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Man in Court Over Simpsons Porn
Ever get the urge to look at pornographic drawings of famous cartoon children? Neither do I, but 28-year-old Kurt James Milner did, and that's what got him registered as a sex offender. Police received a tip about the pornographic material and eventually found images featuring child characters from The Simpsons and The Powerpuff Girls on Milner's computer. Back in 2008, a Supreme Court judge in Australia ruled that cartoons in which child characters engage in sexual acts is child pornography. Milner said he downloaded the images to show them to his friend 'because he believed they were funny.' Guess it's not so funny now.
Ridiculous.
This is not what got him registered as a sex offender: he was already registered as a sex offender from a previous case, in which he had been found guilty of actually having child porn (with images of real children) on his computer. The prior conviction is reason for the severe response to the cartoon images. This being the case, his claim that he didn't get sexual titillation from these images rings rather false.
The best part of this story... "Officers discovered the computer would no longer turn on but a year later police forensic experts recovered 64 images of cartoon child exploitation material in the machine’s recycle bin." So, it took officers a year to mount the hard drive in another system, and take a look in the recycle bin.
I guess you didn't read the article, which is no big surprise.
It's his second offense. The first involved real children.
depicting sexual acts with people under the age of 18 years.
Technically, even Maggie is over 18 now.
I am becoming gerund, destroyer of verbs.
Interesting... a cartoon character rises to the level of person now. Whoever knew.. I suppose it is the next logical step.
How do you measure the 'age' of a cartoon character, I wonder.
Is it whatever age the author says it is.... or does the jury have to make some sort of subjective determination based on carefully examining the imagery to make a judgement on the appearance of the images filed as evidence?
With careful consideration as to not be prejudicial against midgets and people who appear much younger than their actual age.
Next step is to extend the law to include imagery depicting violence as well.
And then expand the age a little bit... age under 21 instead of 18.
And then extend the law to include images depicting not just porn and violent acts, but drug usage also
Then extend the age rule a little bit... persons under age 25 instead of 21.
Then expand the scope a little bit... images depicting any crimes or hostile activities at all against such persons.
Then extend the age rule a little bit... persons under 30 instead of age 25.
Then expand the scope a little bit... images depicting or showing anything the least bit offensive to community values to persons depicted.
Then remove the age limit entirely.
Then expand the scope a bit to include anything disruptive to the civil order, government business, or disparaging to authority.
Next make it retroactive, include text, writings, blog posts, opinion columns, as well as images. And anything offensive to even dead people or non-governmental highly-regarded entities. Increase the penalty for some years of confinement to permanent imprisonment, and eventual execution.
Wow, instant censorship (in 10 steps)
I thought the point of harsh laws against child pornography were meant to prevent the exploitation of children. Child cartoon characters are not actual people and thus were not actually exploited. Clearly he should have been arrested for copyright infringement instead.
That's really sad. They sat on the evidence for a year before processing it.
I guess what would be worse would be if they confiscated someone's equipment, sat on it for a year, and found nothing. I'd be a bit pissed if my computers were taken for a year before they found that I had nothing illegal.
My mother-in-law's computer was taken as evidence in a case where a roommate may have used her computer in relation to child porn. They imaged the drive and gave it back the next day. I assume a block by block copy of the drive, so they could try to recover any deleted information. Needless to say, he was quickly invited to not be a roommate any more. This may have been because she wasn't a suspect, but they needed her assistance to look for further information.
Her case turned out out to be nothing except a lapse in judgement that didn't quite cross any legal boundaries (but came very close), and he did nothing on her computer. From what I knew of the case from the investigator and my mother-in-law, the police were perfectly justified in their pursuit of evidence. I had worked on her computer between the time he used it, and the time they collected it to process, so I gave a detailed report of what I had done. Unfortunately, that had been clearing the browser cache and history, scanned for viruses, did some housekeeping, updated a few things, and defragged the drive. They may have been able to recover some things, but it was less likely after my cleanup. I wish they had called a few days earlier, and they may have found something more.
