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Australian Judge Rules Simpsons Cartoon Rip-off Is Child Porn
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.
During The Simpson's movie, it showed Bart's junk while he was skateboarding. Does this mean the movie depicts Child Porn?
The greatest revenge in life is massive success.
This is totally insane. There is a thread over at Whirlpool about this: http://forums.whirlpool.net.au/forum-replies.cfm?t=1101155 A child has not been abused. The rational behind the child porno laws is to prevent children from being abused... Or so I thought.
Technically, all the characters are over 18 by now, whether or not they're drawn that way.
Without certified birth certificates, I wonder how they determine the legal ages of the "children" in those images?
If "She looked old enough." isn't a valid defense, then "They don't look old enough." cannot be a legally valid position either.
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However it was also to deter the production of other material, including cartoons, that could "fuel demand for material that does involve the abuse of children".
This is the same question you can find in discussion about violence in games: will it fuel a natural tendency or will it serve as an escape valve?
When a goverment makes laws that can not be enforced, people lose respect for not only the law, but the goverment itself.
This means that any figure, that some judge deems is drawn to represent a person under the age of 21, must be considered juvinile. Therefore, if this drawing is doing something that may be construed as 'adult' in nature, the drawing is now up to the judge's intrepretation as to the age and content of the drawing.
And people are supposed to sagely nod their heads and say "ye wise man, thou knowest my inner-most thoughts and thy punishment is just".
As a note to myself, henceforth all my stick figures will sport mustaches (yes, both male and female stick figures). The beard on the females will indicate that they are post-menopause - just to be safe.
So how long before Anime is child porn down there? Oversexed adolescents are the typical fare so it probably is fodder for these guys. It really sounds similar to the case involving the suicide we had recently, the law just HAD to do something because it was "OBVIOUSLY" wrong to begin with. In other words, law based on the whim of a government employee.
It is a cartoon, no one real was harmed, so now inanimate objects have rights or is that entirely dependent on what they represent? I mean, can you get busted for making a parody where the statue shits on the bird? After all its "naughty bits" might be showing.
Who would have thought the real prudes wouldn't be over zealous religious players and instead dowdy old government goons
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
I'm sure that the children who are actually being abused around the world are enormously happy that at least their favourite cartoon characters are safe.
I'm sorry if that's a little too cynical, but don't these people have important things to do?
no it doesn't make you a pedophile for seeing something online, if however you liked it and wanted to try something similar with a under age boy or girl, then that would make you a pedophile.
-Ours is the wisdom of Solomon, the magic of Merlyn, the fall of Icaris.
You bring up a good point, Bart and Lisa are clearly depicted as children, in spite of being decades "old". But what about all those Manga girls? Are they 18 (or whatever is legal where you are at)?
Stupid ruling, and one that easily can infect other nations for no reason other than it sounds like it "protects the children".
"Justice Adams said the purpose of the legislation was to stop sexual exploitation and child abuse where images are depicted of "real" children.
However it was also to deter the production of other material, including cartoons, that could "fuel demand for material that does involve the abuse of children"."
Firstly, child pornography is generally produced by people who wish to profit from such material or trade it with others. The belief that non-commercial demand encourages production is based on the assumption that child pornographers produce such images to distribute freely, which clearly contradicts claims that child pornography is a multi-billion dollar industry.
The idea that viewing child sex cartoons encourages child pornographers to abuse actual children takes this argument to an even more ridiculous level. If someone can download child sex cartoons in order to get their fix, they are less likely to download real pictures of children. If commercial child pornographers make an increasing amount of money from child sex cartoons, they're more likely to draw cartoons than use real children. If there is an increasing demand for cartoons amongst people who trade child pornography, those who produce images for trading will be more likely to draw cartoons than use real children
There is no mechanism by which viewing child sex cartoons can lead to real children being used for child pornography; this is yet another example of blind moralism being placed above the welfare of children.
"To the future or to the past, to a time when thought is free" ~ Nineteen Eighty-Four
thoughtcrime.
I really am scratching my head over England and Australia. It almost seems like they see the US going down a path and are racing each other to beat us to the end.
"As God is my witness, I thought turkeys could fly." A. Carlson
What is the argument against drawings of child porn? That showing the act is as much criminal as the act itself?
