If live, sexually explicit images of a model are broadcast on the Internet beginning at 12:01 am on the model’s eighteenth birthday, let’s say from Chicago, then are people who view the images in places like Denver and Los Angeles breaking the law, since for them it would still be the day before, and the model’s eighteenth birthday would not have arrived yet?
– CH
But her birthday would have arrived where she is. So, “where she is”, she’d be 18, and no, the people in L.A. wouldn’t be doing anything wrong.
But wait! If it’s 9:01 PM the day before her birthday and it’s being broadcast in Los Angeles, then it would be a crime for the people on the West Coast to watch it, but perfectly legal on the East Coast.
Weird.
I would have to investigate further to make a legal determination. What is the URL again?
I doubt the law gets specific enough for this case, but if you really wanted to “safe”, you could find out the time of day she was born, and in which time zone, and use that to calculate her age.
Ok. Hypothetically, you have a model who is flying on an airplane on a trans-pacific flight from Asia and, during the flight to the U.S, just turned 18. So a live porno movie is made right afterwards, broadcast on the internet.
But THEN, she crosses the international dateline into the west, which means that you must subtract a day.
That would mean that the first, earlier half of the movie is legal, but the part made just AFTER she crossed the international dateline would techically be “child pornography.”
It’d probably be calculated based on the time where she was born, in a case like this.
Why does it have to be so complicated?
One day, a person is born. Precisely 18 years later, they’re 18 years old. It doesn’t matter where they are; it may not even be on the same date as they were born. But they’re still 18.
I am 20 years, 295 days, 6 hours, and 8 minutes old. It doesn’t matter where I am on or off the planet, I’m still that old.
It does matter how you calculate your age, if down-to-the minute is important. Were you born in the same time zone you are now in? (And don’t forget daylight savings time!) If not, you need to do some adjustments – exactly 20 years, etc. later arrives in all time zones at once, of course, but the apparent time of day is different in each.
For example, if you were born at 9AM in Time Zone N, and are now living in Time Zone N-1 (one notch further east), the anniversary of your birth would arrive at 10AM on the critical day.
Call me a sick puppy, but this thread reminded me of the song “Sixteen (Going on Seventeen)” from The Sound of Music. 
What if she was born 20 years ago but is biologically only 15 years old, having been aboard an interstellar spacecraft for the past 10 years?
INTELLIGENCE ALERT!!!
From this it seems to follow that “at the time” would be used to mean “in the original time zone in which she was filmed.”
This arguement can also be used about voting. I voted when I was technically 17 since I voted in AZ at 7am whereas I was born in HI at 8am. What matters that I was born on that day.
Oookay… so one possible alternative is to define the cutoff as the point when 31,556,940 seconds have elapsed in your frame of reference from your moment of birth…
Oh, hell, let’s just go with Osiris’ legal cite. If you’re the right age at the time-and-place of the production, defined simply by the date at that place, you are OK everywhere.
Wait, I’m still confused. If I were to take the Olsen Twins and put them on the Concorde, would I have to fly really fast east or west in order to get a head start on their legality? What if we flew them to the International Space Station?
Yet one more reason I’m so fricking glad I like older women.
Since this example takes place in the U.S., I’d like to point out that under English common law you turn a year older at 12:01 AM on the day before your birthday anniversary. So the way this example is worded, even in Los Angeles she had turned 18 about 22 hours earlier.
All this bickering about legalityan no one’s mentioned gestational age?? What happens if said model spent 10 months in the womb?
Really? Why? That seems to go against common sense. I was born on March 17; does that mean I legally turn 26 on March 16 next year? Now I’m confused…
Actually, that reminds me of a stunt pulled a while back by The Sun (lowest-common-denominator British newspaper, famous for publishing topless photos on page 3).
IIRC, they had some model who was 17, and published a series of teaser pics together with a countdown calendar to her 18th birthday. The gimmick being, of course, that on her 18th birthday they would publish a photo of her topless. I remember someone pointing out that presumably, if the photos were published on her birthday, they must have been taken the day before at the latest, when she was technically underage. But if what whitetho says is true, I guess they’d have been covered.