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So I kind of agree, except:

1) nobody would ever have known it was him if he hadn't been trying to milk it for celebrity

2) He's aiming at the record label because they've got the big bucks, but it's his parents who sold him out when they accepted 200$ for a photoshoot

1) People don't have to know its him for it to kind of fuck him up. Honestly, I dunno know if it would mess me up or not to be in his position, but I could definitely imagine it messing some folks up to know that basically everyone had seen you naked and you had no ability to consent.

Also, the way I read the articles, I don't believe he reached out for those recreations - the media reached out to him.

2) The record label are the ones who ultimately profited off the image.

Edit: Also, it's not like it was hidden that it was him on the album cover. Anyone who wanted to know who the baby was could easily find out it was him. It's in the wikipedia, and I imagine it was probably credited in the Album credits: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nevermind#Artwork

That's probably how the media tracked him down for recreations.

>2) The record label are the ones who ultimately profited off the image.

Were the parents (or whomever consented) not compensated?

A pittance yes. But the record label were the ones who accepted their consent for a baby who ultimately couldn't consent - and the record label were the ones who then distributed the image and made a ton of money off of it.

Just because the parents made a morally questionable choice to consent on behalf of their child doesn't absolve the record label of also making the morally questionable choice of distributing and profiting from the naked image of a child who couldn't consent for themselves.

but no child can consent to anything, so unless we just put a blanket ban on media depictions of under-18s, we have to rely on the consent of the parents

i really don't see what the moral question is. they wanted a photo of a newborn swimming, they bought the photo of a newborn swimming

I think it'd be reasonable to reduce the age of consent to kids who actually can consent. 18 is pretty arbitrary. I think it's pretty clear a 14 year old can consent to many things. A 10 or 8 year old can probably also offer partial consent.

But a newborn can't. A 2 year old can't. A four year old can't. The line of when a kid can understand what they're consenting to gets blurry from there. And we probably just need much more nuanced consent laws rather than a blanket "You can legally consent at 18, and your parents can consent for you before that."

There are certain things we need to let parents consent to - like medical care. But we don't need to let parents consent to the use of their kids image in media. We don't need to allow parents to sell their kids.

And I don't think "Well, they can't consent and if we give them consent we can't do this class of thing" is a good enough reason to deny them the ability to consent.

So we can't use naked pictures of kids who can't consent in media, or pictures at all. So what? Voluntary consent is important. If respecting voluntary consent means there are things we can't do - then there are things we can't do.

>or pictures at all

To be clear, consent relates to things like, well, album covers and other types of commercial photography such as marketing and advertising. There's no consent needed for editorial (e.g. news) photography.

This also wouldn't even be a discussion if this were some obscure art photography. It just happens to be on an iconic album cover.

Movies and TV shows would be pretty weird if you couldn't ever show children. So would school yearbooks, typically printed by a for-profit company.

> or pictures at all. So what? Voluntary consent is important

How far are you willing to push that?

Should I need to destroy photos that accidentally capture an infant in public?

Should children not get vaccine shots until they can meaningfully consent?

My comment answered the vaccine shots (medical procedure). The one below mine answered the "destroy photos" - commercial use is different from incidental, personal, or news reporting in current consent laws. And that seems like the right line to draw.

So you're proposing an entirely new legal regime around the interminably gray area of commercial activity, and it's intersection with the equally gray area of consent by children, which is currently centered on age, typically late teens for most uses?

Relief in the courts would require a completely new body of common law. In the mean time, legislation would be the only way to provide compensation to victims of un-consented childhood photography.

What specific ideas do you have for laws that could start to provide this relief?

The history of psychological effects on child actors and children of "blogger moms" indicates there should be atleast some ethical concerns.

Just because parents consent doesn't mean that parents are looking out for their children or understand what the effects of fame as a young child will be.

I don't have cut and dried answers here, but I don't think you can pretend that there aren't ethical concerns with media protrayal of young children that need atleast some consideration.

Edit: Personally, I think that if a photograph of a naked baby was important to this piece of art, the ethical solution would have been to keep the baby's identity anonymous (at least until he was 18). That would have done a lot to balance the ethics here, especially as the identity of the baby shouldn't matter.

> profiting from the naked image of a child who couldn't consent for themselves.

As an honest question, I'm curious whether the "naked" part makes this worse in your opinion. I, personally, don't feel any shame about my body at that age -- too young for me to even remember -- being seen. (As opposed to a nude photo of me now being distributed without my approval.)

To me it seems like the nakedness is irrelevant -- if it was a violation of consent to use his baby image, then clothes don't negate the violation.

