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German Member of Parliament Joins Pirate Party
Political Observer writes "Jörg Tauss, a member of the German Parliament (Bundestag), left the Social Democratic Party (SPD), which is part of the coalition government, and announced that he is joining the German Pirate Party (Google translation; original German article). Tauss resigned from the SPD after all but four of the party's members voted for a new censorship law, which passed the parliament on Thursday. The law, which aims at reducing child pornography, introduces an infrastructure for DNS-based content blocking and is the subject of major criticism from Internet users. In March 2009 Tauss became the subject of investigations by the German police for possession of child pornographic material. He said he had this material only for research as part of his role as a member of parliament. Investigations are still continuing."
the grammar nazi party
we're all doomed to a life of assumed inferiority because we don't apply strunk and white's element of style to throw away comments on a backwater chat forum
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
If the difference between an adult human being and a child eludes you, then perhaps you need to pay a visit to your doctor. Most concerns are rightfully about very young children and not about weather some porn actress really is 18 or 17.
Now, anti-CP laws can get pretty silly, so much is true. I remember a story about a 16 years old boy getting arested for CP possession, because he had naked pictures of his 15 years old girlfriend. And don't get me started on that idiotic judge who concluded that possessing drawn images depicting children was the same crime as actual CP.
You are not looking the act of possession under the right angle through. We've all seen how well anti-drug laws work when only selling them is illegal. If the legal status of CP changes, this will encourage underground rings to produce it (since their "customers" will not be scared of purchasing it) which in turn will increase the number of children exploited. There are many stupid censorship laws that get day to day coverage, but CP has real victims and as such the current system is working as intended. As far as victumless drawn art goes, I don't see why moralfags make such a big deal of it.
We can never purge pedophiles from the dark corners of the Internet, but as long as they keep themselves underground in the various darknets, nobody will make money off it, and it will remain something that only the truely interested and somewhat tech savvy can find. Which is fine, since you can't stop these people, unless government spyware comes preinstalled within the BIOS of every single PC in the world.