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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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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 don't think there's ever been a study done proving such a link.
It would be an interesting study, no doubt, but it sounds like there's a chance that it would go against "accepted wisdom," which means said study would never be done, or would simply be ignored.
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.
Distribution of (real) child pornography is still a very bad thing. Aside from the trauma to the child (which is big thing in and of itself), you can make a supportable argument that distribution encourages production.
Now as to artificial work, there are a number of problems. For one, no child has been harmed by it. For two, it can be very subjective what is porn and what is not. Just because someone gets turned on by a picture, it doesn't mean it is offensive or pornography. Unfortunately, this latter seems to be the way UK law now handles something. A film like Let the Right One In from Sweden shows a girl of around 13(?) naked from the waist down at one point. It's in no way porn - it's scary. But someone might like that and then it becomes pornography? Terrible principle for determining things. Or look at the kerfuffle about the cover to the Scorpions' Virgin Killer we had a year ago in the UK. Determining whether an artificial work is porn or not is of itself a very difficult thing. A recent UK law however, was explicitly stated during its implementation process as 'allowing the police to lock up people they wanted to lock up if they couldn't find a way to prove something'. I kid you not - the comment was made in the House of Lords as one of the purposes of the law.
But the final question about artificial child pornography is whether it increases the likelihood of real offenses against children. I think if someone is attracted to pre-pubescent girls (and that's another thing - a girl of seventeen is "child pornography". Are they serious? It might be best not to allow pornographic images / films of her all over the place because she probably is too young to make informed decisions about these things, but to imply that it's wrong to find her physically attractive? At that age, a girl is biologically screaming sexual attractiveness! You might not find her attractive after half an hour of seventeen year old conversation mind you, but that's a different matter.
What will get really creepy is when technology progresses further and the artificial porn gets much more realistic. But the principle will remain the same. I imagine it will ignite just as much bad legislation though, because I agree with one of the GPs that the motivation is probably less about actual harm (with the cartoons), than it is with social ostracism. Anyway, what about the UK 2012 Olympics logo? It clearly resembles Lisa Simpson giving a blow-job. Why hasn't this sick filthy been banned?
Aide-toi, le Ciel t'aidera - Jeanne D'Arc.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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)