Then why are action movies legal that show killing people? Is it less criminal to show how to kill someone than it is how to rape someone? Is it me or is this logic a wee bit flawed? It's legal to show how a person is getting disembowled, with blood and guts flying while a chainsaw rips through their body (yeah, of course special effects, but hell, that's REAL people acting, I'm not even talking some splatter anime/manga here!), but it is illegal to draw something?
Could anyone explain to me the logic behind that? I'm sorry, I don't get it.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
There have been two big news items about child porn regulations 'gone wild' recently - this, and that business in the UK about images on Wikipedia. It was hard to trump the UK's absurd regulation, but Australia did it!
I'm absolutely against "child pornography" for reasons that I think I share with many others. However, that term is clearly very broadly interpreted.
The reasoning for child porn regulations is pretty reasonable:
Since most people agree with 1., we should prosecute those who produce and sell overtly sexual images of real children. If we just consider 1., I think it's fairly straightforward to delineate between acceptable and unacceptable images; pictures of children taking a bath or running around naked (which children do, and which parents find charming for some reason) were clearly not taken in circumstances where children were exploited.
Point 2 is where the more broad regulations come from. Perhaps there are people who would be sexually aroused at seeing an image of a child bathing, even if the picture has the most innocent of connotations. I would argue that we need to deal with the disturbed individuals in this case, not parents recording their childrens' lives.
With point 2 in hand, regulators can really go nuts - who's to say what will sexually excite an individual? Pictures of fully-clothed children playing, pictures of aspiring dancers in tutus, pictures of children's shoes, where is the line? Is there some critical number of people who have to be sexually excited to make the image illegal? Even if that is solid reasoning (and I don't think it is), how do you measure that?
I think the important thing to keep in mind is point 1 - we know that the creation sexual photographs of (real) children exploits children, so we must prevent it. Point 2 must be treated with care; we shouldn't abridge our liberties to create content just because there are mentally ill people who would use said material as a call to action. We should be devoting our resources to helping such people.
Another example of lazy, ineffectual government.
njord
He could have been fined A$0.01 and it would still be a very bad thing.
It's the precedent in this case and not the punishment.
(And they say CHILDREN can't tell fantasy from reality. Apparently we now allow judges with a child-like intelligence.)
If cartoons can be considered people, and the laws apply to all people, can cartoon makers be charged with murder for killing off a character? Can Warner Bros. be charged with assault and battery? What about Bugs Bunny or Wile E. Coyote? If one produces a cartoon depicting a rape, can one be charged with facilitation?
This is an incredibly stupid ruling.
There is no "-1 offended" or "-1 you don't agree with me" mod options for a reason.
The difference between art and porn is interesting. The True Teen case out of Utah illustrated it clearly. (I'm at work, so I can't Google for links and details. Feel free to fill in, folks.) In that case, the defendant, a photographer with a web site selling sexy but clothed pics of girls, won in a slam-dunk after the evidence showed that he did not produce the material for his own sexual gratification, an essential element of the crime under the law in that state at that time. IOW, he won because he was able to prove his state of mind to the court. (The details are probably unique...Wish I had links.)
Later, on his web site, the photographer published an essay in which he opined that he could take far more revealing photos and sell them for far more money IF he were to sell in book form, rather than online. His point was that online sales of the material at a reasonable price to the masses meant that the knee-jerk reaction of LEA was that it couldn't be art. Art is expensive; his stuff wasn't. Art is a tangible thing that you hang on the wall or put on a bookshelf; his product didn't fit the profile. Art is printed on paper or something flat and doesn't require electricity; his was just light emitting from a monitor.
He is of the opinion that he could put *anything* (almost) in an expensive, coffee-table-style "art" book and sell it without harrassment. However, he feels that even the most innocent content, if sold online, was a risky business.
I agree with him. I have a copy of Larry Clark's beautiful book "Teenage Lust" in which he reproduces several photo and text essays on growing up, running with the gang, getting in trouble, and getting laid. (I hope I've got that title right; it's been years sinice I looked at the book.) If the thing were a web site, Clark would be in jail for life. But I paid ridiculous money to get it at an internationally-famous art exhibition and it's a BOOK instead of just a computer file. No way anyone is going to get prosecuted over that; the few times that bluenoses have famously tried, they've failed. Sally Mann, David Hamilton and others have been harrassed and have re-located or changed their art, but none of the high-profile investigations of serious artists over the last 30 years (that I'm aware of; please tell me if I'm wrong) have actually resulted in anyone being convicted of this crime.
