All pornography, including online material, is now classed as child porn unless the providers can prove the age of all the participants shown. Also, actors' photo ID must be held for seven years by the producers of pornographic material.
The changes to the law have been compared to the Patriot Act because there is the potential for people outside of the intended range to be prosecuted. Already the Free Speech Coalition is challenging the law through the courts.
Another aspect which campaigners are voicing concerns about is regarding the safety of women who operate pornographic webcams, since the law now states that their physical address should be published online, leaving them vunerable to stalking, etc.
People like William Gaines (founder of M.A.D. Magazine ) had to fight for freedom from this Red Scare when he had to defend EC Comics from censorship. Ever wonder about the history of the 'Approval' stamp on all those mainstream comics appearing on 7-11 shelves?
Now store-owners are getting busted for selling something that is not considered porno by anyone except the local yahoo police.
I can tell you a thing or two about stalkers. My girlfriend told some guy she knew online what mall she worked at, and the next thing she knew the guy had searched the whole place for her. He didn't even say hi, he just watched her and then told her about it later. Exterminate. >:T
“LOOK AT THE PORNOGRAPHERS!” Meanwhile the Neo-Cons are raping the country for every penny they can get their greedy hands on and we take it up the a** without the benefit of lube and don’t even see what is coming. If the networks weren’t in Dubya’s pockets so deep they would be running a reality TV magic show and we’d all watch Dubya make the whole country disappear. Hey Dubya! I don’t give a sh!t about pornographers! Stop the war and bring back our jobs you A-HOLE!
monsters the world has ever seen. Remember Prohibition? The same Moral Right fought to make alcohol illegal. The had the simplistic mind set that once it is illegal it will go away. People will not want to drink because it is against the law. It of course failed and ushered in the era of Organized Crime. Al Capone made his money and criminal empire off of stupid blind laws such as these. I think the world got off easy with Al Capone, he could have been much worst. Blind Moral laws will unleash monsters like we have never seen before. If you consider how much money legitamate Porn makes, then take that away and give it to Organized Crime like the War on Drugs has accoplished, paints a scary picture.
man wasn't that your classic anti-bush movie... "Obi Wan, you're either with me, or your my enemy".
Seriously though, look at McCarthy and the anti-communist campaign.. look at the Salem witch trials... I know it's not the same, but the Patriot Act, AND this porn debacle are yet MORE infractions on American freedom.
I'm not American, nor do I live in the USA, but I'm sorry to see things going in this direction, and I'm VERY scared that Mr. Dubya is going to take the rest of us with him.
Its considered child porn UNLESS you can proove otherwise. So in effect you are guilty until proven innocent. I thought americans were different but, then again, child porn is like the communism trials were. If you dont agree with every 'effort' to stop it, you are seen as engaging in it. So if you speak out about this law, and say its useless, backwards, unethical etc, expect a visit from your local cops saying they have found 'proof' that you have kiddy porn. And you bet your ass they will make sure they tell everyone you know that they have found it on you, even if you dont have any.
"And you bet your ass they will make sure they tell everyone you know that they have found it on you."
Actually, they go one step further. After you are found with it, get your court done with, pay your punishment, and get released. That person then has to be registered for life as a sex offender, and then that person has to tell everyone that lives/works/anything around them that they are a registered sex offender.
So while a guy who shot, stabbed, assulted, robbed, raped a corpse, conned old people out of their life savings, or any other number of crimes doesn't have to reveal to anyone that they did something like that once they are set free (because after all they served their time for the crime), the guy who had unregistered porn (child porn by these laws), has to, for the rest of their life, tell everyone that they are a registered sex offender.
Now they can search your house without permission or warrant thanks to the Patriot Act. Then they find some porn on your computer, and unless you can provide a photo ID copy for each model you are charged with possession of child porn. Once you get out of jail you are now a registered sex offender, so you can never get a job.
Republicans are fast becoming nazi-ish. Control of media, Illegal or forceful taking of power. War and invasion of 'enemies' of the state. Unfound reason for imprisoning people far beyond haebus corpus.
Unfortunately there will be no one to save the day this time.
It seems to me that the neocon religious Republican right are never too far away from porn. Look at the Gannongate scandal (supressed by the mainstream media) where he was blowing Bush's trumpet (ooeerr) while appearing on gay military-style porno websites. There have been rumours for years concerning various Republicans being directly linked to porn rings (specifically including adoleacent males) but although the rumours and conspiracy theories run abound nothing has officially come to light. Sometimes its the ones who preach the loudest and strictest that you have to keep an eye on. Denial and self-shame often manifests itself in the strangest ways.
so let's see... the govt' can come in on unrelated suspicion, sieze your computers, then turn around and force you to "sell" your home to Wal-Mart.. and there's not thing one you can do about it...
I agree fully with you both. It's a fine line between not promoting something, and permitting it, and that's the line I try to aim at, however, this is way in the opposite direction and will only lead to increased involvement of social undesirables, including organised crime.
Why are the conservatives so focused on porn? From hearing them talk you would think that 5-year-olds are buying it down at the local Wal Mart. I'm all for eliminating child porn but the guys who made that shit wern't exactly keeping records of the subjects ages in the first place. What is this going to accomplish other than hurting legitimate sites and stores?
Nope your wrong: "Also, actors' photo ID must be held for seven years by the producers of pornographic material."
Only the producers must keep these records. All it means is, start one company. Make some movies. Shut down teh company for some reason after you have given the rights to the movies to another company - therefor you are not a producer but a distributer and dont need those IDs etc.
If I download a bunch of porn from a newsgroup right now and then open a porn website I could fall foul of this updated law.
Even though I was not the producer of the images if I could not provide proof that the models in the images were of adults, then technically I could be found guilty of possession and distribution of child pornography.
So your idea of circumventing the law would not work. Basically this new law allows the government to shut down any website they take a dislike to if there are any images of nudity and less than perfect record keeping. I guess they are looking to China for leadership on this one.
I suggest you do some research on this issue before you start telling people they are wrong.
I was being sarcastic when I talked about the government becoming like the Chinese government. Sorry that went over your head. But it is not a huge leap to see that if porn on the web is now erroneously categorized as child porn, then so could porn on your home computer.
For that matter, I wonder if this law could be applied to ISPs that host porn images in newsgroups. How long will it be before this law 'evolves' to the next level and ISPs are prosecuted for storing porn on their servers without proof of age.
My original post was not an actual commentary on what was really going on, but an example of how the law could be further abused in the future. But this law is, as someone else said, pretty despicable. By equating porn with child porn the government can in their all too common methodology say, “Either you are for banning child porn or you are a pedophile that wants to harm children.” It’s just another attack on our freedom and will do nothing to protect children as they are representing.
Sorry if my post hurt your ego and in your eyes I have gone from ‘clever’ to a ‘moron.’ I’ll try and climb down off this high horse, just to make you happy.
That is an excellent point. How nude is nude? What is art and what is porn? But also how old is a child? If some loving parent takes a picture of their two year old twins in the bath, is that porn? What if an eight year old girl is running around in the garden with nothing but some panties on, is that porn? What if a fully clothed teen girl is licking cream off a banana, is that porn?
One of the biggest reasons I have such distain for Republicans is that they like to make laws based on a perfect world scenario, that doesn’t really exist. They then misapply these laws and a lot of innocent people get hurt. It’s a really shame.
It is a sneaky underhanded thing this law. If they were to just outlaw porn like the Neo-Cons and Religious right want to then everybody would be on it because it is freedom of speech. This is trying to get around strait censorship by making hoops to jump though. You can still do what ever you want, just right down the details to protect the children. As if. I know religious people. My Dad is a Jehovah's Witness. I am not because I can't take the bible for face value. I don't know where its been since/if God wrote it. Could have been changed by King James or who ever and how would you know? Moving along. Religious people are weird about Sex. Look up a biography on Kellogg. Yes the Cereal guy. Corn flakes was invented and advertised at the time to lower sexual desire. These religious people are of the same breed of short sided, ignorant by choice people who tried the experiment of The Prohibition of Alcohol. They thought that if they took a ligitimate market and made laws against it, the market would disolve. They never imagined that it would be replaced by a violent Black market. Also drinking rose durring that time by about double. It was because alcohol was the in thing at the time. Like reality TV is today. I can only think that this will spark more kids to become curious about porn on the internet. Remember how much they wanted Clinton gone for moral reasons? They didn't do that, what they did do was make sure that every American CHILD knew what oral sex was after they tried to impeach him. These moral right blind faith people who wanted Clinton gone because he was a bad influence CORRUPTED the minds of children by making Oral Sex the topic of the Month. Kids were even learing the difference from Felatio and cunalingus. I never heard a 10 year girl old say Cunalingus on a bus until that Monica Lewinsky crapola. And why not, it was on EVERY news paper and TV news. She learned what it was because the Religious guys wanted Clinton out because he is a bad guy. Excellent Job Protecting our innocent youths.