Serious? Seriousness is well above my pay grade.
It's not a 20-year-old picture. It's a new picture of a character that has existed for 23 years. If a new picture of a person who has been alive for 23 years is legal, so should a new picture of a character that has existed for 23 years. The logic is actually fairly sound; if a cartoon character is going to be treated as a person, it must be fully treated as a person, and therefore if the character has existed for more than 65 years, it should also qualify for social security.... Anything less is just absurd. Anything more is also absurd. Indeed, the entire nature of the question is absurd....
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
As an Australian working in Digital Forensics who works in the private sector but worked in the public sector, Law Enforcement Digital Forensics folks are woefully trained in my experience and under-resourced.
This was his second offense but something doesn't really make sense with all of this. If these laws are put in place to protect then why is he not 'dangerous' enough to be taken off of the streets? This is starting to sound like parking or speeding tickets where they just do it to make a point but not really make a difference. It's not like I personally view 'cartoon porn' as something that serious although it is fucked up to get off of anything related to kids but obviously the courts see it the same way since their ruling was not much more than a slap on the wrist. So either the first conviction was too much or the system is all wrong becuase how can you say how much of a sex offender someone is? I would either think you are a threat to society or you are not how can you be kind of a sex offender?
A loop, by its nature, continues. If that didn't make sense, start reading this sentence again.
That was the original intent, yes. The original idea was that children are not fully developed individuals mentally as well as physically and thus need adults to protect them against various things. As such laws were created that say that children can't enter in to a contract on their own. Likewise, it was decided that children lack the understanding to consent to making porn. So it was outlawed to keep adults from exploiting them for that purpose.
However now it has become more or less a witch hunt tool. The laws exist only to further themselves and to punish indiscriminately. Best example is two teenagers who were convicted of sending naked photos to each other. They made no effort to distribute the photos to a wider audience and were both under 18. However, they were successfully tried and convicted on child porn charges and that conviction has since been upheld on appeal. After their prison stay, they'll both have to register as sex offenders.
Clearly such a situation is not designed to protect them from anything. While they may cause themselves harm by sharing nude photos, that harm has already been caused. The harm of going to prison and being labeled a sex offender is far, far worse. So they aren't being protected, they are being punished. There is no point, other than strict enforcement of the existing law.
There is very little sense to what goes on with regards to these laws at this point. It seems to bypass people's ability to think logically and start off a witch hunt mentality.
> What's wrong with sexual titillation from a drawn image of imaginary characters?
You're asking the wrong question, IMO. You should have asked:
"Why is it any worse than pure textual depictions of fictional children having sex?" (which AFAIK is not considered child pornography in most jurisdictions)
Would ASCII art depictions of child-like figures having sex, which are simultaneously textual erotic fiction about children having sex, be considered child pornography?
You could, of course, go in a different tangent and come up with the question:
"Why is a simulated depiction of the sexual abuse of children any worse than simulated depictions of other heinous crimes?" (AFAIK there are no other crimes for which possessing a depiction of them is also a crime. No, wait! Under the DMCA, a depiction of copyright protection circumvention which is sufficiently detailed to aid in circumvention itself could be criminal. Oops, no. Even there, mere possession is not criminal, distribution might be.)
This seems obvious to me, but I'm not hearing it from anyone else, so I'm just going to be the voice of reason here.
Guy downloads real child porn (I'm going to assume deliberately). Get's busted for it, because law makes the argument that he's contributing to actual child exploitation.
- I don't agree with this, but it could be argued
Guy downloads cartoon child porn. Get's busted for it, because law makes the argument that he's contributing to actual child exploitation?
- Hard to argue the benefit to society here.
Only possible explanation: It's been made into a thought crime. They just need proof someone has been thinking sexual thoughts about children. And apparently that's been made illegal.
If a guy tries to abide by a law he got busted for by looking at cartoon child porn instead of real child porn, my first reaction is to support him. Am I crazy?
