Let me ask you a counter-question. If I am able to draw child pornography so realistically that you couldn't easily tell, am I committing a crime by drawing?
That really depends on the law in the country where you're doing that. According to the law in my country, yes, you are.
None of this actually answers my question though, it's just a separate discussion. I would appreciate an actual answer.
And to address your explicit question, it is far too complex and specific to a given community to answer in any meaningful way here. I can tell you what isn't the answer though: deploying spyware on phones worldwide.
The answer is much more simple than you seem to think it is. Because the law doesn't say it is. I can only go by the law in my country, which is that (loosely translated) 'ownership of any image of someone looking like a minor in a sexually suggestive position' is a crime. Since a drawing is an image, it's a crime. Having an image of someone breaking into a home is not a crime according to law in my country. That's why you can have a drawing of that.
Your question is like asking "why don't I get a fine for driving 60 on the highway, but I do get a fine for driving 60 through a school zone?" Well, because one is allowed and the other isn't.
At somepoint somebody is gonna actually have to tackle that looking at images, especially fake ones, might not only be harmless, it might be safer to let people get release from their fantasies (I'd be curious to see what the research says).
Some day, people will say "Obviously nobody cares if you possess it or look at it, obviously, it's just about MAKING it."
I think this is follow the process of weed (unspeakable horror, "drugs will kill you" in dare, 1-strike expulsion from high-school or college) when I was growing up, yet now legal to even grow.
While I do agree that drawings being illegal might not be in anyone's best interest, that doesn't have anything to do with the questions I asked.
> At somepoint somebody is gonna actually have to tackle that looking at images, especially fake ones, might not only be harmless, it might be safer
I thought I agreed with you for a second, buy "especially fake ones" implies you think that child pornography is actually a good thing. I hope I'm wrong about that.
> Some day, people will say "Obviously nobody cares if you possess it or look at it, obviously, it's just about MAKING it."
Guess I'm not and you really think possession of child pornography is harmless. My god that's depressing.
If you are reasoning from the standpoint that the ownership and trade of child pornography is harmless, yes, then I understand that giving up privacy in order to reduce this is a bad thing. Because in your eyes, you're giving up privacy, but you gain nothing.
Holy cow, that's the worst phrase anybody has ever put into my mouth. That's too offensively disingenuous to warrant any further discussion. Shame on you.
Unless a leap year is positioned unfortunately (probability ~1/4), in which case it's back to being a serious crime.
Who’s talking about surrealistic drawings? We’re talking about actual material in real life, being shared by users and abusers.
To be clear, I’m not supporting surveillance, just stating facts.
CSAM databases can by necessity not contain novel abuses, because they are novel. In fact, filtering by CSAM databases even indirectly /encourage/ novel abuses because these would not be caught by said filter.
Catching CP hoarders does little to help the children being exploited in the first place, and does a lot to harm our integrity and privacy.
If there is no market for it, there might be less incentive to produce any more of it.
Not that I believe we should all be continuously spied by people who merely pinky sweared to do it right and not abuse it.
But that's, I think, tangential - I don't understand pedophilia well enough to say something meaningful here.
- https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB114485422875624000
- https://thehill.com/blogs/congress-blog/economy-a-budget/260...
- http://www.radosh.net/archive/001481.html
> I'm sure you're aware, but when CP collectors are busted, they often have terabytes upon terabytes of CP.
Always appalled me that there is so much of it out there. FFS.
For some reason, it reminds me of when the French government decided to spy on BitTorrent networks for copyright infringement (HADOPI).
Defense & Interior asked them not to, saying that it would only make their work harder.
That some geeks would create and democratise new tools not to be caught downloading some random blockbuster, or even just out of principle, and both child pornographers & terrorists would gladly adopt them in a heartbeat, because while they weren’t necessarily the type capable of creating such tools, they had historically been shown to be proficient enough to use them.
Quite hilarious, when you think of it. Some kind of reverse "Think of the Children".
We still got HADOPI however, and now any moron has access to and knows how to get a VPN.
This is completely untrue, since hoarders tend to often also be part of groups where images of still unknown abuse circulate. Those images help identify both victims and suspects and in the end help stop abuse.
Surely if one takes measures against only existing material, and not production of new, this only encourages appearance of new material.
For evidence you can look up what happened with synthetic cannabinoids, and how much harm they brought.
Without finding the child porn, he would not have been identified and would've victimized many more children.
And, more importantly, material that has been and will be produced through the actual abuse of real children. The spreading of which encourages the production of more of it.
GP's counter is absurd.
This issue came before the US Supreme Court about a decade ago and they ruled that the depiction of a crime is not a crime so long as the depiction can in any way be called "art". In effect, any synthetic depiction of a crime is permitted.