The lesson for pervs? Just brazenly publish your work in high-quality books with high prices. That should be enough to shield you from any charges.
The lesson for the rest of us? The laws in this area have hinged on thoughtcrime for far longer than most people realize. All pictures of kids are illegal if the prosecutor can convince a jury you got some sick jollies from them.
I have no idea how to protect against that. Burn your family albums, I suppose.
Well, dunno about Australia, but it _might_ be in the UK which beat them to the finishing line when it comes to criminalizing stuff that might look like the real thing. To be fair, though, they didn't stop at child porn. You can also go to jail for "extreme porn", if I understand that right.
Still, you bring exactly the kind of example that I had in mind. And it's not just a matter of portrayal, I guess.
I had a classmate through high school and college which looked a _lot_ younger than she was, and the diminutive size probably didn't help that distinction either. By the time she finished college and got married, she looked like she was just hitting puberty.
So, obviously she was old enough to marry and have sex (unless a big star appeared in the east when she got pregnant;) But I'm getting the idea that in a few places around the world her husband could probably get in trouble if he has a picture of her naked on his hard drive. And may the elder gods help him if he filmed himself having sex with her. Because she _looks_ like a child.
Where does one draw the line when it comes to what it _looks_ like, anyway?
Because it happens in the other direction too. Some girls look older than they are. E.g., Tracy Lords obviously didn't trip anyone's suspicions when she claimed to be 18 and starred in a porn movie... at the actual age of 15.
So let's say you have a picture of an 18 year old on your hard drive and fly to Melbourne or London. Well, it could also _look_ like a very precocious 15 year old. I mean, she could be 15 and just look like 18. Maybe you're pretending she's 15 in your head. (Well, _you_ probably aren't, but just making a point about such confused laws.) How do they know you aren't? If the purpose of the law is to prevent demand for underage porn, how do they know if after pretending some 18 year olds in pornos are 15 and precocious, you won't progress to actual pictures of 15 year olds? It's at least a theoretical possibility.
Criminalizing what something _looks_ like, seems to me like a really slippery slope, when there's so wide a range between what someone is and what they look like.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
why stop here. I've got book after book on my shelf where fictional characters are killed!
More to the point if you really want to draw attention to the 'wtf' currently underway, possibly we should direct our law enforcement officers to your national art gallery. Undoubtedly plenty of naked underage flesh on display there (in fact just has to appear underaged, so not even that much of a stretch) - hey, who's to say you're not aroused by cherubs anyway?
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Do hope none of you think my stick-people look a bit on the young side - hate to have my front door kicked down and be put on 'a list'
Yeah this is getting ridiculous. We need to go back to the ROOT reason why child pornography is illegal: - to protect real children/teens from being raped by adults
Therefore we also ban images of child sex because we don't want to distribute the imagery of said rape. But is a child harmed when they pose nude (like Vanessa Hudgens self-portrait)? No. There's no rape. Is anyone harmed by a cartoon or CGI of children? No. Again, there's no rape.
If there's no victim, there's no crime.
The government is not your daddy. Its purpose is not to raid middle-class neighbors' wallets and give it to you.
And there is the fallacy of all child pornography laws. Women hit sexual maturity around 13-15 and according to the law hit mental capacity to give consent at 18. There is an entire genre of porn where women of legal age who look much younger than they are pose nude for men.
Men find the unadulterated idea of women attractive since they can believe they are virgins(google "teen virgins" if you need proof). Another issue with censorship laws like this is that its impossible for a man to look at a picture of a woman and know with any certainty how old she is. You can dress up an 18 year old to realistically make her appear 12, and you could probably realistically dress up a 14 year old to look 18. Theres no way to know. To illustrate this conundrum, consider these scenarios:
A 15 year old girl poses nude but the photograph has a photoshopped head of of an 18 year old. Is it immoral to look?
A 18 year old girl poses nude but the photograph has a photoshopped head of a 15 year old. Is it immoral to look now?
What if all these numbers were reduced by 5? Immoral now? Quite obviously, but in the two scenarios above the answer isn't at all clear cut. In the second scenario, this must be illegal since there is copious amounts of this type of pornography scattered across the web. Simply google "Miley Cyrus nude" for proof.
Any argument that a cartoon which includes no photorealistic elements is child pornography is faulty. Since the laws were designed to protect children, and there was no children harmed, this merely exemplifies a flaw in the law.
You can't legislate goodness. Let each to his own destiny, by will of his freely made choices.