This guy is obviously a pedophile, the article points out he has a prior conviction of posession of actual child pornography. His defense that the images were just funny is a total lie -- and other people have pointed this out.
The problem I have with this case is that the guy is disgusting, his motives were obvious and so it is very easy to support his conviction. But with Cartoons, it could be argued that there is _no victim_ at all. And as much as I hate pedophiles, and I do - I don't believe that the images, real or cartoon, actually encourage pedophile tendencies.
Images of children being exploited sexually have been banned all over the world because the children have to be protected from those images remaining in circulation for their entire lifetime; images of children being exploited sexually encourage other pedophiles to exploit more children on camera for the purpose of trading images, etc. BUT with the case of a cartoon -- none of these reasons hold true, and more importantly, at best - they encourage pedophiles to draw cartoons of children being sexually exploited which, as i said, doesn't create any victims. Distributing actual child porn may encourage the creation of child porn, but it doesn't turn otherwise normal hetereosexual people into pedophiles. You have to be a pedophile to begin with to even want it.
Now that this guy has been charged, and this is obviously a precedent setting case - it will be easier to charge and dole out harsh sentences for people found posessing cartoon porn even if it is their first offense and they really aren't pedophiles. I mean, cartoons are sometimes funny and in the case of Simpsons porn - I know I've seen a few cartoons featuring Bart and Lisa that were funny and.... at least to me, not sexually exciting at all. I mean christ, they're cartoons.
It seems to me that they've gone after an easy person to hate, with a history of child porn collecting - to blindside people to the over zealous and really very useless law they've just created.
Ace
I guess I need to draw some clothes on my stick figure man just to be safe from now on.
So ... if someone has 20-year-old pictures of a 10-year-old being raped, it's okay because now the child in question is 30?
While I don't see the harm in cartoon-sex, you can't really expect the "but technically $person is over 18 today " defence to work or even be acceptable.
If you can, what's wrong with killing people? Technically they're already dead by the time you get to court over it, and there's no point in crying over spilt milk.
Except Maggie, Bart, and Lisa are not real people. They do not have human rights. They are not children. They are cartoon characters.
Child Pornography is illegal because it violates the rights of the children contained therein -- the right to consent, amongst others. The Simpsons "kids" have no such rights because they don't exist.
Treating this material differently is merely a way to punish people modern society considers "creepy." That's all.
So everyone who owns or has seen the Simpson's movie is liable for child porn? Is it me or didn't Bart go skateboarding naked in the movie, including showing his "talent". If I draw two stick figures in a suggestive manner, is that child porn? How old is a stick figure?
It's bad enough that partial nudity is starting to be considered porn.
The whole idea of "partial nudity" is silly anyway. Anyone who isn't covered from head to toe is "partially nude".
Treating this material differently is merely a way to punish people modern society considers "creepy." That's all.
As we rightly should! If today we allow this, then tomorrow it might be acceptable for fat guys in beards to dress in sailor moon outfits. And when we start to allow that, then humanity's slide into depravity will be unstoppable.
Scientists point out problems, engineers fix them
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I don't get this obsession that people have about breasts.
Could it be you are not a heterosexual male?
All hail the Pedo Finder General!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UvsoVdvtZC4
All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain.
Child Pornography is illegal because it violates the rights of the children contained therein -- the right to consent, amongst others
That's a strong argument against creation, but a weaker one against distribution. (You could still argue that distribution does further damage by embarassing the child, so it's still a valid argument - just not as strong)
Treating this material differently is merely a way to punish people modern society considers "creepy." That's all.
I think you'd find the powers that be phrase it differently. For instance argue that gratification from cartoons leads to or encourages real world abuse.
I'm in 2 minds about this, but I do think we should save harsh punishment for harsh crimes, and destroying someone's life and imprisoning them definitely qualifies as a harsh punishment where as having a giggle at immature cartoon porn that may involve depiction of child characters I find difficult to classify as a harsh crime. People and the laws they make have no sense of proportionality as soon as the word sex is mentioned. The dichotomy of laws like this with prolific sexual material and the legal sexualisation of children through idiotic kiddie pagents and the like is disturbing. It's a sign of a truly sick society that's lost it's way.
