Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Court OKs child porn prosecution of minors distributing pictures of themselves

washingtonpost.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

81–90 of 315 posts

Re: Court OKs child porn prosecution of minors distributing pictures of themselves

#81

Post by quuquuquu »

cperciva wrote: post #22
quuquuquu wrote: post #2

Everything is a crime in our neo-puritan state. Congrats, two 17 year olds sending pictures of themselves consentually = child porn. What I also couldn't understand from the article: A picture of someone who is an adult, but is /pretending/ to be a minor is also child pornography? What?! Pornhub.com will need to take a hard look at some of its content providers then. Or does it not apply to Montreal based companies?…

Never mind adults pretending to be children. In some jurisdictions, child pornography includes cartoons . In one case, Simpsons fanfic.

Hey, thanks for writing! Love tarsnap and scrypt :)

Just utterly amazing. Hentai is now child porn. How many hentai pictures are stored on Tarsnap??!

Those images might be stored on US servers. Time for you to grant a "backdoor" to the government.

If I was in your position, I would be genuinely confused when trying to juggle all of these regulatory threat matrices :( :(

Re: Court OKs child porn prosecution of minors distributing pictures of themselves

#82

Post by jliptzin »

jfaucett wrote: post #7

What is the rationale behind defining child porn age The first case is something that actually happened to a friend of mine. He was 23 and dating a 17 year old, got convicted, sent to prison, and is now labeled a sex offender for life. Are there any countries out there that take a sane approach to this moral conundrum?

My friend's grandfather was 21 and his grandmother was 15 when they first started dating. Needless to say if laws were as crazy back then as they are now my friend wouldn't exist as his grandfather would have been on a registry and in prison instead of starting a family and a 60 year long marriage.

Re: Court OKs child porn prosecution of minors distributing pictures of themselves

#83

Post by ajmurmann »

dcow wrote: post #54
thanksgiving wrote: post #44

I'll be the bad guy here and say that these laws should all just go away. It is just too convenient to plant "evidence" be it alcohol, drugs, or this. The idea that minors cannot consent is correct. Children are not a scaled small version of adults. They need to develop not just grow physically and children are vulnerable. We need to protect vulnerable members of our society. However, like with so many things in life…

> There's a quote about doing the same thing and expecting different results... It's the definition of insanity. The abortion topic is interesting because we're talking about how we socially define a human life in a realm where science can't help at all (or at least has failed to give a concrete answer thus far). If it was an accepted truth that human life begins at conception, then abortion is murder. Even our laws…

I think the abortion discussion is much easier than its made out. I like Peter Singers approach to ethics which sets the goal to be avoiding of suffering. Now the question is easy: at what stage of the pregnancy can the being suffer?

The entire abortion conversation is completely ruined by most people wearing glasses colored with existence bias.

Re: Court OKs child porn prosecution of minors distributing pictures of themselves

#84

Post by lovich »

bsder wrote: post #74
mediocrejoker wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which is better, to have a few horrifically competent go free or have a few innocent teenagers on the sex offender registry?

That's a really interesting question. I'm always on the side of "convicting innocents is wrong" because I consider it a pure civil liberty issue subject to abuse. However, you are going to have to defend against people doing a "damage amount" calculation. The malicious individuals are so vile and cause so much damage and exploitation while teenage sexting cases are generally sufficiently rare that the calculus probab…

Are adults actively seeking child pornography more common than teens experimenting? If that is true it would be a little disgusting/terrifying

Re: Court OKs child porn prosecution of minors distributing pictures of themselves

#85

Post by bsder »

mediocrejoker wrote: post #56
bsder wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So, child porn is legal as long as both parties are involved? That doesn't work either. All you will wind up doing is having people magically always have only two people involved. And "teen sexting" isn't even uniform: a 10-year-old sexting a 16-year-old is generally a problem while a 17-year-old sexting an 18-year-old likely isn't. Your opponents in kiddie porn are two different sets of people: 1) the egregiously st…

Which is better, to have a few horrifically competent go free or have a few innocent teenagers on the sex offender registry?

You are framing the problem wrongly. The FIRST problem is the existence of the "sex offender registry" AT ALL.

