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Comment by 127361 | Hacker News Reader

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.

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> 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?

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

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

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.

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