---------- Forwarded message ---------- Date: Wed, 13 Aug 1997 08:07:47 -0700 (PDT) From: Declan McCullagh <declan@well.com> To: fight-censorship@vorlon.mit.edu Subject: "Leotards and the Law," morphed child porn lawsuit, from Netly --- http://pathfinder.com/netly/opinion/0,1042,1287,00.html The Netly News Network (http://netlynews.com/) August 13, 1997 Leotards And The Law by Declan McCullagh (declan@well.com) Take an erotic photo of an adult and alter it in Photoshop to look as though he was a minor. Would you be breaking the law? A federal judge in San Francisco ruled yesterday you would be, rejecting a court challenge to a 1996 law banning computer-generated erotic images that "appear" to be of children. U.S. District Judge Samuel Conti ruled the adult film industry, which brought the suit and argued no simulated minors appear in movies, shouldn't feel threatened by the law. "Plaintiffs' products do not fall into these categories," he said in a 16-page decision that upheld the Child Pornography Prevention Act as constitutional. Plaintiffs challenged the law as vague and overbroad, saying it "criminalizes forms of expression in violation of the First and Fifth Amendments." But Conti skirted the more controversial question: What if someone did use Photoshop to synthesize images of half-naked children? Would that bit-twiddling violate the First Amendment's guarantees of freedom of speech? What about an anthropology professor's computer-generated movie of the sex play of South Pacific teens? "This ruling resolves nothing of consequence," says Eric Freedman, a constitutional law professor at Hofstra Law School. "The judge never reached the real problems of the statute. That'll have to wait for another lawsuit." [...]