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Japan Moves Toward Blocking Online Child Porn
crimeandpunishment writes "In the wake of increased international demands that it do something about its legal lenience toward child pornography, Japan is beginning to take action, albeit slowly. Thursday a government task force recommended that kiddie porn sites be blocked as soon as they're discovered, instead of waiting for an investigation or arrests. Making or distributing child porn is illegal in Japan, but possession is not ... and critics have called that a legal loophole making Japan an international hub for child porn."
While child porn is certainly a very terrible thing, the rush to suppress it brings up an interesting point.
we often hear these two arguments:
possessing child porn = supports the industry and encourages further production
possessing downloaded music/movies = damages the industry and threatens further production
If downloading media is such a serious threat to the production of new content that laws have to be introduced to prevent unauthorized sharing, why isn't anyone suggesting that downloading child porn be encouraged to drive the producers out of business?
I guess one, (or both) of the above statements is false. Anyone care to take a guess which?
-I only code in BASIC.-
and searched usenets for childporn. I found it, and then deleted it. Months later my computer was seized by law enforcement because the guy I was renting a room from was under investigation for a completely separate matter.
The deleted cp was discovered and I was charged with posession. No jail time, but did have to work at the local animal shelter for a couple days a week for a couple months. The lawyer bill was about $4,000.
I would probably be much more bitter about the whole episode had I ended up being a Registered Sex Offender. Turns out that in my state the offender registry is reserved for the more serious offenses.
Witches are being hunted down, non-believers are being tortured: it's easy to see all our technological progress and think that we've progressed far beyond the fire and stake.
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If police need search warrants they can find other ways to get them but having a search warrant which only leads to digital copies of evidence of the crime does not actually solve or prevent the crime.
But it sure makes for good PR. Much better headlines to say you've busted hundreds of icky pervs than to say you busted one guy who has a well documented track record of hurting kids.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
That may be true now but not in the early 00's, it was the wild wild east for awhile. They have just set up and moved to their own 2chan-like forums now.
People that seek this out are just as responsible as the people making the content.
I have trouble understanding this logic. Someone who seeks out a picture of a child being abused (say on a free p2p network) are just as responsible as the person who actually abused the child? There's no difference to you? Really?
You can be damned sure that if you were paying someone to make snuff tapes you'd be charged along with the producers.
Maybe, under a conspiracy charge, yes. Yet if you were just seeking out snuff tapes you wouldn't be charged. Or if you just possess snuff tapes. Or even if you pay someone for snuff tapes after the fact. By that logic we could charge people with conspiracy to commit sexual abuse of a child if they were paying for a child to be abused before it actually occurred, and thus our current child porn laws would be unnecessary. Otherwise your analogy is completely false.
I haven't seen any posts here claiming that child pornography is a positive thing. They are just disputing the rationality of penalizing aspects of it.
But again, you're avoiding the question. Do you think a 16 year old taking a sexual picture of themselves should be illegal or not?
You realize that the US had driven the Japanese all the way back to their home islands before dropping the Bomb, right? They were doomed to lose by then regardless.
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
"We're making an appeal today to build a society without child pornography," said Anges Chan, a UNICEF ambassador and well-known media personality in Japan. "We're trying to build a national movement to appeal to the government to outlaw the possession of child pornography."
Agnes Chan... the very same former gravure idol that made a plea for donations to Somali children from her super-gaudy luxury mansion? The one that is famous for ad hominem attacks when complex issues relating to privacy are discussed in the diet?...
She's the Sarah Palin of Japan.
- These characters were randomly selected.
> > And they're smarter than you are.
>
> > Now that requires some serious references, please. Unless you were flamebaiting, of course.
>Actually, according to David Brin (of the 2 Uplift Trilogies), whales and dolphins are only about as smart as dogs. Although how >they got a blue or sperm whale to sit down and take an IQ test is beyond me.
Well dogs, especially house dogs are very intelligent much moreso than wolves - a consequence of the mental stimulation inherent in living with humans. We constantly challenge their minds, force them to learn and solve and figure things out..moreso than some people challenge themselves.
Dogs learn to understand a very large vocabulary, which is all the more impressive when you consider they lack the organs to be able to speak. Speaking and listening is (much) easier than either alone. So to say that is in fact to call them among the most intelligent non human beings on the planet. Pigs are very intelligent too, though I don't think as intelligent as dogs - because (mostly) they don't get that kind of stimulation.
>Anyway, if anyone would be in favor of smart cetaceans, one would expect that he would, so I expect that he bothered to double-check.
LOL, true.
Consider though, Octopi have a brain the size of a housecat and have proven to be very skilled at solving puzzles. Their problem solving skills are at least on part with that of cats, as pets they learn to recognize humans and form a bond, despite being from incompatible parts of the ecosystem, while there was a /. story a while ago about studies showing birds able to learn things which require a part of the brain (in humans) that they do not possess - they must be compensating with other parts.
Intelligence is one of evolution's most generic survival traits and it has evolved independently in many lineages many times (whatever common ancestor humans and moluscs (Octopi are moluscs) have - it was probably no more intelligent than clam is).
So being smart is nothing special. Octopus soup is delicious. So is porkchops. What made humans special isn't inteligence, it's exteligence.
Whales lack exteligence, though they may be showing the beginning stages of what becomes exteligence in time.
Chimps are our closest relatives and we've hunted THEM to near extinction as well... but nobody cares about unique-on-the-planet treesnails in Hawai being wiped out by human introduced parasites.
The truth is - whales are cute to us. To cultures who don't see them that way. They are lunch. We do the same thing all the time. Every human being fawns over lambs and consider them wonderfully cute... yet we also think lamb-ribs is very tasty.
I don't like the idea of whale hunting, but I do recognize that my cultural background and biasses have a lot to do with that. Parent however is attempting to enforce his cultural bias on a culture that does not share it. Whether he is right or not - that NEVER works. If you really want to save the whales, you need a better answer than to ban whaling.
Frankly whale-farming is probably the only practical way (even if you hate the idea of people eating them). Chimps catch baby antelope for food (so much for our vegetarian ancestory), but then they catch monkeys for food as well - apparently oblivious to their kinship.
I am much more concerned with Rhino poaching - there we're dealing with senseless slaughter. It's completely so, the meat and carcass is left to rot, and the only bit they take is proven not to be any use. Living in Africa I remember when the white rhino was critically endangered. We actually became the first country to develop workable methods for migrating rhino's so we could spread them across various national parks, and in so doing had a great deal to do with moving them out of the "Critical" list [note: I am in this paragraph in part quoting something told to me by a game ranger, I make no claims about the absolute factualness, potential oversimplifications or possibility that I remembered a detail wrong - none of those things are important for my point however].
Either way - I think the parent was not to trying to claim that whales are smarter than humans, just smarter than the specific human who posted the GP.
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *