9 ms·

How I love crazy interactions between laws and the unintended consequences. And laws related to children are seemly really prone to that, like the prohibitions

by speeder 14y ago

How I love crazy interactions between laws and the unintended consequences. And laws related to children are seemly really prone to that, like the prohibitions in taking photos of naked minors, that had three important results in my view: One, allow stupid cases, like ones that DO happened in the US, where for example a 15 year old girl was prosecuted for giving photos of herself to her boyfriend (also a minor). Two, makes illegal to take photos of some real crimes, for example if you take a photo of a guy raping a minor girl in a park and hand to the police, you can still be prosecuted for taking the photo. Three, meddles with human sexuality in ways that few people understand, although many people now believes that people below 18 are incapable of having sex with responsability, I refuse to believe that my mother (met my father when she was 15, they are still married) or my grandmother (married my grandfather when she was 14, they are still married and VERY happy) were some sort of stupid children that did not knew what they were doing.

gambiting 14y ago
I believe you have seen this article? http://falkvinge.net/2012/09/07/three-reasons-child-porn-must-be-re-legalized-in-the-coming-decade/ http://falkvinge.net/2012/09/07/three-reasons-child-porn-mus...
3825 14y ago
>for example if you take a photo of a guy raping a minor girl in a park and hand to the police, you can still be prosecuted for taking the photo well, that is just wrong. what if it is an unmonitored security camera?
- gambiting 14y ago
  In the US recording child pornography usually carries a larger penalty than raping a child. Imagine walking through the park at night with Google Glasses on, recording what you see. And there is a rape going on - congratulations, if you go and report it to the police, you "might" be put in jail for longer than the rapist. Unlikely? Maybe - but it's completely within the law.
  - DanBC 14y ago
    Please stop calling it child pornography. These are images of child sexual abuse. Actually, I'd prefer it if people stopped spreading hateful lies about how acceptable images of child sexual abuse are, and how this abuse causes no harm, and how it should be fine for people to make and possess and distribute these images of abuse; and if they stopped spreading FUD about how taking a photo of a man raping a child to give to the police would mean you'd be arrested, but I realise that apologists for paedophilia[1] are very vocal on the Internet. > In the US recording child pornography usually carries a larger penalty than raping a child. Do you have any citations for this? Specifically, a crime where a person has been given a longer sentence for recording images of child sexual abuse when that did not also involve carrying out the child sexual abuse? [1] don't fucking dare try to start with the ephebophila nonsense.
    - scarmig 14y ago
      Afraid I'm not following you. What's the issue with using "child pornography" to denote "images of child sexual abuse"? It's not like child pornography has undergone some fluffy rebranding that makes people go "oh yeah that's cool!" If anything, "child pornography" will probably set off a quicker, harsher reaction than "images of child sexual abuse." The latter is almost clinical in its approach: people will spend a couple seconds parsing it to try to figure out what it means, while child pornography evokes a very visceral, gut reaction. Using your preferred phrasing seems weird enough that, if not for your context, I might assume the user was trying to create a subcategory of child pornography that's real "child sexual abuse," implicitly also creating a complementary subcategory of some kind of legitimate child pornography that's somehow not abusive. Obviously not what you're doing, so what's the motivation, here?
    - gambiting 14y ago
      There you go, I am not making shit up as I go, but read articles in other places on the Internet too: http://falkvinge.net/2012/09/07/three-reasons-child-porn-must-be-re-legalized-in-the-coming-decade/ http://falkvinge.net/2012/09/07/three-reasons-child-porn-mus... The abuse carries harm. The images however,do not. If they did, how would it be legal(as it is) for me to download a video of two guys killing another one, stabbing him in the eyes and the throat with a screwdriver? This is also a video of a crime, yet one is legal and the other is not. I tend to agree with the article I linked here - it's because we(as a society) would rather make the very existence of information illegal, because it does not go well with our morals, and not because it's a logical thing to do. Ban on cp is actively(as in - right now) stopping predators and criminals from being caught.
onemorepassword 14y ago
In this case however, and in two of the examples you mentioned, these are no "unintended consequences". The laws are deliberately broad to allow the interest groups that lobbied for it to basically lay down the law without pesky democratic interference. In this case, it's corporations that want to arbitrarily add new restrictions they haven't even thought of yet (or perhaps have already), so they want a broad law they can later redefine and apply as they please. Making breaking the terms of service crime allows them to do that. It basically allows them to write their own laws, including absurd ones. In two of the examples you've given we're talking about laws that have be devised by people that want to enforce a repressive sexual morality on society. It absolutely is their intention to make any sexually oriented activity by anyone under 18 illegal. And the sick part of it is, that by making it illegal in practice, they slowly manage to convince the rest of society things that used to be perfectly normal and harmless are now Very Bad Things(TM), which in turn allows them to push even further. See also: the history of copyright. This currently happens in every Western country. We are considerably less free than the previous generation, and things are getting worse. This is not "unintended", there's a method behind it.
- rozap 14y ago
  I agree. It's a shame legislators don't see this sort of thing in the same light as the court described in the article. Laws like this have far reaching and sinister consequences. This sort of problem is summed up nicely in the original post - "As the Ninth Circuit explained, “Ubiquitous, seldom-prosecuted crimes invite arbitrary and discriminatory enforcement.”"
  - newman314 14y ago
    I'm not so sure about not seeing it in the same light. It's more likely that they either don't know or worse, don't care.
    - charonn0 14y ago
      I think it has more to do with their priorities. They want to be reelected, which has become less a matter of policy stance and more of financing campaigns.
blhack 14y ago
>I refuse to believe that my mother (met my father when she was 15, they are still married) or my grandmother (married my grandfather when she was 14, they are still married and VERY happy) were some sort of stupid children that did not knew what they were doing. Your parents and grand parents grew up in a time when divorce wasn't culturally acceptable and likely just "toughed it out". http://divorce.lovetoknow.com/Historical_Divorce_Rate_Statistics http://divorce.lovetoknow.com/Historical_Divorce_Rate_Statis...
- fakeer 14y ago
  A divorce is never a good thing, certainly not if children are involved. But toughing it out is not an option either. Marriage is a human decision and we are known for making mistakes, aren't we? And if we did make a mistake, we have to rectify it or try to rectify it. Over the time, the increase in divorce rate has has a lot to do with (personal) freedom, education and exposure especially of women; and not to the mention the era of women-emancipation and after. Each period in the article correlates with women's status in society at the time, and is mentioned in there. It would be interesting to know what were the % of divorces where women initiated it(it's recorded, right?).
  - speeder 14y ago
    Women initiate about 70% (or more) of no fault divorces. http://www.divorce-lawyer-source.com/faq/emotional/who-initiates-divorce-men-or-women.html http://www.divorce-lawyer-source.com/faq/emotional/who-initi... Unfortunately the link does not provide further link to sources, but it claims it comes from US census. I had seen the US census links, and it is correct, also the same is true in Brazil (our laste census resulted in also about 70% of women initiating divorce with no provided reason). Later if I have time I will edit this post to post the census links.
- fluidcruft 14y ago
  Sorry, I don't think your information is useful. Admission is data relating to divorce rates of people that were married in their mid teens. The yearly marriage and divorces tallies you're offering include quite a bit of "churn" from the subset of serially married. Particularly since the overall number of marriages per year has decreased significantly despite population growth.
pcl 14y ago
These laws also outlaw the sorts of pictures my parents have in their house -- photos of my sister and I splashing around naked in the kitchen sink when we were infants.
- mistercow 14y ago
  IANAL but I don't think those pictures would qualify as CP under the law (in the US), unless they are "suggestive" in nature.
  - betterunix 14y ago
    Maybe, but the fact that the standard is so completely subjective is extremely troubling. Equally troubling is that the law covers cartoons and even written text.
    - mistercow 14y ago
      >Equally troubling is that the law covers cartoons There actually isn't very good legal precedent for this yet. In each case where someone was convicted of possession of CP involving cartoons and drawings, there has also been possession of photographs, with one exception. In that exception, the defendant plead guilty. However, even in that case the judge ruled that the "visual depiction of any kind" part of the law was unconstitutional. >even written text I am pretty sure that's false. Do you have a citation?
      - betterunix 14y ago
        The PROTECT Act of 2003 criminalizes written text that is meant to cause someone to believe that any material is child pornography; this is the "pandering" provision. The Supreme Court overturned an appeals court decision that found that clause to be unconstitutional, paving the way for prosecutions over something as simple as telling someone that a link will lead to them child pornography (which, in fact, was what the case was about). To put it plainly, if you email me random numbers and claim that they are an encrypted child pornography image, you are a felon. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PROTECT_Act_of_2003 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PROTECT_Act_of_2003 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Williams https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Williams It is also not the case that only one person has been prosecuted over cartoons but no real child pornography; there have been at least two notable cases so far (and likely others that have not made the news): http://www.sankakucomplex.com/2008/10/24/american-faces-20-years-over-loli-manga/ http://www.sankakucomplex.com/2008/10/24/american-faces-20-y... http://comipress.com/special/miscellaneous/down-the-slippery-slope-the-crime-of-viewing-manga http://comipress.com/special/miscellaneous/down-the-slippery... Really though, even if we ignore the fact that here in the United States we are talking about illegal cartoons, my point was that the law is not meant to protect minors. It should be clear from the fact that no minors are involved in the creation of such cartoons that that is the case. The point of these kinds of laws is to increase the power of the police to conduct searches or to arrest people, and to give prosecutors more power in plea bargaining and at trial. The theory behind this kind of law is that the police are too limited by things like civil rights, and that prosecutors are too limited by our justice system; therefore, more laws must be passed to compensate for such restrictions on executive branch power. The way our politicians view this issue, if prosecutors are unable to convict lots of people for possession of child pornography because of constitutional restrictions on evidence gathering or the fact that defendants are allowed to actually defend themselves in court, then the prosecutors must be allowed to tack more charges on. After all, if a prosecutor is unable to build a strong case for one charge, they might still be able to convict a person by building a weak cases for multiple charges. If a defendant believes they can successfully defend on charge, they might not believe that they can successfully defend many charges and will thus forfeit their civil rights and just take a plea bargain. This is a troubling attack on our most important rights. The fact that we cannot be arbitrarily thrown into prison is one of the things that makes America a great country. Every expansion of police and prosecutor power etches away at that fact and attacks our rights.
afreak 14y ago
Point two isn't an issue in Commonwealth countries: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colour_of_right http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colour_of_right It would fall under the definition of "means an honest belief that an act is justifiable". If the photo of the girl getting raped in a park was meant to help catch the rapist, then any laws that would have gotten you in trouble for taking the photo would likely be tossed aside.
- Evbn 14y ago
  But "meant" is interpreted by the court, not clear by evidence.
sodomizer 14y ago
I want to meet your parents and grandparents. They sound lovely. In defense of the laws, however, they were formulated only to regulate sex outside of marriage. With love and marriage, sex was viewed as something else. For proof of this, look to the prosecutions. If we had a vast history of people being prosecuted for marrying young, that would be one thing. Instead we've got a lot of busts in parks or having other public trysts.
- Evbn 14y ago
  That's because minor marriage is illegal and simply can't happen, so they become trysts instead.