For myself, no. I've played naked ultimate frisbee points before and there are undoubtedly pictures of me naked doing ridiculous shit as part of college frisbee team hazing floating around the internet (or one of my former teammates hardrives) somewhere - and I honestly don't care.

Although, that said, those pictures have never surfaced. My feelings about them might change if a coworker pulled them up unexpectedly one day and started giving me shit for it.

Whatever our individual feelings about nudity - or how it should be perceived in society (and I agree, it should not be shameful or automatically sexualized the way it is) our society does view nudity a certain way. And people are allowed to feel about they feel about that. If it makes it worse for him, and it sure seems to, then that's something we have to respect. Even if we wish it were otherwise.

My main thing is voluntary consent. He couldn't. He should have been able to. I don't think parents should have the right to effectively sell their kids before they can consent. If that means we don't can't use kids younger than a certain age in modeling and marketing, so be it.

There are billions of photos of infants and young children used in instruction manuals, text books, advertising, and as stock photos. What's more, these are very often necessarily taken in various states of undress, for example the diapered infants on the box of the kiddie pool in my backyard.

Another example: the instructions for my pediatric otoscope used photos of an infant, showing proper placement. This is a commercial use.

Do you propose that all of these photos should be made illegal?

EDIT: And what about movies? Should we ban infants and small children from film as well?

> The record label are the ones who ultimately profited off the image

The record label profited off the music, not the image. The image on its own means nothing without the music.

"up to know that basically everyone had seen you naked and you had no ability to consent."

He was a baby.

What kind of splitting hair intellectual rhetoric are we people getting into?

All of my uncles, aunts, neighbours, neighbours at the cottage, babysitters, people at the park saw me to some extent 'naked' at the park. Little girls considerably more often since they go topless.

It's the most normal thing on the planet and it's been that way for thousands of years for everyone.

I'm hoping is just an odd HN style discussion and not some kind of weird new social normalization that's happened very quickly, in one generation as an artifact of ultra urbane helicopter parenting.

This is not a debate: his parents will have, or not, consented to him being in a bit of commercial artwork. His being naked as baby is irrelevant. That's it.

The issue is not his nudity so much as the commercial use of his image.

Did you even read the lede?

> Spencer Elden, the man who was photographed as a baby on the album cover for Nirvana's Nevermind, is suing the band alleging sexual exploitation.

The article goes on:

> He also alleges the nude image constitutes child pornography.

> However, Elden's lawyer, Robert Y. Lewis, argues that the inclusion of the dollar bill (which was superimposed after the photograph was taken) makes the minor seem "like a sex worker".

It amazes me just how many HN users just say stuff without reading anything. The person being replied to also doesn't deserve the downvotes; it's an entirely valid point that the general population is likely to agree with. (not saying you downvoted in particular... I just find it baffling.)

Maybe this is perhaps one of the greatest artistic ironies ever?

The 'barely born baby, into the world chasing the dollar on the devil's rod' ... has come to life in the 'baby adult demanding money for something he's probably not owed, making hyperbolic claims of 'child porn'.

I think if he were not naked, he would have a much harder time with the 'sex crime' hyperbole.

Nudity isn't porn.

Sadly, I think it's a rapid change in at least urbanized predominantly white societies.

This is why recently I've been loving watching old videos of people living their everyday lives before technology oversocialized us.

Here's a recent one that I happened to find because I was researching the Boston accent:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=omVFxtbZoyw

These days you'd think all these people were just actors in some 80's movie, but they were real people all walking up to each other and interacting organically. Nobody is staring down at phones, everyone is socially confident, kids are out playing, adults show affection towards the children, and so on. Some may disapprove of the lifestyle of these urban Boston Italians or certain things they say, but it's one reflection of a different time that really wasn't that long ago. This was before mainstream media scared the shit out of people and convinced them that the world is too dangerous, before people overexposed themselves on social media, before video games addicted children, before adults spent more time with their devices than with their families. Things weren't perfect in the old days by any means, but there were some good things about humanity that we've gradually suppressed in ourselves which we've been losing in a short period of time.

Like you, I grew up with a big family where the little ones were sometimes seen naked whether it was when we were running around in the dirt or taking baths together. By a certain age, our parents knew when to start having us to always wear clothes and bathe by ourselves. But there's what I would consider a precious window of innocence in young childhood where kids can exist and be themselves, clothed or not, free of the knowledge of sexuality. My sibling and cousins all were naked at one point or another as young kids and nobody feels scarred or exploited because our elders saw us naked in some vague memory.

We haven't had photography for thousands of years, and it's reasonable to think that we are still adjusting to the implications.

It's quite normal for people to be embarrassed when their parents show baby pictures, especially if it involves nudity. It's transplanting the childish innocence onto the person's social present.

His parent's consent does not negate the harm done, possibly the opposite.

