Yikes, the authors summary of Knox v US sure glosses over a lot of context about the case.
> The tapes contained numerous vignettes of teenage and preteen females, between the ages of ten and seventeen, striking provocative poses for the camera. The children were obviously being directed by someone off-camera. All of the children wore bikini bathing suits, leotards, underwear, or other abbreviated attire while they were being filmed. The government conceded that no child in the films was nude, and that the genitalia and pubic areas of the young girls were always concealed by an abbreviated article of clothing. The photographer would zoom in on the children's pubic and genital area and display a close-up view for an extended period of time. Most of the videotapes were set to music. In some sequences, the child subjects were dancing or gyrating in a fashion not natural for their age. The films themselves and the promotional brochures distributed by Nather demonstrate that the videotapes clearly were designed to pander to pedophiles.
As far as I can find, the conviction was upheld in the end... definitely the right decision.
Do you think the adults filming and directing this stopped there? Those kids were eventually raped and that's probably on film too. The slippery slope isn't a fallacy when the stats back it up.
On top of that- letter of the law and spirit of the law... letter of the law doesn't mention the necessity of visible genitalia ... spirit of the law, I'm going to go out on a limb and guess that if you ask every legislator that voted for the law and the president that signed the law if it was intended that something like this qualified as child pornography within the definition of the law, they'd agree wholeheartedly. And that intent matters quite a bit.
The controversy exists because people with 0 context took the "oh that sounds gross but not illegal" stance and made dumb public statements about it that they then had to go back on.
https://ir.lawnet.fordham.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?referer=ht...
This extensive article goes into the full details of the case.
And, from the description in this journal article, the tapes were, as described in the submitted Plover link, rather more than “videotapes of girls in leotards and swimsuits”.
To me the interesting part of the case is the procedural history; further detail about what was actually in Knox's loathsome videos is much less interesting.