Not a strict GQ, but placed here because I can’t think of a better venue for discussion of legal issues. Mods move if you must. Story via Fark-
Per this story a photographer was convicted for cutting and pasting pictures of (clothed) children’s heads onto pictures of naked bodies. Are we on a slippery slope with this sort of ruling? As an example would pictures in Maxim or Playboy of very young, adolescent looking 18 and 19 year olds caressing each other to fall under this category at some point if the standard is to prevent “children from being depicted as engaging in sexual activity”. If cut and paste stuff is allowed under this legal umbrella where will the slope end for what counts a pornographically depicted “child”?
I am somewhat confused by your question because I thought he was found guilty of child pornography. Would you mind clarifying for a tired doper who has been staring at a screen all day?
He was convicted of “child porn” for photoshopping kids faces onto adult naked bodies. The fact that the children were originally clothed for the original pics was seen as irrelevant. The non-naked kid’s head shot attached to an adult naked body via Photoshop constituted “child porn” in the eyes of the law and he was convicted of it.
My question for discussion is - At what practical point does this expanded notion of “child porn” stop if a synthetic picture is allowed to be classified as the criminal exploitation of children? Would adult porn actors that look like adolescents and portray adolescents having sex be considered child at some point in this context? Are we on a slippery slope in this ruling? That’s the question.
this is very confusing. The scienter component of the statute seems directly to cut against to conviction, since Zidell (perhaps uniquely) knew that the pictures in question did not represent a cshild engaged in sexual activity. (per contra, the camp director, had he pocketed the cd rather than turning it over, might have been guilty of the said violation, which seems on its face to turn upon the specific facts known to the person possessing the offensive material.)
Maybe it depends on what the meaning of “represent” is, but in that case, how would a sketch be exempt from the same reasoning. How about a sketch of a kid’s head on an adult’s body?–(Dodgson, this bud’s for you…)
It’s hard to see how a superimposed sketch would pose lesser liability for zidell, notwithstanding that it seems preposterous.
query:what about a sketch involving no photo, but all charcoal? What about a sketch stipulated to arise from no model?
I’m gonna bet that this last hypothetical would be found (at least by this trial judge) to violate the law. I couldn’t detect in the statute as reproduced any language that limited the proscribed visuals to photographic representation.
Maybe I’m taking a slight tangent here - but what is the point of this? I never realized a “visual representation” of children engaged in sexual activity was against the law - I thought only actual child porn was. I always assumed a cartoon would be OK (though I’ve never sought it out).
I thought the point of anti-child porn laws was to protect children from being put in sexual situations when they haven’t reached a level of maturity yet to decide if that’s what they really want to do. So what the heck is the harm of a visual representation, that never actually involved children, anyway?
to make things more confusing, suppose a sketch is drawn of a thirty year old woman, who is drawn as younger (not normally considered a hostile act by an artist…), and named in the drawing so that it is plain that the representation is of a thirty year old, albeit she is “airbrushed” to a 16 year old’s characteristics?
There is the obligatory usc. record keeping disclaimer that (I am told…) frequently preceeds the action portion of what are (I understand from my friends who view them…) called adult videos.
What if Zidell had imposed a digital disclaimer on his photos? I think in this case that would have immunized him, which makes the whole thing preposterous since HE had what we call in the trade “actual notice” that the bodies (at least) were over the age of 18 at the time of the photographing, etc.
On deconstruction, perhaps that’s the nub of the offense–he could not actually sustain such a disclaimer in toto, inasmuch as parts of the pictures (albeit the inoffensive part) did contain pictures of models not over 18, etc.
The rationale for making this type of pornography illegal is because it involves an actual child, even if the face was cut out of a Disneyland flyer or something. Frankly, I don’t get it. What kind of pedophile would get off looking at an ADULT body?!?
You may remember the “Virtual Kiddy Porn” bill that was proposed by Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) in '96, signed by Pres. Clinton that same year, and overturned by the Supreme Court a few years later. That law would have made EVERY naked image of a child illegal, even cartoons/drawings, even movies where the actor/actress APPEARED TO BE underage. That’s right, if a 22-year-old actress plays a 17-year-old who’s having sex, it’s kiddy porn, and you’re a babyraper if you watch it. Nice, huh? The whole brouhaha over “The Tin Drum” was based on this badly written, overbroad law.
