I can understand individual sites taking down such images, but anything further seems like overreach.
All matter and objects can be broken down into a configuration of numbers (of electrons, protons, etc.). Either possession of things can be illegal or not. To exempt "digital" things will be less and less a clear line as technology advances (3d printers and, presumably, eventually "replicators"). I don't know the answer, but "they're just numbers" doesn't help us solve these difficult questions.
A gun is just iron and various other metals arranged in particular configuration and yet we don't have a problem regulating metals in that manner. Bits are just bits until they're in a configuration that is illegal under current law.
Maybe the law should be different, but saying "it's just numbers" isn't very illuminating, imo.
Reductively, a gun is a pile of atoms, like everything else, but unlike child pornography, it has the capability of acting upon the material world.
And I still think enforcement of these laws should be absolutely draconian. This isn't a victimless crime: real lives are being absolutely destroyed. It's not like legalizing weed where suddenly you have a lot of people using it openly and responsibly. There is no acceptable degree of child rape that we can tolerate in society.
I'm 100% with you if we were talking about file sharing. I'm 100% opposed to you on this specific subject.
Just like videos of people being graphically murdered, for instance. I'd put 3guys1hammer up with anything else on the internet in terms of "should not exist", but that doesn't mean I think it should be illegal to possess/distribute/view.
Your primary care doctor can treat you for Anthrax, and you'd likely be fine. The only difficulty in 2001 was that individuals were in contact with it that didn't realize, and mistook it for a common cold or flu.
Edit: The motivation of that attack was the fear, not the deadliness. In 2001 only 5 people died, and only 17 were infected. As we've seen, a single gunman can do a lot worse without requiring special training or equipment.
While I do think concern about over zealous enforcement is warranted, and opens up potential for abuse (e.g. embedding illegal content in other files to troll or extort people), I don't object to the principle behind banning it even if it is "certain configurations of numbers".
When there is a market for something, that will result in more of it. And, you can’t generally make child porn without children.
It’s not a huge logical stretch to suggest that some content ought to not be legal, especially when the participants are unable to legally decide if they want to participate. Banning child porn isn’t the slippery slope to full censorship as it is often portrayed as. There should be some common sense involved. Banning child porn doesn’t lead to banning political speech or even distasteful speech, societies should have some limits on speech and I would suggest that child porn would be will within reasonable limits and not necessarily leading us down a road of total censorship. Plenty of legal freaky stuff out there that it seems reasonable to exclude children from the mix.
In fairness, the only point of this would be a more purist implementation of freedom of speech, but well, the status quo is rather pointless too.
So, we should ban not only production, but third-party possession or distribution of any photography/video depicting either results of crime or the actual commission of crime, because it creates a market for crime?
We also know that the idea these images are out in the world is something that causes trauma to the victims.
It's pretty easy to make the opposite argument, in fact. People want access to CP, either because they're sick, they're in the age range in question, whatever, and so they go to the only place that has it available - darknet sites that require OC to view. So they go out and create more to gain access, harming kids.
Right now, the way to gain access to CP is to create CP, which of course incentivizes creating more. This is arguably worse than the world in which it's available to all.
This is false; there are plenty of free websites, and people who leak "pro" content on those websites. I'd like to see some statistics on paid versus unpaid content, and whether abuse is actually incentivized just to gain access to more. As far as I know, the research on this topic is conflicting.