What about people that make their own kids (I hear humans can do that) and then abuse them? Clearly we should have video cameras in every room to ensure that this doesn't happen.
What if someone, right now, is doing something I don't approve of!? Something must me done!
The issue is whether there is speech that is objectionable, and whether free speech has some sort of nearly universal limit if properly considered (yeling fire in a crowded theater, for example) and whether creating a law-free zone might have unintended consequences.
I don't see how a straw man implying that all laws require draconian enforcement really benefits the conversation. So we let child molesters do as they please because somehow any law enforcement would mean total and constant invasion of privacy? Not sure I follow the leap.
I've also heard pedophiles claim that looking at child porn sates their desire to act out those fantasies, so perhaps fewer children are being harmed? That sounds plausible to me since 'normal porn' works, to some degree, as substitute for sex for many non-pedophiles.
Please reread my posts. I am talking about the bits. The only place where I talked about actual child molesters (child abuse) was to point out a specific false-choice that jrockway put up--that we had to put cameras everywhere to enforce child abuse laws, which really was defeating an argument that no one made--ie, jrockway was the person who brought up actual child abuse, not the bits. He has articulated his position better in other posts now.
Child porn isn't speech, it's evidence -- evidence of a crime that has already taken place. This crime, like other crimes, can and should be prosecuted without any sort of totemic obsession with inanimate copies of the evidence.
In general, censorship of kiddie-porn-as-speech is the greatest favor we can do these criminals. We've already taught them to hide in the real world, and hide well. Now we're teaching them to cover their tracks online.
If a search reveals a video of your child being abused at day camp on the internet, would you want censorship of that video?
jrockway's post below is basically my position as well.
Child porn is illegal because its creation damages the child. Its continued distribution is not the primary problem, the fact that it was created in the first place is. So the solution to child porn is to find it, use good-old-fashioned police work to find who made it, and use the legal system to remove that person's access to children.
No need to break the Internet and restrict free speech for this very-special case. Let's spend the money we want to spend on censoring the Internet on more detectives, so that child abuse can be eliminated!
The same goes for "counterfeit goods" or whatever the DHS used as rationale for seizing domain names. Don't break the Internet; just buy one of the fake watches, ask UPS where it was shipped from, get a warrant, and bust the guys! Right?
(I fear that in the US, though, the problem with child porn is not that children were abused, but that people like something in a sexual way. Consider the person who was mailed a box of comic books that depicted "under-age" children in a sexual context. The government wanted to put him in prison for 15 years. For receiving a box of books.
"Sexting" is another example. It's doubtful that one can abuse one's self, but the government still wants to put people in prison for it.
What I find most amusing is that all people look pretty much alike when naked. I don't understand why naked pictures are such a hot-button political issue. It seems like the government just doesn't really want any depictions of sex [children, adults, tentacles, or otherwise] around at all.
But I digress.)
This wasn't good enough for the RIAA, which shut Napster down completely. This caused the programming community to come up with an un-blockable alternative, and now everyone uses un-blockable encrypted BiTorrent with DHT. If you want something gone, there is nothing you can do short of shutting down the entire Internet.
(It wasn't un-blockable initially, but some greedy ISPs tried to block it, so now it's encrypted UDP instead of cleartext TCP. Now the ISPs can't block it reliably, and they waste their own bandwidth because UDP has no concept of a window size.)
So oops... now it's super-easy for people to distribute child porn, all because the music industry got greedy.
It does not, however, provide any encryption or anonymity for your traffic. All packets are sent in the clear, your real IP address is still shown to all connected peers, etc.; do not rely on an "encrypted" BitTorrent connection to save you from a packet-sniffing fiend because the content you're downloading is not given any extra encryption by an encrypted BT connection, because the connection is not really encrypted in the classical sense, it's just obfuscated so that ISPs can't automatically detect BT traffic and disconnect/throttle/filter. "Encryption" was a bad thing to call BT encryption.