Supreme Court child pornography
 

I don't know if this is good or bad.

Supreme Court Tuesday struck down a
6-year-old law that prohibits the
distribution and possession of virtual
child pornography that appears to --
but does not -- depict real children.

The law had banned a range of techniques
-- including computer-generated images
and the use of youthful-looking adults --
which were designed to convey the
impression of minors engaging in sexually
explicit conduct.

Read the whole ruling
http://www.cnn.com/2002/LAW/04/16/sc...orn/index.html

This is probably a good deal overall. It now doesn't look good for those prosecutors who want, for example, to prosecute people who dress up models to make them look underage. It also doesn't look good for prosecuting non-nude teen sites, either. I think we can take this ruling as the court defending a rather broad interpretation of free speech.

Actually, the court didn't go very far out on a limb here. The law in question was terribly bad, from a vagueness and impossibility to know whether you were breaking it perspective.

Anime provides my favorite example. Them crazy Japanese love to draw pictures of female individuals fucking, which individuals have full tits, pubic hair, and other aspects of physical development common only in fully adult women. Yet these same fantasy individuals are often drawn with childish faces, big eyes, and very slight statures (kid-like sizes) compared to the male individuals fuckin' them.

The law says, a drawn image is criminal child porn if it shows a kid. Do these images show kids? Uh....question does not compute. It's just ink on paper, pixels on screen. Asking whether a "toon babe" is above the age of consent is like asking whether Donald Duck stinks. "Virtual images" (such as computer generated pictures) do not, by definition, have models that have ages -- and yet, the law allowed people to go to jail because a prosecutor and some jurors formed an opinion about the age of a fantasy creation, one which was not based on any model.

Would we accept statutory rape convictions obtained by parading the young ladies involved in front of juries and letting the juries convict if they thought the girls "didn't look" old enough? Hell no, the prosecution has to prove she was underage. But with non-photographic pictures, it was different -- "she looks 14 to me" was enough to prosecute, and convict.

It was a bad law. And anybody who ever pointed a news robot at alt.binaries.pictures.erotica.cartoon without formatting c: afterwards is better off after today's news.

The subject of this thread is misleading. This was a bullshit law that had nothing to do with child porn. It had to do with "virtual child porn", which involved no children, and could have included just about anything.

The adult industy, the movie industy, artists, and all Americans should be cheering the high court's runing on this case.

Once again, by reading his dissent, we get to see what a stupid fuck Rehnquist is.