown-ups physically abusing little kids.
Any broader definition is an invitation to rampant irrationality. Just like we have now.
Parent
Easy fix. (Score:5, Funny)
PROBLEM SOLVED.
Go after God... (Score:5, Insightful)
Since Abraham strapped his son to an altar and was in the process of performing ritual sacrifice on him. Or that naked Moses, that's offensive. God only knows what those three "wise" men really wanted with a swaddling clad Jesus and his virgin (and underage I might add) mother.
If we're going to get the religious right nutters involved, we might as well get the completely involved!
Re:SCOTUS and drawn CP as actual CP (Score:5, Funny)
Rule 34 on the Supreme Court.
Parent
Re:Simpsons porn is child porn too. (Score:5, Insightful)
Ya, real democracy, wonderful. So that a 90% Christian nation can impose its morals on everyone. No, we need to remove blue laws, not give people the chance to make more. Our republic is supposed to be setup so that the majority can't run roughshod over minorities. Democracy is nothing more than codified mob rule.
Parent
Re:Simpsons porn is child porn too. (Score:5, Insightful)
You know what's gonna remove blue laws? Successive generations.
The politicians of today are fighting against two things they can not possibly win against: time, and Big Bird.
Yes, Big Bird.
Most of us here - regardless of country - grew up watching Sesame Street and other children's programs. You know, the stuff that taught us about sharing and respecting others? This is why I believe in 20 years or less gay marriage will not only be the norm nationwide, but it will be common. Big Bird told us not to judge people based on their beliefs, appearance, etc. and by the furry grace of Elmo we listened.
The second enemy - time. People are travelling around the world more and more. Information is spreading and its getting nigh-impossible for the government to control it. I'd say most teenagers think weed being illegal is bullshit. They just tune out the "anti-drug" crap and other lies as if it were their English teacher in high school.
These kids are going to go to high school with other kids who won't have to live in fear of being openly gay, or Atheist, or Muslim, or do or believe whatever they want that doesn't infringe on the rights of others. And one day, these kids will be able to vote. The idiotic laws will be repealed to some degree. It's just a matter of time.
Parent
Re:Simpsons porn is child porn too. (Score:5, Interesting)
Our republic is supposed to be setup so that the majority can't run roughshod over minorities. Democracy is nothing more than codified mob rule.
Tell that to the idiots that think pure democracy is the best thing since sliced bread. I would advocate at least two changes to get us back to what the Republic was supposed to be:
1) Repeal the 17th amendment. Senators should be responsible to the state and not the people, otherwise the US Senate might as well be abolished.
2) Pass a Constitutional Amendment to overturn Reynolds v. Sims [wikipedia.org]. Reynolds v. Sims was a SCOTUS ruling that prohibited state legislatures from drawing districts geographically. So it's ok for the US Senate to be drawn geographically but not for the New York State Senate? WTF was that ruling for other than a urban power grab?
Parent
Re:Simpsons porn is child porn too. (Score:5, Insightful)
It's not the best route, but a violent revolution (global this time) seems to be not far off from coming.
HAHAHAHAHAHA!
Violent revolutions do not happen because a form of information got censored. Violent revolutions happen because a sufficiently large proportion of the populace cannot eat or because a sufficiently large proportion are being repressed (repression in this context means "taken away at night and never seen again", not "prevented from posting what they like in their blog").
Even then it's amazing what people will put up with. Note that Robert Mugabe is still in power, for instance.
Parent
Re:Hmm (Score:5, Informative)
Parent
Re:Hmm (Score:5, Insightful)
It shouldn't matter AT ALL the age depicted. The (Just) reason that child pornography is illegal is to stop the harming of children through its production. Adults have the right and ability to consent to be part of such productions as part of their own free speech rights. Children, almost by definition, do not, and thus their rights are violated when they are used in child pornography.
First in order to be child pornography a child, a real one has to be involved. Cartoon characters are not children and they have no rights to violate. Hand drawn pornography can be considered child pornography if and only if the drawings were done from an actual child model.
Secondly, though this doesn't apply in most cases, it has to be pornographic. Pictures of baby's first bath and similar don't count. Generally there is(and rightly so) less tolerance for what is and is not pornography when children are involved.
The real impetus behind child porn laws that go against those who merely possess or re-distribute the material and do not produce it or harbor those that do, especially once written, drawn, and cartoon porn is made illegal where a child was never involved at all(though if someone is making a lot of written porn they might not be up for jail but a mandatory talk with a psychologist might be in order), is generally to protect those persons' who are pushing for the law sensibilities. Just like segregation protected those same sensibilities by keeping the dark people out of sight, and such laws in the end are only a little less unjust, mainly due to fewer peoples' rights being violated on a generally smaller scale.
Parent