“Photoshop Porn” was the only part of this law that was not overturned by the Supreme Court.
In this case I do feel that pasting a minor’s face onto a naked body is a form of exploitation. You are using a child’s face in a manner that they are not developed enough to approve of. In this case, it is difficult to even argue artistic merit. More importantly, I find it hard to believe that personal use of these children’s photographs was not prohibited under his contract. I doubt that they would even permit him to use the photographs in a portfolio without parental permission. With regards to personal use, I will defer to any professional photographers out there until I get a chance to ask my father about it.
The only thing that I see as unclear is whether or not he is actually guilty of child pornography as defined by United States law. If he was granted personal use of the photos that he had taken, then I would rather see him paste them onto naked adults then encourage children to pose nude for him.
I agree with Frosted Glass, in this case the face of a real child was used, the abuse is in the scary possibility that the families would have been harassed by bad people or (in what in some occasions would be worse) the authorities, lives would had been already ruined by the time the truth was found, if it had been a completely cartoon or digitally created being it would had been allowed, regardless of the squeamish factor.
it’s pretty hard not to see this as classic “thought crime” (which is especially weird when the purported pedophile knows the body is adult, as mentioned above)
But the deal breaker, on why I don’t consider it a thought crime, is in the fact that the guy used real photos for his creations, if the pictures had accidentally been released on the web at large, I do think many lives would had been terribly affected.
And I do think it is fair to assume that some families were disturbed when the evidence was being collected for this case.
I think you are reaching the same point as I circled around in the inability to produce a veridical disclaimer–some part of some real child does appear in the photo, hence liability. I guess what makes it weird is that the part of the real child is not the sexual part, but your point is nonetheless well taken. There are potential harms other than the obvious ones that we recognize in actually using children in sexual situations for purposes of photographing them.
Nothing to add here except I was just watching “The Blue Lagoon” on cable last night. I couldn’t help thinking to myself: If this movie were made today; the first twenty minutes of it would have ended up on the editor’s floor.
The Supreme Court in Ashcroft v. Free Speech Coalition (the case cited to earlier by Frosted Glass) specifically excluded these kinds of images from their ruling. Kennedy, in his majority, stated: “although morphed images may fall within the definition of virtual child pornography, they implicate the interests of real children and are in that sense closer to the images in Ferber.”
Since this was a New Hampshire case, I looked and found New Hampshire v. Cobb, which discussed these kinds of images. In that case, the majority held that similar kinds of morphed images can be illegal, and stated “Although the people whose photographs have been “morphed” were not made to engage in the behavior displayed in the photographs, they are nonetheless victimized each time photographs containing their image are displayed or exhibited.” They went on to discuss the issue by saying “While the children in the morphed photographs may belong to a different class of victims than children made to actually engage in sexual behavior in the production process of child pornography, the children in the morphed photographs are nonetheless actual identifiable human victims, rather than computer-generated virtual images. In other words, morphed photographs create direct and identifiable child victims of sexual exploitation, whereas purely computer-generated virtual child pornography does not, absent additional criminal conduct, directly victimize any particular children. The underlying concerns which informed the Ferber decision, therefore, are implicated by the facts of this case in a manner they were not in Ashcroft.”
Since there are real children involved, albeit just facially, in the images, I have no problem with it being illegal.
This is all going to get very interesting once CGI technology advances to the point of producing renderings indistinguishable from a photo of a real person.
While looking for pictures of naked, grown-up ladies on Usenet, I frequently stumble across pictures of dressed kids. (Kills the mood, let me tell you.) By New Hampshire v. Cobb’s reasoning, posting such pictures to alt.binaries.pictures.erotica.soccer-moms victimizes the kids and is therefore kiddy porn, even though there’s no nudity at all!
If someone were to paste my mug onto a nude body, they’d be using my image in a manner I’d disapprove of… but there’d be nothing I could do about it (unless, perhaps, they then tried to sell the resulting image). How does the age of the, ah, pastee enter into it?
This discussion reminds me of a Penthouse pictorial from a coupla decades back, featuring a model known as “Baby” Brease, IIRC. She was of legal age, and had a woman’s body, but she had a face that looked more like that of a 9 year old.
Guess that wouldn’t have been child porn under current law, but it would have been hard to tell the difference between that pictorial and the photos being discussed here.