by speeder 14y ago

gambiting 14y ago

I believe you have seen this article? http://falkvinge.net/2012/09/07/three-reasons-child-porn-must-be-re-legalized-in-the-coming-decade/ http://falkvinge.net/2012/09/07/three-reasons-child-porn-mus...

3825 14y ago

>for example if you take a photo of a guy raping a minor girl in a park and hand to the police, you can still be prosecuted for taking the photo well, that is just wrong. what if it is an unmonitored security camera?

gambiting 14y ago
In the US recording child pornography usually carries a larger penalty than raping a child. Imagine walking through the park at night with Google Glasses on, recording what you see. And there is a rape going on - congratulations, if you go and report it to the police, you "might" be put in jail for longer than the rapist. Unlikely? Maybe - but it's completely within the law.
- DanBC 14y ago
  Please stop calling it child pornography. These are images of child sexual abuse. Actually, I'd prefer it if people stopped spreading hateful lies about how acceptable images of child sexual abuse are, and how this abuse causes no harm, and how it should be fine for people to make and possess and distribute these images of abuse; and if they stopped spreading FUD about how taking a photo of a man raping a child to give to the police would mean you'd be arrested, but I realise that apologists for paedophilia[1] are very vocal on the Internet. > In the US recording child pornography usually carries a larger penalty than raping a child. Do you have any citations for this? Specifically, a crime where a person has been given a longer sentence for recording images of child sexual abuse when that did not also involve carrying out the child sexual abuse? [1] don't fucking dare try to start with the ephebophila nonsense.
  - scarmig 14y ago
    Afraid I'm not following you. What's the issue with using "child pornography" to denote "images of child sexual abuse"? It's not like child pornography has undergone some fluffy rebranding that makes people go "oh yeah that's cool!" If anything, "child pornography" will probably set off a quicker, harsher reaction than "images of child sexual abuse." The latter is almost clinical in its approach: people will spend a couple seconds parsing it to try to figure out what it means, while child pornography evokes a very visceral, gut reaction. Using your preferred phrasing seems weird enough that, if not for your context, I might assume the user was trying to create a subcategory of child pornography that's real "child sexual abuse," implicitly also creating a complementary subcategory of some kind of legitimate child pornography that's somehow not abusive. Obviously not what you're doing, so what's the motivation, here?
  - gambiting 14y ago
    There you go, I am not making shit up as I go, but read articles in other places on the Internet too: http://falkvinge.net/2012/09/07/three-reasons-child-porn-must-be-re-legalized-in-the-coming-decade/ http://falkvinge.net/2012/09/07/three-reasons-child-porn-mus... The abuse carries harm. The images however,do not. If they did, how would it be legal(as it is) for me to download a video of two guys killing another one, stabbing him in the eyes and the throat with a screwdriver? This is also a video of a crime, yet one is legal and the other is not. I tend to agree with the article I linked here - it's because we(as a society) would rather make the very existence of information illegal, because it does not go well with our morals, and not because it's a logical thing to do. Ban on cp is actively(as in - right now) stopping predators and criminals from being caught.

onemorepassword 14y ago

In this case however, and in two of the examples you mentioned, these are no "unintended consequences". The laws are deliberately broad to allow the interest groups that lobbied for it to basically lay down the law without pesky democratic interference. In this case, it's corporations that want to arbitrarily add new restrictions they haven't even thought of yet (or perhaps have already), so they want a broad law they can later redefine and apply as they please. Making breaking the terms of service crime allows them to do that. It basically allows them to write their own laws, including absurd ones. In two of the examples you've given we're talking about laws that have be devised by people that want to enforce a repressive sexual morality on society. It absolutely is their intention to make any sexually oriented activity by anyone under 18 illegal. And the sick part of it is, that by making it illegal in practice, they slowly manage to convince the rest of society things that used to be perfectly normal and harmless are now Very Bad Things(TM), which in turn allows them to push even further. See also: the history of copyright. This currently happens in every Western country. We are considerably less free than the previous generation, and things are getting worse. This is not "unintended", there's a method behind it.

rozap 14y ago
I agree. It's a shame legislators don't see this sort of thing in the same light as the court described in the article. Laws like this have far reaching and sinister consequences. This sort of problem is summed up nicely in the original post - "As the Ninth Circuit explained, “Ubiquitous, seldom-prosecuted crimes invite arbitrary and discriminatory enforcement.”"
- newman314 14y ago
  I'm not so sure about not seeing it in the same light. It's more likely that they either don't know or worse, don't care.
  - charonn0 14y ago
    I think it has more to do with their priorities. They want to be reelected, which has become less a matter of policy stance and more of financing campaigns.

blhack 14y ago

>I refuse to believe that my mother (met my father when she was 15, they are still married) or my grandmother (married my grandfather when she was 14, they are still married and VERY happy) were some sort of stupid children that did not knew what they were doing. Your parents and grand parents grew up in a time when divorce wasn't culturally acceptable and likely just "toughed it out". http://divorce.lovetoknow.com/Historical_Divorce_Rate_Statistics http://divorce.lovetoknow.com/Historical_Divorce_Rate_Statis...

fakeer 14y ago
A divorce is never a good thing, certainly not if children are involved. But toughing it out is not an option either. Marriage is a human decision and we are known for making mistakes, aren't we? And if we did make a mistake, we have to rectify it or try to rectify it. Over the time, the increase in divorce rate has has a lot to do with (personal) freedom, education and exposure especially of women; and not to the mention the era of women-emancipation and after. Each period in the article correlates with women's status in society at the time, and is mentioned in there. It would be interesting to know what were the % of divorces where women initiated it(it's recorded, right?).
- speeder 14y ago
  Women initiate about 70% (or more) of no fault divorces. http://www.divorce-lawyer-source.com/faq/emotional/who-initiates-divorce-men-or-women.html http://www.divorce-lawyer-source.com/faq/emotional/who-initi... Unfortunately the link does not provide further link to sources, but it claims it comes from US census. I had seen the US census links, and it is correct, also the same is true in Brazil (our laste census resulted in also about 70% of women initiating divorce with no provided reason). Later if I have time I will edit this post to post the census links.
fluidcruft 14y ago
Sorry, I don't think your information is useful. Admission is data relating to divorce rates of people that were married in their mid teens. The yearly marriage and divorces tallies you're offering include quite a bit of "churn" from the subset of serially married. Particularly since the overall number of marriages per year has decreased significantly despite population growth.