> 2) The record label are the ones who ultimately profited off the image.

Did they? Seriously - would this album have sold a single fewer copies if the cover had been a picture of a duck, or a floating Pom-Pom, or any of a million other things?

To claim they profited from the photo, you’d have to prove that people bought one of the most popular albums of all time because this dudes baby parts were on the cover.

Nobody would know it’s him even now. I just saw a photograph of him and read his name but I am confident I would never recognize him or the name after a day or two.

Let me use a straw man to make a point: what if instead of that photo shoot and it becoming the cover of an album he was actually sexually exploited as a baby and a photo of that horrific act became widely seen. Do you think it would still fuck him up to know that it happened to him as a child even if you or I couldn’t recognize him? That is to say, I don’t think his issue is so much that people recognize him as the baby on the album cover but the fact that he recognizes himself as that baby.

Yes, if the situation was completely different, then I would absolutely have completely different thoughts about the situation. I don't even have a problem with a civil lawsuit making a case that there is emotional distress. But the particular argument being made here is that the album cover constitutes child pornography and that the dollar bill portrays the infant as a sex worker. I'm not a lawyer, but that doesn't seem remotely plausible to me.

Right. I am with you on your point there. My point is not necessarily that his lawsuit does or does not have merit. It is simply that just because nobody knows who he is until he tells them doesn’t mean that damage to him wasn’t done. Ultimately I think his parents fucked up by doing this and not thinking through how it would affect their son.

Living nearby and having gone to some bars he frequents, he is a frequent user of "Don't you know who I am!"

> 1) nobody would ever have known it was him if he hadn't been trying to milk it for celebrity

It was a thing that happened to him as a baby, and it sounds like he's had conflicted feelings about it. It doesn't seem reasonable to blame him for not acting in just the perfect way for his whole life to minimize the effects on him.

> 2) He's aiming at the record label because they've got the big bucks, but it's his parents who sold him out when they accepted 200$ for a photoshoot

It's not an either or thing. It's totally legitimate to blame all the parties involved.

However, of all the parties involved, his parents were likely the most ignorant of what this photo would become. From the OP:

> In 2008, Spencer's father Rick recounted the photo shoot to US radio network NPR, saying he had been offered $200 to take part by Weddle [the photographer], who was a family friend.

> "We just had a big party at the pool, and no one had any idea what was going on!"

> The family quickly forgot the photoshoot until, three months later, they saw the Nevermind album cover blown up on the wall of Tower Records in Los Angeles.

I kind of hesitate to use terms like this, but the intent of your comment seems to be to deflect blame towards the least responsible parties, which seems like a kind of victim blaming.

Yeah, just imagine. You are born into this mysterious existence full of beauty, suffering, sadness and joy. You live on a mote in an infinite universe, sharing it with billions upon billions of self aware entities just like yourself, and ever since the very first moment you had awareness, each and every one of them had seen your little tiny baby penis.

Poor bastard.

> I mean, it goes on, but to me that reads as someone struggling to come to terms with something that happened to them when they couldn't consent. Most people would not be okay with having their naked image broadcast to the world before they could consent. And then add in the idea that others made a ton of money off content that used their naked image, and they saw almost none of that... it's understandable.

As soon as the child pornography argument falls flat on its face (assuming the prosecution is actually that boneheaded), the defense may argue that the magnitude of possible harm is very different considering how the body, mind, and memory of an infant hardly recognizable to their adult counterpart and that there is no sort of humiliating aspect to the album art that would cause the public to view the adult Elden in any negative way.

It's not as if Elden doesn't have some point to make. It's bad that he hasn't been compensated for being pictures on one of the most iconic albums ever made. But unless there's something revealed in trial that I don't know, it doesn't appear that the record company or the band did anything wrong. It all hinges on whether there was sexual child exploitation, and although some people on HN seem to believe that the image of the naked body of an infant is inherently sexual in nature (which is creepy to me, but what do I know), I highly doubt that a judge, jury, or regular people are going to buy that argument.

The image has nothing to do with the success of the album, it's the music. They could have put a deflated football on the cover and it would have still been iconic.

Given the easy availability of newborn babies, I think $200 is fair.

What is it with Americans and the naked body? Babies are supposed to be naked, it's not embarrassing.

We put giant photos of ourselves as babies, often naked, on sticks and wave around when we graduate. I have never heard anyone even hint at that being an issue.

And for the record, breastfeeding is the most natural thing in the world.

> The recreations could easily be him trying to take ownership of something he feels conflicted about as a way of exerting control over something he had no ability to consent to.

beautiful

"It'd be nice to have a quarter for all the people who have seen my baby penis."

Sounds like the only issue he has with it is that HE didn't get any of the money.