That part about child pornography was a bit...weird. Am I misreading it or is the author suggesting children can consent?
The author seems to argue if there are no children involved there's no problem, but notes others argue the images are harmful to view regardless of how they are produced.
There were a lot more people much more ready to publicly make (IMHO terrible) arguments about how a jpg is just a stream of bits, which is a number, and you can't just arbitrarily ban specific large integers. Or about how nobody is harmed if streams of bits get passed around, it's just data, ones and zeroes, that's not harming anyone. Or that the data is encoded, so it's meaningless without a decoder, a different decoder could decode that bitstream into literally anything else.
Fundamentally these arguments were always pretty nasty and meritless. It's images/video of kids being raped, the continued existence and trading of which can be argued to do continuing harm to the victims. The accessibility of this stuff also goes some way to normalise the behaviour and create bubbles in which there is demand for new material, so more kids get abused.
Ideas of children being unable to consent were well established in law and society though, it was only 20 years ago, so that bit about consent does stick out considerably. But again in certain corners of the internet * there were people who would argue about it, you hope theoretically.
( * and not that obscure, pretty sure you could find this sort of stuff in the comments on slashdot back in that sort of time-period)
Contrarianism isn't interesting purely for its own sake, especially in relation to child abuse. And the internet is full of voices who are knee-jerk contrarian for the pure sake of it. Most of what they have to say is meaningless noise.
The only people who think that we should keep busting teens by the truckload for sexting are closeted pedophiles.
“There is little evidence to justify the widespread assumption that willing participation in pedophilia hurts children.” - Richard Stallman 2013[1]
[1] quoted here and elsewhere. Can’t search for the original right now https://thenextweb.com/news/free-software-icon-richard-stall...
Why is it untenable that yes, data is data and it should move freely, and no, children should not be raped and filmed?
It’s a source of continuing harm to the person who has been abused, and it creates bubbles of acceptance which go on to encourage creation of more material.
We have moved past the somewhat myopic “it’s just ones and zeroes” view of this in general, as a society. Actions have consequences, even actions as simple as exchanging a specific large integer with another computer.
I don't think that's what the author is saying. They say that IF any real world kids are involved in the "production" of the video, the image is illegal (have a bad "colour"). Nobody disagrees with that, especially not the author of that blog post. This is contrasted with drawn or rendered images that were created in a computer graphic program.
> Or about how nobody is harmed if streams of bits get passed around, it's just data, ones and zeroes, that's not harming anyone. Or that the data is encoded, so it's meaningless without a decoder, a different decoder could decode that bitstream into literally anything else.
That's exactly what the author is arguing againts - he says that this is a naive interpretation of computer person, that makes no sense to a lawyer (in his words: color is not a function of bits).
I think CSAM is too sensitive topic to use it an example (today, maybe 20 years ago it was different). So my version of that example for 2023: watching and distributing (adult) rape videos is morally abhorrent and often illegal. But porn websites are full of staged rape videos. It's not about the content of the video, but its source (colour).
...that was my explanation of the thought process of the author. As he mentions, not everyone agrees with that interpretation in that context.
But I think it’s either a sincere mistake or a very poor attitude to bring up consent affecting the colour in relation to CSAM, which they explicitly do about a third of the way into the article.
I see what you mean about the "who did or didn't give consent" line. I don't see how "consent" could be a mitigating factor in determining whether or not something qualifies as CSAM.