Quote:
Originally Posted by Paul Markham
So can you explain how to write into law "only models who look to be under age" ?
The law is written so that it covers all models, not ones that in someones opinion look old enough.
As for clearly documented, well that's simple. If an FBI officer point to an image of a girl and says "Where's her 2257 documents?" He doesn't want to be told in the hard drive file.
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In a 'free country' that prides itself on a justice system where everybody is presumed innocent until proven guilty in a court of law, there is no need for such regulations. In such a country all that is required is a law that says that you can't shoot models under a certain age.
In such a free country, the burden of proof in on the prosecutor. When the police suspects that someone has broken the law, it is their job to collect evidence. The prosecutor then presents this evidence to the court. The defendant gets the opportunity to defend himself. And finally the court (judge, jury,...) decides, based on the evidence presented, whether or not the defendant is guilty.
In such a system, the mere presumption of guilt alone is not enough to convict someone. If a police officer thinks that you committed a crime and has otherwise no evidence whatsoever, no prosecutor is ever going to prosecute you. If the prosecutor would prosecute you based on nothing more than the opinion of a police officer no judge in his right mind would accept that.
If you have a picture of 21 year old model on your site and a police officer visits your site and thinks she looks 17, in such a free country the police officer would need to collect evidence to prove that she actually is 17 years old. The prosecutor would then have to present this evidence in a court of law in order to prove to the court that you committed a crime. In that free country, you have no obligation to prove that you are innocent. You are presumed innocent until proven guilty.
Of course, a smart content provider would always keep some kind of evidence that the model was in fact of legal age when the content was created. However, that still doesn't mean that everyone MUST keep that kind of info.
Now, what happens when you start making laws, rules and regulations forcing everyone to store certain kinds of information to prove they have not violated the law and then force them to store that information in a specific way, is that you turn the whole presumption of innocence principle on its head. Instead of having a situation where the burden of proof was on the police and the prosecutor, you turn the whole thing in to a bureaucratic affair.
You create a situation where people can be punished for not storing the right kind of information in the right kind of way.
Let's apply the same principle to another area:
When you are driving your car from town A to city B and along the road the police catch you speeding, then you broke the law and they caught you in the act. They now have evidence they can present in court.
But what if they suddenly decided that they no longer needed to prove that you violated the traffic laws, but that you from now on need to keep records to prove that you did not violated the traffic laws and respected the speed limits? What if they started requiring people to log their speed/location (using gps)? What if the police could visit your house and demand that you provide proof that you did not speed?