Comment by dragontamer | Hacker News Reader

Comment by dragontamer | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

You'd be surprised.

The exact line gets blurry with various media. Kim, the female protagonist in the Broadway Musical "Miss Saigon" is a 17-year old whore. There's implied sex, as well as multiple stripper-dances throughout the musical to hammer in the sexual issues that Kim faces.

Something like Miss Saigon is allowed and not CP (despite being below the age of 18) because of cultural significance and whatnot.

There are clear cut cases of CP of course. But when musicals / movies / various media toy with the idea of 16-year-old or 17-year-old girls who are exploring their sexuality... where do you draw the line? What should get censored?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lolita

Lolita the novel + movie also gets brought up a lot. As it is explicitly a story about a middle-age man exploring sexuality / erotic elements with an underage girl. It toes the line and never becomes sexually explicit, but its clear from the context what the novel is pushing.

>because of cultural significance and whatnot.

No, because Miss Saigon is a fictional piece of work, as is Lolita. Committing a crime in a piece of fiction is obviously not equivalent to actual child pornography, just like showing an action movie isn't equivalent to footage of actual violent crime.

There is no blurry line here. Child abuse and child pornography are clearly defined terms. Justifying child abuse in a novel might be morally offensive, but is not a crime, abusing an actual child however, and publishing footage of it, is.

> Child abuse and child pornography are clearly defined terms.

How well defined are they really? People have gone to jail for possessing cartoon imagery that depicts children in a way that is deemed pornography under child pornography laws. That does not match your definition of abusing an actual child and publishing footage of it. Such imagery is entirely fictional and seems closer to a story in a novel than a physical act that took place in the real world.

We're not talking about sending people to jail, we're talking about blocking content from search engines. Whether or not you think it should be illegal to possess that imagery (which it is in many countries), it seems totally appropriate to block pretty much anything that could be construed as CP from search engines.

Indeed we are. It really doesn't matter what should or shouldn't be illegal, the topic at hand is what defines child pornography. It does not seem to have a clear cut definition, and is entirely in the eye of the beholder. Some believe fiction is absolutely child pornography (as we saw in such legal proceedings), others believe that it requires a physical human to be present to facilitate in the creation of the content. There is nothing to suggest that it is actually cut and dry. Are Lolita and Miss Saigon child porn? Depends on who you ask.

Parents photograph their naked children and put it on social media. It's clearly not CP, and good luck separating that from CP with a ML model.

They do?

If thats not CP it should be banned as a gross violation of the child's privacy.

Nudity and porn aren't the same thing. Porn is media intended to provoke sexual gratification. If you prefer porn is what the majority would consider material intended for sexual gratification.

Babies aren't sexual and they also don't as far as I can tell have any legal right not to have their parents take or share pictures of them. We could do well not to invent imaginary legal rights.

Huh? I didn't say it was illegal?

Posting naked photos of a baby on the internet is an awful violation of a baby's privacy, so it would not be allowed on my platform.

Do you really want to be the arbiter of right and wrong in all these cases? A lot of people think naked baby pictures are fine. Who are you to tell them they're not? It seems to me you want to police the whole world to make what you think is indecent disappear. Guess who also has similar ideals? Hardcore islamists (not that I'm saying wanting to block search results and creating a totalitarian regime are the same thing, but the ideal is wrong in both cases, in my opinion).

The line wouldn't be blurry if you were given 10 pictures and asked to sort them by what's allowed and what's not. We don't have 10 pictures here, we have at least billions and we can't sort them by hand. Using an automatic filtering system is where the blurry line problem comes in.

Sadly the line would still be blurry.

Fully clothed photos of kids are CP depending on the site where you find them for example. It is "easy" to block everything that could be CP, but that would include photos of children in diapers on Facebook posted by their parents.

It is easy to classify the more horrible stuff, but as soon as you make a line you can be sure some shithead will search for a way to blur it.

In more general terms this is why many things should be at least a bit subjective. Clean-cut definition are too easy to abuse.

> There is no blurry line here. Child abuse and child pornography are clearly defined terms. Justifying child abuse in a novel might be morally offensive, but is not a crime, abusing an actual child however, and publishing footage of it, is.

Okay, let me give an alternative situation then.

A 14 year old girl sends a sexual text message to her (also underage) boyfriend. In Minnesota, the 14-year-old-girl was charged with Child Pornography.

https://www.aclu.org/blog/juvenile-justice/minnesota-prosecu...

If you think morality is black-and-white, then you are going to cause issues to many people. There's nothing "black and white" about distributing child porn. There are unfortunately, a ton of gray areas.

Yes, there are clear-cut cases of CP that need to be banned. But you must ALWAYS be wary about the edge cases, lest you harm otherwise innocent people. A 14-year-old who sends naked pictures of herself to her friends is... well... objectionable, but it shouldn't result in a sex-crime on her permanent record.

Minnesota’s criminal statute would have absolutely nothing to do with any federal statute or any other state’s criminal statute

Good news! If you are rich enough to pay and keep paying your lawyers then you can move the case to the federal venue either immediately or in appeals court. Now we have a standardized venue to actually discuess any gray areas or lack thereof

That’ll be $2000 for this “hour” of work to afford your freedom, thanks

You can't "remove" your state criminal case to federal court. You've confused a civil case with a criminal case brought by the state.

Thats pretty interesting, it seems there have been some narrow circumstances for removal of criminal cases from state to federal venue but not a viable option like in civil cases

This is the way it must be. Otherwise an underage person could, say, send nude photos of herself to all her teachers, call the FBI, and have them all arrested while she faces no penalty. If simply having the file on your computer is illegal, then any creator of this content, no matter what his or her age, must be liable.

