Yes, because Jill was damaged by more people.
A big problem I have with all this is that it reinforces the ridiculous notion that child pornography is rampant on the internet.
If you look at it from the idea of comparing the distribution of CP today compared with 20 years ago then yes, CP is much more widely distributed. By a couple orders of magnitude in fact. But, if you compare the amount of CP compared to the total amount of all content available on the internet, then it isn’t even measurable.
I don’t mean to diminish the illicitness of CP, but I cannot stand alarmist politicians & lawmakers who make utterly ludicrous claims that you can’t surf the web without stumbling across CP regularly. That is a lie of monumental proportions. Even with the internet, finding actual CP is something that takes deliberate and concerted effort by an individual!
The point I’m making is, again not wanting to be insensitive to any actual victims, but the fact remains that the images of them being victimized are not something that anyone is ever just going to ‘happen upon’. IOW unless they are specifically told by law enforcement that their images were again found in possession of some perv, there is very little chance of them ever having to deal with these images again. Almost none really. All attempting to sue future purveyors of images of their abuse is going to do for the victims is make them relive it. It will be incredibly harder for them to get on with their lives if they do this. Whereas in terms of not wanting to be reminded that these images still exist, it would in fact be incredibly easy for them to never ever come across any of these pictures again simply by NOT being involved with any future prosecutions.
Add to this the practical reality that other than sueing the profit-making distributors of CP, no victim is ever going to see a dime from each and every Chester the Molester who gets caught with it, let alone thousands of dollars apiece.
I don’t mean for this to sound like a “Well its really horrible it happened, but just forget about it” argument. Rather a “Best intentions…” one. Regardless of how right this seems (and is) making it happen would be a tangled, unworkable, abuse-of-intent-ridden, 1[sup]st[/sup] Amendment challenging boondoggle…
Glad you didnt. By the way, I think you’re a [statement that i’d get an official warning for].
Well, here is a flight of fancy, by a non lawyer.
Since no child can give consent to use such an image with any legally binding authority, and since all such images are illegal to make, display, or own, it is obvious that each and every case of the use or possession of such an image is a violation of the rights of that person, it seems to me that the same penalties that would be appropriate in copyright infringement would be a reasonable minimum liability for possession of any child pornography in a civil action.
If two or three hundred of the thousands of victims get rich, and if a legal tort industry builds up around it, perhaps that would have a greater effect on the child pornography industry than all the basically ineffective legislation we have currently. If possession of child pornography was not only criminal, but sufficient evidence for a ten thousand dollar liability to the victim for each and every piece of such pornography, I have no problem with it. I am already clogging up the courts with class action suits for stuff that bothers me a whole lot less than the victimization of children.
We have the technology to identify the victims from the evidence, although many of them are dead, or unknown. But potential future victims could benefit when porno collectors start paying 10,000 dollars a pop for their collections.
Tris
Returning to this thread a year later with an update:
In this petition, “Amy’s” lawyer asks for three million from this single defendant, and in this posting, he says:
But she should be able to get it all from one person. And it’s not like she is–she’s been suing people left and right. So this lawyer’s statement makes no sense to me.
The thing that hurts the child is that the pornography is made and published, not that people see it. The reason we try to stop people from seeing it is to prevent it from happening to someone else. It is not because we have some magical thinking that somehow what someone views in private somehow magically transmits pain to the other person (although such thinking is depressingly common even amongst people who otherwise despise magical thinking).
And, yes, if the child filmed herself (as in the hypothetical you are responding to) she didn’t get hurt at all by the making–only the distribution. If she were to have distributed it herself, you could argue that no one got hurt (or that she hurt herself, same thing).
We have the criminal court system for preventing people from doing bad things. The civil court system is only for making restitution. It sounds like most of the people defending this girl’s actions are doing so because they want the people punished. Again, that’s not the job of the civil court.
Nonsense. She is just as much harmed as if her images had been sold in a magazine. More so, because she is a child victim, and the images show her in a humiliating and painful situation. What woudl it be like to have to wonder, at the age of 20, 30, 40, whether some @$$hole is out there jacking off to the sight of your worst nightmare?
What is meant by the term “punitive damages?”
Edit: Nevermind.
And another update: the Fifth Circuit has decided in favor of Amy’s approach.
Is child porn actually purchased that often? I believe it’s mostly exchanged, or downloaded with peer-to-peer tools. Even if some people sell child porn, I doubt anybody is producing it for profit.
