first off, let’s make it clear that child porn is just plain wrong.

now, here’s what’s got me all upset about recent court activity:

the r. kelly trial

so they’re doing the r. kelly trial right now and apparently today they showed the alleged 25-minute sex tape to the jurors. what’s especially crazy about this?

Sketch artists were warned that if they drew any depiction of the acts on the tape, they, too, could be charged with child pornography.

OH COME ON. have we really gone so insane to believe that a court sketch artist is creating child pornography??

u.s. vs. williams

this court case was decided by the supreme court a day or two ago, and the court upheld a law that prohibits someone from trying to convince someone else that child porn is available. the really wacko part of this law?

The new law sets a five-year mandatory prison term for promoting, or pandering, child pornography. It does not require that someone actually possesses child pornography.

want to know why i think this is spooky? here’s a scenario:

let’s say you’re running a P2P filesharing program, or some sort of spyware gets on your computer, and ends up downloading and saving files to your computer without you knowing, and starts distributing those files to others. that’s not outside the realm of possibility.

let’s say that one or more of those files it saves is a porn image or video. again, it’s not unlikely for something like this to happen.

what if one of those porn files had a filename “hot naked xxx teen young blonde shaved tight wet.jpg”, which may or may not be accurate. it’s not uncommon for such files to have a variety of keywords in the file name. let’s say that none of those keywords are accurate, or certain keywords are accurate but there’s no chance that the subject was under 18.

according to this law, if the government for whatever reason found a file with that filename on your computer, what’s to stop them and a jury from saying “doesn’t matter, you expected it to be child porn, and it’s named in such a way to appeal to people searching for child porn” and throw you in prison for 5 years (mandatory minimum) because with a filename like “hot naked xxx teen young blonde shaved tight wet.jpg”, why wouldn’t you have expected it to be child porn?

want to send someone to prison?

step 1: smuggle a bunch of quesionably-named files on to someone’s computer and put them in their shared folder

step 2: call the cops

step 3: watch as they get hauled away

and customs is able to snoop through your laptop when you bring it into the country – they have that ability. what do you think would happen if customs poked around and found “hot naked xxx teen young blonde shaved tight wet.jpg” and other similarly named files on your hard drive? it’s one thing for them to toss you in prison if what you have is actually child porn, but this makes it so easy to toss someone away because of what someone else thinks!

let’s try something else here:

“The new law sets a five-year mandatory prison term for promoting, or pandering, child pornography. It does not require that someone actually possesses child pornography.”

change that to:

“The new law sets a five-year mandatory prison term for promoting, or pandering, [speeding in a car]. It does not require that someone actually [speed].”

“man, my car goes so fast! i can get from point A to point B in no time at all! nobody can catch me!”

see how ridiculous that seems when it removes the actual act from the crime?

yeah, i know a lot of this is devil’s advocate, but it doesn’t sit right with me.

But Justice Antonin Scalia, who wrote the majority opinion, wrote there is no “possibility that virtual child pornography or sex between youthful-looking adult actors might be covered by the term ‘simulated sexual intercourse,'” which is excluded under the law.

yeah, thanks justice scalia. mind giving folks a “get-out-of-jail free” card for assurance?

on a chuckles note, i wonder if all the harry potter slashfic writers even know about this, bahahaha…