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
Tastes and preferences vary from culture to culture and era to era. Go back even a century and whilst breasts were considered erotic then, they were much less eroticised and size less emphasized. Go back a couple of centuries more and they were hardly eroticised at all (in a general sense). A couple of centuries before that, and breasts were eroticised again. We can roughly infer these sorts of things from changes in costume style, art from the period, etc. At other points in time, shoulders and necks have been eroticised, legs and, rather a lot, bottoms.
Anyway, you can be straight, male and attracted to girls primarily by things other than breasts. And if you are, the media fixation on them may well seem a little perverse. There are loads of girls you find attractive all the time who don't particularly have large or pronounced breasts. They're just, you know, pretty.
Aide-toi, le Ciel t'aidera - Jeanne D'Arc.
When I think about this issue, I come to the conclusion that the real reason for simulated depictions of sexual child abuse being criminal is something which no judge would ever admit to: society wants to criminalize people who are sexually attracted to children, even if they have never committed any such crime, and because of their psychological makeup are even unlikely to ever commit such a crime in the future, because society is afraid of such people.
All this "slippery slope" BS is just beating around the bush. My guess is that simulated child pornography will continue to be illegal even in the far future when it will be trivial to produce, so trivial that only the very, very stupid would consider producing it using real children (assuming, of course, that the only goal involved is the production of the pornography; I'm not talking about the case where a pedophile wants to film his illegal acts).
BTW, your argument that he's a horrible poster child seems weak. His first offense was for actual child pornography, rather than simulated child pornography. If anything, he seems to be slowly climbing up that slippery slope.
Maybe they only found the cartoons, but...
But what? But he may or may not still be thinking about that stuff? But he may be thinking about raping a kid? But he might go to a public school and rape a class room? Your assuming the worst about someone based on a single conviction. Maybe he is totally perverted or maybe he was just mildly curious and happened to get busted.
Basically I see this like a guy that was busted for smoking pot and now he is being arrested for smoking a cigarette because it's kind of similar.
It mentions that the first offense was of actual kids. That means it was real kiddie porn.
My parents have old pictures of me as a kid, taking a bath. Should they go to jail?
It's idiotic beyond belief to think that nude pictures are by default harmful or exploitative. It's like saying that, since guns are harmful, pictures of guns must also be harmful. If my government decided to make it a crime to own pictures of firearms, it wouldn't surprise me a bit - it would be perfectly in line with the policies they've been following.
Yes, child-porn can be harmful. But there is a world of difference between pictures which depict simple nudity, and ones which depict child abuse. Not only do many governments not distinguish between these, but they apparently don't distinguish between reality and fantasy, either. They seem to feel that it's ok to arrest people for drawing a cartoon. When the Chinese do that, we rightly criticize them for oppressing their citizens; when we do the same thing, well ... it's For The Children!
How can any thinking person defend these types of policies?
Yes but considering how truly insane the laws have gotten now I wouldn't trust TFA. Does it say what ages these kids were? I know here in the US they can be 17 years and 11 months and you would still get treated like they were 5, even if you had no way of knowing. And of course we have bullshit like this were we are talking about ink on paper, no actually kids involved.
To me this kind of horseshit just cheapens the charge against those actually involved with really kiddie porn crap, because we have all heard stories like this, of the law going totally apeshit, that you have no idea if the person was busted for something real or "save teh kidz!" horseshit. We here in the US need to throw out any politician who pulls this "save teh kidz!" bullshit and bring sanity back to our laws. Hell the way the laws have gotten so fucked up you could have nothing but over 18 porn and STILL go to to jail because some judge decides it "looks lolita" and gets you for simulated CP. This shit is gone past crazy three exits back folks.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
So essentially, they wanted to throw the book at him and this was all they could find, and it happened to artificially fit the definition of a law that is really only randomly enforced. The guy may be a perv, but he did his time and this is no reason to put him away.
