http://www.wired.com/news/news/politics/story/5153.html
Making Imaginary Sex Illegal
by Ashley Craddock
So maybe it shouldn't be surprising that Congress has made it a criminal offense to depict non-obscene, sexually explicit material involving anyone who "appears to be" a minor. Maybe it shouldn't be surprising that it made it a criminal offense to advertise materials in any way that "conveys the impression" that minors will be sexually depicted.
But what about the fact that Congress explicitly designed the law to make computer-simulated child porn illegal?
If "computer-simulated" images are legal, how can you tell that it is computer simulated? Everyone will then claim to be a talented artist, or use reverse aging algorithms on adult porn photos, or just use enough obvious features on a real picture to show computer alteration. Or, simply have a CG artist render the live scene? Which category would that be? JPEG is a lossy compression technique - would that alteration to a photograph be considered "computer simulation".
As the case has evolved, the government has moved toward the stance that it didn't really mean to outlaw sexually explicit images of young adults who might look like kids. What it meant to do was protect the world from explicit kiddie morphs.
If anyone watched the original hearings, this is what they were discussing as the problem with the original definition. I forget the specific legalese, but if one face was pasted on a different body, for some reason it ceased to fall within the old definition, making it very easy to create "legal" child-pornography. Of course courts regularly ignore legislative intent. Congress is notoriously bad at coming up with good legal definitions, and I was bothered that they didn't simply include "computer-altered" images in the existing definition instead of a complete redifinition of "anything that appears to be". I hope the existing law is overturned as being too broad so that the narrower definition can be passed. But to return to the cypher aspect, what about altering existing images so that they are unidentifiable as to whether they are from real acts or truly the products of an imagination. Will we now need someone from the government to certify the kiddie porn isn't real? --- reply to tzeruch - at - ceddec - dot - com ---