Vaguely related note I must share : while googling “download child porn” and “buy child porn” for this post, I noticed two cases of people planting child porn on someone else’s computer (in one case the culprit’s boss to get a promotion, in the other case the culprit’s coworker’s husband in the hope of latter seducing the coworker). In both cases, they were caught for being pretty stupid. One had left personal infos on the hard drive he had put in the victim’s computer, the other boasted to coworkers)
Still, that’s a pretty shitty thing to do, and I’m not sure there’s an easy way to exonerate yourself if done by a less stupid criminal. I guess this trick has been pulled by a number of people.
On a lighter note, I also found the story of a guy who tried to defend himself against child porn possession charges by stating his cat had probably accidentally downloaded a thousand pictures.
They did so as a matter of statutory interpretation - that the relevant restitutionary statute deliberately included restitution for the “full amount of the victim’s losses” and not just those losses “proximately caused” by the crime.
This is clearly right in interpretation (the “proximately caused” criterion is referenced in the catch-all clause at the end, as the court notes, so it makes no sense to read it in to the clause as a whole), but it is troubling in substance. Removing the proximity requirement seems to open the door to ‘unlimited liability of uncertain ambit’, something that the Courts, at least up here in Canada, are very reluctant to do. Presumably, this could mean that “Amy” could sue each and every person who possessed a child porn pic for the full amount of her damages - an absurd result. The court simply announces it is not concerned about that - but it ought to be.
Yeah. Didn’t work when my wife found all the “black pussy” websites in the browser history, either.
Perhaps absurd… but that’s what she’s doing now. Each person identified as having her images is being sued for the full amount of her damages.
And I think that it is an absurd result, because it lacks proportionality. Everyone accepts downloading a child porn pic is bad and wrong, but making a person who did so potentially liable for the full damages caused to the child so abused from his or her abuse is excessive.
I realize that this sort of thing can happen under various theories of “joint and several” liability in tort theory, but those are usually restrained by at least some notions of proximity. Remove proximity, and you soon get potential absurdity.
This is a perfect case of bad facts making bad law. Everyone hates child porn. Therefore, there is apparently no judicial restraint from imposing the worst possible legal scenario on child porn-viewers. Problem is that the precedent will not be confined to them … and pretty soon Americans start wondering why there is so damn much litigation going on.
How is that any different from joint and several liability? Or will she be entitled to collect the full amount of her damages from everyone?
Or, in other words, if one person pays the full amount then the others are off the hook unless the are sued by the person who paid for contribution? Or can she get a windfall by getting the full amount of damages paid by a potentially endless number of people? That last one seems ridiculous.
I just assume it will work like joint and several liability. The notion, I think, is to remove the burden of suing (potentially) thousands of people, most of whom may be unknown, from the plaintiff and put it squarely on the defendant s/he manages to catch.
The problem is that the defendant may have only the most tangental and fleeting relationship to the harm being sued for. While it makes sense to express detestation for kiddie porn-viewers, it makes no sense to hit them with (potentially) the full cost of the kid’s injuries for downloading a pic.
The unfairness of this can be demonstrated by an example. Say kid A is molested and his pic becomes extremely popular - fodder for hundreds of thousands of pedophiles world-wide, all of whom are caught by the feds. Kid B is molested in exactly the same way, but his pic isn’t popular - only one lonely pedophile in Kansas downloads it and gets caught. The harm to the two kids is the same - the molestation. Arguably, kid A is harmed worse by the wide-spread distribution of his pic. Yet, those pedophiles who download the pic of kid A are way better off than that fool in Kansas. They get to share the burden of paying his damages among hundreds of thousands. The guy in Kansas has to pay the full amount himself.
This Canadian documentary, Hunting the Predatorsfeatures a similar case. I watched it a few years ago, but checked quickly and she’s featured at first around the 7 minute mark (though I recommend watching the entire thing, as they dispel a lot of myths and answer a few questions posed here e.g. about how pedos exchange files).
No. Each pedophile is hit with the same damages. The pedos who are caught with “A” are EACH liable for the full amount of damages.
The child “A” will potentially collect much more money than the child “B.”
I documented this above:
No - I direct you to page 29 of the Petition.
The lawyer’s post was sloppy. His Petition makes the situation clear.
In short, this is nothing more nor less than the usual “contribution & indemnity” tort situation. The victim is not asking to get $3 million each from each defendant, but is seeking the “full amount” of her damages from a defendant - who is then free to seek contribution from his fellow-tortfeasors, and split the damages accordingly.
The Pedos in the “kid A” situation are far better off than those in the “kid B” situation, because they have fellow-tortfeasors to bear the load alongside them. They can divide that $3 million by a few hundred thousand.