Religion is what happens when nature strikes and groupthink goes wrong.
I also don’t. Maybe because I god a extreme helicobacter infection from my mother’s milk back then, resulting in having horrible stomach pain and heartburn, whenever I sucked those breasts.
There are other things that I find far more sexy. A sexy hip or neck, a barefoot girl, a fitting perfume.
Oh, and that here in Germany, we can see tits every day, in advertisements, on TV, etc. We have no retarded “nipplegate”. Because it’s nothing special. So you focus less on them, and more on other things.
I wish you could come to a south European beach in the summer. You will be practically guaranteed to see some sexy bare tits. :)
On the first day you’ll get a boner. On the second you will say wow. On the third you will yawn.
Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.
Maybe it's drawn too poorly, but this is an actual depiction of Bart and Lisa engaging in taboo acts of a sexual nature!
>+o
>+o
the sad part is that I am posting anonymously because.... what if?
Is it just me, or does that guy bear more than a passing resemblance to Comic Book Guy?
Also, talking about Simpsons porn, will Australia make the London 2012 Olympic logo illegal?
You can't win Darth. If you mod me down, I shall become more powerful than you could possibly imagine
and on the fourth day you'll see two fat grandmothers jogging.
Then you will be scarred for life.
You will not watch Baywatch.
ever again.
ever.
People who have children are aiding and abetting child pornographers by producing potential child porn models. They indulge in home porn shows when they bathe their children and offer provoking glimpses of young flesh when they flaunt their kids at the seaside. Outrageous!
Well, I don't see it like that, but with the aid of a twisted mind, I can see how the folks who want to ban cartoons of children might be working towards that conclusion. The ban and control brigade are just as sick as the paedophiles they claim to abhor.
So why don't they make it illegal to possess a picturing of any crime being committed, even if the portrayal is completely fictional? Like, I dunno, people beating up, or killing other people. That should be completely eradicated from movies now, don't you think?
Sheesh...
Sig erased via substitution of an identical one.
Someone who --makes the concious choice to take a drug-- is also --making the concious choice to act under the drug's influence. Therefor, ANY crime they commit "while under the influence" is a concious, willing act.
This "aww poor them, they were ADDICTED, so they HAD to beat their grandma to death" is a load of crap.
Drugs should be entirely legal, with the simple premise that --if you CHOOSE to take them, your actions while 'under the influence' are also part of that CHOICE, and punishable as such.--
Sorry for the rant, but this is one of my biggest pet-peeves; people should damned well take responsability for what they do.
That requires other people or at least communication beyond the room.
Try again.
You can become a criminal without ever sending any of those sheets beyond that room.
It's ok. They're actually 1000 year old zombies, so it's not CP at all.
Seriously. What the hell? The anti-pedophilia laws are there to protect children from harm, particularly from people in a position of trust or influence. That's eminently reasonable.
How does a cartoon - however tasteless - have anything to do with that?
You could impale yourself on the pen. Attempted suicide is illegal in some places.
"linux is just DOS with a UNIX like syntax" -- Galactic Dominator (944134)
So they didn't find anything, and based on their findings:
1. You effectively punished your room mate (forced relocation) on the grounds of an assumed conviction.
2. You feel guilt that you aided and abetted your room mate because you assume your room mate was going to be convicted.
Why do you feel that someone asking if a crime had been committed means the crime was committed?
It may feel uncomfortable to interact with someone who's been accused of something, but accusations and trial by public humiliation come pretty cheap these days. Accusations don't require verification that any act actually happened, but if you make them loudly enough, you'll scare enough people into providing the punishment without any sort of due process. Your former room mate may be found guilty in the course of time; but, if said room mate is exonerated you are guilty of punishing unjustly. Since your punishment came before it was possible to know that it was appropriate, you are definitely guilty of using your brain as a fear stimulus response machine instead of an instrument of reasoning.