pcl 14y ago

These laws also outlaw the sorts of pictures my parents have in their house -- photos of my sister and I splashing around naked in the kitchen sink when we were infants.

mistercow 14y ago
IANAL but I don't think those pictures would qualify as CP under the law (in the US), unless they are "suggestive" in nature.
- betterunix 14y ago
  Maybe, but the fact that the standard is so completely subjective is extremely troubling. Equally troubling is that the law covers cartoons and even written text.
  - mistercow 14y ago
    >Equally troubling is that the law covers cartoons There actually isn't very good legal precedent for this yet. In each case where someone was convicted of possession of CP involving cartoons and drawings, there has also been possession of photographs, with one exception. In that exception, the defendant plead guilty. However, even in that case the judge ruled that the "visual depiction of any kind" part of the law was unconstitutional. >even written text I am pretty sure that's false. Do you have a citation?
    - betterunix 14y ago
      The PROTECT Act of 2003 criminalizes written text that is meant to cause someone to believe that any material is child pornography; this is the "pandering" provision. The Supreme Court overturned an appeals court decision that found that clause to be unconstitutional, paving the way for prosecutions over something as simple as telling someone that a link will lead to them child pornography (which, in fact, was what the case was about). To put it plainly, if you email me random numbers and claim that they are an encrypted child pornography image, you are a felon. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PROTECT_Act_of_2003 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PROTECT_Act_of_2003 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Williams https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Williams It is also not the case that only one person has been prosecuted over cartoons but no real child pornography; there have been at least two notable cases so far (and likely others that have not made the news): http://www.sankakucomplex.com/2008/10/24/american-faces-20-years-over-loli-manga/ http://www.sankakucomplex.com/2008/10/24/american-faces-20-y... http://comipress.com/special/miscellaneous/down-the-slippery-slope-the-crime-of-viewing-manga http://comipress.com/special/miscellaneous/down-the-slippery... Really though, even if we ignore the fact that here in the United States we are talking about illegal cartoons, my point was that the law is not meant to protect minors. It should be clear from the fact that no minors are involved in the creation of such cartoons that that is the case. The point of these kinds of laws is to increase the power of the police to conduct searches or to arrest people, and to give prosecutors more power in plea bargaining and at trial. The theory behind this kind of law is that the police are too limited by things like civil rights, and that prosecutors are too limited by our justice system; therefore, more laws must be passed to compensate for such restrictions on executive branch power. The way our politicians view this issue, if prosecutors are unable to convict lots of people for possession of child pornography because of constitutional restrictions on evidence gathering or the fact that defendants are allowed to actually defend themselves in court, then the prosecutors must be allowed to tack more charges on. After all, if a prosecutor is unable to build a strong case for one charge, they might still be able to convict a person by building a weak cases for multiple charges. If a defendant believes they can successfully defend on charge, they might not believe that they can successfully defend many charges and will thus forfeit their civil rights and just take a plea bargain. This is a troubling attack on our most important rights. The fact that we cannot be arbitrarily thrown into prison is one of the things that makes America a great country. Every expansion of police and prosecutor power etches away at that fact and attacks our rights.

afreak 14y ago

Point two isn't an issue in Commonwealth countries: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colour_of_right http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colour_of_right It would fall under the definition of "means an honest belief that an act is justifiable". If the photo of the girl getting raped in a park was meant to help catch the rapist, then any laws that would have gotten you in trouble for taking the photo would likely be tossed aside.

Evbn 14y ago
But "meant" is interpreted by the court, not clear by evidence.

sodomizer 14y ago

I want to meet your parents and grandparents. They sound lovely. In defense of the laws, however, they were formulated only to regulate sex outside of marriage. With love and marriage, sex was viewed as something else. For proof of this, look to the prosecutions. If we had a vast history of people being prosecuted for marrying young, that would be one thing. Instead we've got a lot of busts in parks or having other public trysts.

Evbn 14y ago
That's because minor marriage is illegal and simply can't happen, so they become trysts instead.