There's no public interest in prosecuting a 15 year old who willingly sends an image of themself to another 15 year old.

It's a fucking stupid thing for them to do, but criminal justice system isn't the solution for that.

Except when the recipient forwards it on to his buddies and the picture then makes it into the Internet.

Even then you don't prosecute the person in the image, even if they took the photograph. You prosecute the people distributing the image.

So it's not the way it must be, if the existing insane laws are repealed.

Nope, if I hide cocaine in your house the crime is mine. If person X send person Y unsolicited CP with the intention of calling the police on them I am pretty sure X is committing a crime.

It might be hard for Y to prove this though.

That's not the way the law works with illegal pornography. There is no legal defense to possession.

To be more precise, in most jurisdictions, there's strict liability for possession of child pornography. Which means that mens rea, or even awareness of the crime, is not required.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strict_liability_(criminal)

That is a fairly programmatic, not judicious, interpretation of how the law and morality intersect. Maybe the people involved, law enforcement and the courts are a bit better than mere computers. Just a thought.

They could be charged by making sending pictures of themselves to themselves.

> There is no blurry line here. Child abuse and child pornography are clearly defined terms.

In many places around the world it's clearly defined to include purely fictional depictions. It seems to be rare, but there have been convictions for possessing child pornography cartoons in the US.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legal_status_of_drawn_pornogra...

I believe in many places it is illegal to distribute even a novel with explicit CP.

A relevant note is the distinction between production, distribution and possession (both directly or indirectly) when talking about corner cases.

A 14 years old should not be incriminated of producing or possessing photos of his/her naked body, he or she could be incriminated of distribution in extreme cases (the cited case should not be one of these cases)

I wonder how the future will classify AI generated content which depicting things like CP[1] but where none of the actors are real. We haven't quite crossed that threshold yet but wouldn't be surprised if something like this were to hit the headlines some time very soon. Will people claim that this is a valuable surrogate to keep these sick people from acting on real victims or will we see claims that it encourages them (like terrorists get radicalized etc).

[1] but not only. other genres like snuff would come to mind. How about an AI generated take on "A Serbian Film"

> Committing a crime in a piece of fiction is obviously not equivalent to actual child pornography

That depends on the jurisdiction. In the USA it isn’t, in Australia fictions in certain media (eg anime) can be considered CP. Even porn with adults who just look young can be considered CP.

> Even porn with adults who just look young can be considered CP.

That's terrifying. I can't think of a more subjective measure to codify into law than, "if she looks young." In the USA we already have a huge problem with subjectivity in interpretation of laws which allows our government/police to go after people they don't like (with real or imagined infractions).

Actually now that I think about it, I think that's what the state of Texas is doing to Cody Wilson. They're charging him with child molestation and child prostitution by saying that even tho he thought she was 18, she "didn't look like it." (not defending Cody, just stating that the USA may be no better at all in the subjective interpretation of law department).

This is even more problematic when attempting the use the automated filters that would be necessary at this kind of scale, which have no sense of context at all.

A recent demonstration was in Tumblr's attempt to block all pornography. They provided some canonical examples of things that are explicitly allowed. It was then discovered that their automatic porn filters blocked the images they used as the specific examples of things that shouldn't be blocked.

https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20181218/16150941264/filte...

Lolita IIRC is about the viewpoint of a predator justifying his behavior, no? At least I thought that was what the book was about.

It’s more brilliant witty egocentric diary of a predator than justification by a predator, punctuated by irony and an unreliable narrator, but basically yes.

I'm not outright rejecting that there are gray areas, but neither of your examples are ambiguous, because they're not porn.

Fair enough. I should note that Lolita, the book, has been called to be banned on several occasions though. Because the sexual nature of the book makes people uncomfortable.

In any case, a search engine (like Google or Bing) may decide to ban sexual content like Lolita, for being sexual + about underage minors.

As for an actual case of actually pornographic material, I have another example: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18877901

I talk about an actual pornographic case in this post. A 14-year old girl sends a sexually explicit image to her boyfriend, and is therefore charged with distribution of child pornography.

If I can give my uninformed and probably lacking opinion the only reasonable definition of CP should revolve around crimes outside of the digital world. (Don't take this too literally) It is for sure CP if it involves actual child abuse or if it promotes child abuse (or normalize sexualization of children)

In Australia young looking porn actresses/actor and loli hentai are illegal because they promote CP as a fetish.

There is an anime I really liked, "Miss Kobayashi's Dragon Maid", except that there are small children (7-9) that while are never depicted in sexual situation are often given excessive sexual maturity; I found that extremely unsettling (I never finished that otherwise truly beautiful series for this reason) because it is how one would try to normalize the idea that "maybe a kid would like it".

In a sense I think we should treat CP as the correspective of hate speech. Hate crimes : hate speech ~ child abuse : CP.

This highlight the conflict free speech vs censorship.

If you are still reading allow me one last opinion :-) another problem with thinking that a problem is simple is that you might miss an important connection between seemingly unconnected problems.

Well, if you didnt have so many pedophiles working in movies and television, then maybe this issue would be a lot easier.

Look at Epstein, Weinstein, Spacey, Schneider, [other disney nickolodian people], and the ridiculous number of abusers in politics in the UK and US, as well as the music industry.

Its a huge problem.

I am personally suprised that not a single person at Youtube has been held accountable for all the blatent shit on that cess-pool of a site.

If you need links and information on Youtube - bing 'Elsagate' as just one example.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com