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Comment by gorgoiler | Hacker News Reader

I’ve heard a lot of the rational arguments as to why making digital images is nonsensical. Banning information is anathema to the nature of digital data just as much as it would be to make certain thoughts or ideas or shapes illegal, etc.

Are there statistics on child pornography over time? Is it spiralling out of control? Is it diminishing to zero? It would be easier to live with the pearl clutchers if there was lots of good evidence to show that owning illegal JPEGs causes either JPEG production or abuse offender rates to increase, or that decreasing JPEGs correlated with a downturn in offending.

It also might be ok to ban stuff because it feels like the right thing to do, but it’s not an amazingly solid argument.

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I agree with your stance here so much. Possession data should not be illegal.

There are thousands of images of real murder[1] and other absolutely heinous acts committed against humans and animals out there. Millions and millions of murder fiction books purchased every year. So much violence in the media. And people with secret obsessive interests and fantasies of torture and homicide, who view large numbers of such images intentionally. And a large number of homicides each year.

We do not prosecute people for looking at images of murder on the Internet.

So comparatively little is done to stop that, instead we focus on sex-related moral panics, driven by what is likely a primitive primal human instinct.

1. War crimes, etc.

> sex-related moral panics

You’re not legitimately comparing the puritanical sex-averse aspects of the US and child porn, are you?

Yes, I am, when it comes to imprisoning people for simple possession of data, where there is absolutely no intent to distribute.

I think nobody should be going to prison for looking at or storing any image on their computer. Or reading any book or text as well (some countries prosecute possession of certain written material). Such actions are part of the private sphere, which the state has no business policing, unless you commit some violent crime or are severely insane, for example.

Sending people to prison for that absolutely is a moral panic in my opinion. It is a modern day form of heresy or witch hunt.

Murder for entertainment probably exists, but is vanishingly rare. Prosecutions of CSAM frequently involve people actively soliciting either the production of more or the opportunity to participate. CSAM enthusiasts network a lot. Read some court documents dealing with real cases rather than thinking purely in terms of abstractions.

Many of the prosecutions are for simple possession of such images. On top of that the "chilling effect" it causes means we can't download large collections of data such as historical web archives (e.g. GeoCities, etc), just in case there are illegal images in there.

The laws regarding child pornography possession are "strict liability" in many jurisdictions. So these laws prevent entirely legitimate activities from being carried out, because of the fear of being persecuted (it has parallels to the Salem Witch Trials).

> So these laws prevent entirely legitimate activities from being carried out, because of the fear of being persecuted

Can you name a single legitimate activity that is prevented from happening due to the need to comply with CSAM related laws?

Training a VAE on LAION-6B, for example.

Running open public WiFi at home. Because of fear that someone might download illegal pornography on it.

there is an enormous gulf, legally and morally, between fictional murder and real pictures of children being abused. which is the topic of the article at hand.

Regardless of if banning child porn is effective at stopping crimes against children (it doesn’t, porn in general correlates to a societal-wide decline in sex and sex crimes) that doesn’t mean all the CSAM victims out there want pictures of them naked as a child to be part of some uncompensated scheme to replace their jobs.

Absolutely, and we should do what's reasonably possible to reduce the number of images out there in circulation. But we can't do what is the equivalent of shutting down the whole Internet, in order to stop it.

Society and AI development have to keep going, otherwise progress will be disrupted. It's progress that has gotten us out of the barbaric Medieval period and the Dark Ages.

Good point. If someone publishes a photo then they violate the child’s right to privacy and I agree that they should be punished.

Doesn’t this mean that the crime is in the act of publishing? If they have the photo but don’t publish it then what have they done wrong? What about if the photo is a very realistic rendering of a child that doesn’t exist? (Or just a drawing, for which people have indeed been prosecuted in some parts of the world.)

(The flip side is already covered in law: if the face is real but the scene is fake then it is still an invasion of privacy.)

each person has the individual right to not have pictures of their abuse posted in public.

and as a society we dont need statistical evidence for every single law we come up with. some things we just know are harmful to victims because of common sense.

No, that's the same "common sense" we used to justify discrimination and other abuses towards people who were different in some way, e.g. by race, or by sexual preference (e.g. homosexuality). And at the time in history the discrimination was happening, most people considered the discrimination normal.

Heck even we still have problems with society discriminating against young people, and especially teenagers, by the way. So I really care about young people's rights.

But I still think these draconian content laws are unacceptable, they are replacing one form of abuse (pedophilia), with another by the state (sending people to prison for possession of data).

bigots will always try to abuse the legal system to attack minorities, that doesn't mean we shouldn't try to improve the legal system to protect victims of crime.

if we are going to argue over historical injustice, this crime in particular has been ignored for centuries because the perpetrators were often powerful and wealthy.

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