However that ruling predated the rise of deep fakes. Would the SC reverse that decision now that fakes are essentially indistinguishable from the real thing? Frankly I think the current SC would flip since it's 67% conservative and has shown a willingness to reconsider limits on the first Amendment (esp. speech and religion).
But how would we re-draw the line between art and crime? Will all depictions of nudes have to be reassessed for whether the subject even might be perceived as underage? What about films like "Pan's Labyrinth" in which a child is tortured and murdered off-screen?
Do we really want to go there? This enters the realm of thought-crime, since the infraction was solely virtual and no one in the real world was harmed. If we choose this path, the freedom to share ideas will be changed forever.
Images can be illegal if all people are of age, but are portrayed as underage. Many historical dramas take legal advice about this when they have adult actors portraying people who historically married while underage by modern standards. (Ie the rape scene in BBC's The White Princess series.) This is why American porn companies shy away from cheerleader outfits, or any other suggestion of highschools.
This reminds me of a classic Swedish movie I watched, I forget its name, it's made in the 70s and contains upskirt panty shots of an actress who is playing a 14-year-old, along with her exploring sexuality with a same-age male peer. I think the actual actress was around 14 years old too. It made me feel real uneasy, maybe because my parents in law were around, but also because I thought "wait, this must be illegal to watch". In the end, the movie was really just a coming-of-age story from a time when we were more relaxed about these things.
Had not heard that change.
the US arrested some diplomat like guy some years ago for having sexualized bathing suit models underage on a device. all non nude I believe.
I think most of what gp saying is mostly true - some places cartoons can be / have been prosecuted.
Just cuz its on 4chan every day - doesn't mean it's legal - I thought 4chan deletes it all with in 24 hours (?) - so that if they got a warrant to do something about it, it would already be gone before the warrant printed much less signed and served.
However charges are going to vary by jurisdiction - I don't think many prosecutors are trying to get cartoon porn convictions as a top priority these days, but that doesn't mean it couldn't happen.
I don't think gp is accurate in saying that american porn avoids cheer and high for these reasons. the market forces have changed many times over the past so many years and depending on which porn portals one might peruse they will see more or less of cheer and such. With some portals the whole incest titling is used for clickbait - it just depends on the portal, and much of what is not seen on portals is not there because of dmca / non-rights.. not because things aren't being produced and made available elsewhere.
If that's indeed the law in some countries, it is a stupid law that nobody should help enforce.
In Shakespeare's take on the story of Romeo and Juliet, Juliet is thirteen. So this play should probably be illegal in the countries that have such laws.
On reddit, you can't link to written content like stories or fanfiction (words only, without any image files) if any character in your fictional story is under 18 and does anything sexual in the story.
I'm not sure I fully understand how society can be more relaxed with actual pedophiles than they are with cp material.
Personally it bothers me to see the focus around things that gross people out rather than the actual child abuse.
Using complicated language does not make you smart... It just makes you hard to understand. Maybe if you expressed yourself in common language, you'd understand that the points you're trying to make are bogus.
There may be a reasonable counter to this argument but I would not say that OPs position is "bogus" on is face.
If the picture had no grounds to spread, it would likely not have been made—no incentive. As such, the fact that the picture is able to spread indirectly incentivises further physical abuse to children.
Edit: People are unhappy with this refutation, so a second one then. The claim, specifically, is that CP is CA because CP requires CA to happen. So a photo of theft is theft. A recording of genocide is genocide. Clearly absurd. Never mind the context that the pornography in my question is drawn, thus no actual child was hurt.
Edit 2: The point was made somewhere that CP is hurtful to the child that it depicts, and this is obviously true - but only if spread. Therefore, distributing CP should be illegal, but that does not mean that it's justified to scan every phone in the world for such images.
That large percentage is disincentivized when technology that makes it more difficult to spread and/or makes it easier for LE to apprehend owners is implemented.
I never said that there would no longer be any child abuse with these steps, just less of it.
Therefore we shouldn't do anything about it.
While your comment is true, it does nothing to refute anything the previous commenter said. They are completely right. Also the spread of child porn increases the impact on the victim and should just for that reason be minimized.
People have made all of these points before, but I still wonder what the legal and/or practical basis of the law is when the pictures or videos are entirely synthetic.
On another note, I wonder how much of this kind of Apple(tm) auto-surveillance magic has made it into the MacOS.
Yes, exactly.
It may even help prevent child abuse, because it may help pedophiles overcome their urges and not act upon it.
I'm not aware of any data regarding this issue exactly, but there are studies that show that general pornography use and sexual abuse are inversely correlated.
In effect, possessing such material may incentivize further production (and abuse), "macroeconomically" speaking. And I hate that evidently, yes, there is an economy of such content.