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Comment by Falkvinge | Hacker News Reader

> There's a very important reason only documentation of sex crimes against minors is banned -- there isn't a big market for watching videos of murders.

Ahem.

Fox News, CNN, al-Jazeera, BBC, ...

The market for videos of murders (wartime or criminal) is IMMENSE.

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And despite there being a huge market for depictions of murder thee has as far as I know never been anyone producing a snuff video for the money. People like Luka Magnotta either keep the videos for themselves or upload them for free.

A "market" doesn't necessarily involve monetary compensation. It can be a trivial as "likes", pageviews or peer recognition.

THere is a very real market, possibly bigger than the child porn market. That there are websites dedicated to gore videos is proof of this.

Indeed, I should have been more clear. What I meant that despite there being a huge market very few are encouraged to commit these crimes to satisfy the needs of the market.

The market is mostly based around crmies that would have been happened anyway. There are some exceptions like possibly Luka Magnotta who while he did not do it for the money might have done it for the attention. But people like him a rare.

Distributing videos of criminal acts for popularity does seem to be rare.

However distributing videos of acts of war (or terrorism, or freedom fighting, or whatever you want to call it) for popularity (propaganda) seems to be immensely popular. Youtube and especially LiveLeaks are full of these videos. Everything from IR videos from helicopter gunships blowing up people at night to telephoto video footage of snipers shooting people driving along roads.

In my mind the reason for this is often increasing government transparency and encouraging citizens to be more critical of the government by exposing them to the gruesome realities that most of us don't see often. I think that the hypothesis here is that violent acts or murders committed for the camera is fairly rare, which seems fairly likely based on my observations. I'm not sure though and would be interested to hear from someone with more information.

I think it works both ways. On one hand some videos definitely seem to be published with the intent of exposing the horror of war (Collateral Murder comes to mind), while on the other hand some just seem to be straight up snuff that glorifies the violence.

It is a tricky subject, there probably is not a single correct answer.

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