A court in Sweden has fined a man for being in position of 54 manga pictures (out of a collection of several thousand cartoons) which they considered to be child porn. Translator fined over child porn cartoons. d’oh!
However, of all the things absurd about such a ruling, the court’s means to distinguish the cartoons deemed as child porn seems to stand out in particular, for according to the translator (Den dömde uttalar sig (Swedish), the judges used a measurement of the size of the breasts of the drawn characters to judge weather the images should be considered child porn. And that seems to me to be a rather imprecise or unscientific method to go about judging weather a person should be handed down a sentence for possessing child porn – which is not a triviality. How on Earth is one to go about defending oneself against such subjective thing as the perceived age of cartoon characters? Or if the characters are even human, rather than pixies, elves, robots or an interstellar species or whatever?
In addition, the law under which he has been fined, has a special opt out for pictures of a particular artistic value – supposedly so having certain classic paintings is still legal. But who’s to say what has an artistic value. Has manga no artistic value. And how is one to know in advance weather an image has an artistic value?
It seems to me a perversion of the law. Isn’t there a legal principle somewhere that deals with laws by which it is impossible to determine with any sane amount of certainty and objectivity when it has been broken?
Good thing I only look at manga where the children have huge breasts! (kidding kidding! )
But that raises an interesting question, what if it’s just a really flat girl? Or an 800 year old alien that takes the form of a child? Or a 1 year old child android that looks like she’s 20? Or an immortal vampire who has the body of a child but has lived for a thousand years?
Hey, don’t shoot the messenger; I’m only repeating what I’ve read on another forum somewhere. At least I’m fairly sure it wasn’t this forum. When I read it, I just thought, “Hmm… I knew they were liberal, but wtf?”, but I didn’t care to take the person up on it at the time.
Why, do you think I might have offended Sweden? Oh, diddums!
David by Donatello shows genitals. Surely somebody somewhere at some time masturbated to this expression of adolescent youth. It’s filth. Is there a good reason not to arrest everyone who comes to Florence to look at it?
I fully support laws against child porn. But the purpose of those laws should be to protect children. A piece of child pornography where no children were involved in its creation should not be illegal.
And anyone that uses the size of a woman’s breasts instead of her age to judge whether something is child pornography is an idiot.
This is absolutely stupid and, in my mind at least, embarrassing for Sweden. But there’s a historical context…
In the 90’s there was a child pornography hysteria. Basically a full blown witch hunt with saturated the media, political arena and society in general. This was partly due to some real crimes, but also due to some exaggerations and in cases complete fabrications and fantasies. The hysteria pushed politicians into “showing strength” in battling this nation wide pandemic, and thus stupid laws were created.
There’s also a sort of lack of passion for freedom of speech in Sweden, because it hasn’t been a big historical issue. There’s no real tradition of people standing up for free speech. Which is good in as much as we’ve not had our freedoms threatened, but bad in as we’re not used to having to defend them. Or even thinking they need to be defended.
Having pointed out how stupid it is to interpret the law such that stick figures are pornography, I feel obliged to point out that, let’s face it people, those short, flat-chested, cute girls in anime and manga? Of course they’re meant to look like underaged girls. That’s the whole point. Whether they build a fiction around them where the character’s a 5000 year old android vampire elf, or merely slap an 18 next to their name in the english documentation (in the japanese it’s an 11), in either case, the idea is that it’s supposed to be a child-figure. And if the character is drawn having raunchy sex with a pokemon, then it’s definitely intended to be essentially child porn, whether they bother to skirt that fact or not.
It’s actually kind of amusing the esoteric explanations they use to justify having (essentially) children doing various things we consider to be outside their age level. Check out Petite Princess Yucie sometime! (It’s not porn and is safe for work, or at least the anime is. I make no promises about any manga (if there is any), much less any fan art.)
So what does this mean? Well, it means that people out there are drawing pictures of children (or close enough) running around naked and/or being horrifyingly tentacle-raped. Whether drawing or owning this stuff should be legal or not is up to your legislators, though frankly all the arguments that I shouldn’t be able to sketch stick figures boinking always seem weak to me.
Fined, not imprisoned. I have no problem with that.
Since the identification of victims in alleged child pornography cases is oftentimes is impossible, courts have long used expert testimony to establilsh the age of the alleged victim based on developmental standards, etc. Applying that to anime strikes me as no big deal either.
Not having seen them, I would hazard a guess that the the anime characters are, in fact, representations of children, and not pixies, elves, robots, or aliens.
Here in the States, the jury or judge hearing the case makes that determination. That’s kinda why we have them.
It’s almost impossible to make a determination about the images without having seen them, in context. But the judges did, and made their determination. I personally don’t have a problem with it.
Not knowing which specific characters are in question (assuming they are pre-existing characters), I would say that this is a very unsafe assumption on your part. I have watched a relative buttload of anime and somewhat less manga, and it is quite common for there to be alien, elfin, and/or android characters that look exactly like humans, of any age you like.
Not that this really matters - when you make a character that looks like a seven year old, you can call them whatever you like, and even put on pointy ears or joint lines to prove it, and it’s not really going to impress anybody.
I’m kinding giving the benefit of the doubt to the courts in Sweden that the characters are close enough to be considered children for the purposes of the statute. Again, I haven’t seen the images, so I could be wrong, but the quotes from Judge Palbrant seem to me to indicate he didn’t make this judgment lightly. We’ll see what happens on appeal
Well, I did say that “but really, it’s an alien! Just because it looks exactly like a human child, right down to the genitalia…” isn’t exactly impressive argument, no matter what the fiction says. I don’t care if Sasami is an artificial construct animated by a thousands-of-years-old-tree*, she still looks (and acts) like a twelve year old, and I’d still look askance at porn of her.
I wouldn’t make it illegal, mind you, but I’d still look askance.
*in one of the continuities, anyway
The issue here is that it is cartoons we are talking about. If drawing pictures of under age people having sex is illegal, why isn’t it illegal to draw pictures of adult being raped?
I read somewhere (maybe SDMB) that either Sweden or Denmark had no laws against child porn (to possess or produce) until the 1990’s, so thay may be what ivan astikov is referring to…
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