If you get rid of the sex offender registry then the problems around the child pornography laws become far less acute.

Re: Court OKs child porn prosecution of minors distributing pictures of themselves

#86

Post by dcow »

kinkrtyavimoodh wrote: post #66
mjevans wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It'd be so much easier if as a society we agreed that everyone should have healthcare, and that reproduction should be a choice positively made, instead of the default consequence of sex.

While that would help it doesn't 'fix' the issue. Unintended pregnancies will happen and you will need a moral framework to deal with them. There is no avoiding the matter.

I think contraception has gotten quite good. I don't think the edge cases would excessively burden society in a way we'd be unable to manage. I could see a definition of contraception being something that prevents an egg, fertilized or not, from developing. And then we could define abortion as the act of terminating a developing embryo. I imagine if people had universal access to contraception we'd be more socially willing to push the responsibility of using the tools provided (and generally being sexually educated and responsible) back on the individuals involved.

Re: Court OKs child porn prosecution of minors distributing pictures of themselves

#87

Post by etplayer »

retrogradeorbit wrote: post #51
cperciva wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Never mind adults pretending to be children. In some jurisdictions, child pornography includes cartoons . In one case, Simpsons fanfic.

Yes. Australia is one such jurisdiction. http://www.abc.net.au/news/2008-12-08/fake-simpsons-cartoon-...

From the article:

>Justice Adams said the legislation's main purpose was to combat the direct sexual exploitation and abuse of children that occurs where offensive images of real children are made.

If he believes this, then why is he legislating that virtual pornography, in fact even hand drawn, of the Simpsons which bear such little resemblance to real people, never mind actually existing people, is against the law?

>But, he said, it was also calculated to deter production of other material, including cartoons, which "can fuel demand for material that does involve the abuse of children".

Was it really? And if so, does he, or the authors of the legislation, have evidence to back up this claim? This seems to be totally unsubstantiated nonsense this judge is saying. And what of fueled demand? The fact that a drawing or story might make someone else do an action is, in my view (and I hope others can agree) not reasonable grounds for illegalising possession or production of that drawing.

Unfortunately bone-headed cases and legislation like this have graced the rest of the Commonwealth and various European countries.

Re: Court OKs child porn prosecution of minors distributing pictures of themselves

#88

Post by gozur88 »

ddingus wrote: post #55
tristor wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes. In the US being on the sex offender registry has deep negative impacts on getting housing, credit, work, and of course social life. This completely independent of /why/ you're on the registry. A felony does cause some problems getting work, but doesn't really affect anything else.

Actually it does. A majority of housing is no felon. Work is damn tough, and people get paid bottom dollar. In some places you can't vote. A lot of activities prohibit felons too. Being a coach, for example, isn't a walk in the park. And your traffic stops? Ugh. I know this due to a friend stuck with one. Hanging with the wrong people, group case. First offense. It's pretty brutal. In many States expungement isn't po…

Okay, but once you get on those registries you're screwed. Can't live within a certain distance of anyplace a child might be. Schools, parks, day care centers. I remember reading an article about a town in Florida where all the sex offenders were literally living in the same apartment complex because it was the only one left after all the circles were drawn on the map.

And if you think felons have a hard time getting a job...

Re: Court OKs child porn prosecution of minors distributing pictures of themselves

#89

Post by jliptzin »

return0 wrote: post #62
odammit wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Guilty or not could you imagine the rest of his life. At an interview "so I googled you... what's this about the Supreme Court having a ruling over your dick pic, brah" Better start his own business or get to flipping them burgz.

why is a dick pic such a big deal?

Because of religious people, mainly

Re: Court OKs child porn prosecution of minors distributing pictures of themselves

#90

Post by jliptzin »

thanksgiving wrote: post #44

I'll be the bad guy here and say that these laws should all just go away. It is just too convenient to plant "evidence" be it alcohol, drugs, or this. The idea that minors cannot consent is correct. Children are not a scaled small version of adults. They need to develop not just grow physically and children are vulnerable. We need to protect vulnerable members of our society. However, like with so many things in life…

It's horrifyingly easy to frame someone for CP. There are even people advertising on onion sites to frame someone remotely for as little as $300.
Post reply on HN