BTW. I recommend everyone in the States starts to watch Penn & Teller's Bullshit. The new episode was on Gun Laws but all laws are similar because they are laws. Watch it on showcase or download the torrents from torrentspy.cmm, mininova.org or thepiratebay.org
I am in Canada so the DCMA doesn't touch me. Also this porn law. And I get free health care come to think of it. But anyway, If I were to record on VHS and mail it to you is legal under Canadian copyrights. Infact I now can prove that if the TV networks were to post torrents with commercials they would make money. Try to find these two freeware files on Torrent sites. America's Army and Enemy Territory. Both Free games. One from ID games, the other the American Army recuitment department. Why can't you find it on torrent sites? Because the site that made it is giving it away very efficiantly. If you do , download it for a bit to check speed to compair to the downloads from the official site. If the Network were to host a torrent seed that had the comercials NO ONE would bother to look for the commercial-less one and have it take many times longer to download. Torrents work on popularity. If the source hosted, it would be the most popular place to get it. Commercials or not, its still free to the guy getting it. Even if he just has his friend record it on VHS for him. They are only afraid of the shift in power. What is best for Americans, Even American Economy doesn't matter to them because their specific company might not make the transition. Read history on News papers vs TV/Radio news.
Getting back on this Porn law. I think they are trying to abolish sex. Read the Kellogg stuff or look up the guy who made Graham crackers. This is designed to scare Americans off Porn entirely. What this will accomplish is; 1) any american site that closes, an off shore site opens and america losses money. 2) every child in america will be reminded that there is porn on the net and it is easy to get. 3) Like the Marijuana Tax in the '40, when you could get legal pot but you needed a tax certificate that they NEVER gave to anyone. This is the first step to the War On Porn.
I'd have no problem with them wasting money like this if it was their's in the first place, and they didn't have a growing deficit.
Whatever turns you on. Some people are turned on by women smoking cigars. Some people are only turned on by naked women/men. I think its pretty much common sense to figure out what is porn and what is not.
(I dimly remember a case in the UK of a TV presenter that was shopped for taking naked pictures of their kids. Anyone know what I'm talking about, because I can't remember the names?)
We have an age of consent and an age of majority here in the UK and once you reach that age, if you want to be in porn, make porn, watch porn, and you are not hurting anyone in the process, what's the harm? If you are under 18, it should be a simple matter of looking at the production date and looking at their birth certificate. The math isn't that hard.
As for the war on porn, why bother? Don't like porn? Don't watch porn. Don't want your kids watching porn? that's what the pin number on your cable box is for. That's why its a good idea to have your internet enabled computer in a family room.
But I defy anyone to prevent a horny 14 boy from getting to porn. Put as much security and obstacles in his path as you want, but the kid is a bag full of hormones. You are never going to compete with that kind of motivation.
It will be very difficult to get rid of porn. Man has been creating porn since the dawn of time. As soon as cavemen could draw they drew two things. The things they ate and naked cave people. As soon we invented art, we got naked statues and naked paintings. As soon as we got photography, we got naked pictures. As soon as we got the internet, we got naked people on web cams from one side of the globe to the other. I'll give you 3 guesses as to what people will be watching if they ever get around to mass producing 3d display equipment.
But with everything going digital now and people sharing their family photo albums with holiday snaps in them, people have good reason to get scared. What looks like an innocent picture of your 14 year old daughter on a trip to the beach to you, could look like hardcore porn to a puritan.
Like with prostitution, banning it or making the market so awkward that it can hardly function will only drive it underground. As long as there are ppl who want it there will be a trade in it. Look at the war on drugs - we're no closer now to winning it then we were a generation ago. In fact, statistics say its got even worse. Why? Because millions of ppl globally want to take drugs and are willing to take risks and pay large sums for the pleasure.
The religious fundamentalists are going thru this exercise with the porn industry out of a sense of duty - if they don't try to make everyone around them conform to their moral worldview then they feel that they are jeopardising their own future in the afterlife. Or something similarly ridiculous.
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Child porn is more common today with easy child-access to digital technology and millions of websites willing to steal or actually pay for your recordings.
I see it as a license to drive in public = a license to show porn in public. You just gotta have proof of age before the millions of men secretly and pathetically masterb8 to your 'artwork'
"Child porn is more common today with easy child-access to digital technology and millions of websites willing to steal or actually pay for your recordings. "
Um, proof? It's all well and good to say that this sort of thing is more common, it's another to establish it as fact. Furthermore, we're not talking about a crackdown on underground sites, circles, and markets. If you're to prove that this is a growing problem necessitating these measures, you're going to need to prove that porn companies who operate in the open are buying into child porn more and more. That is who these laws affect.
"I see it as a license to drive in public = a license to show porn in public."
Yes, now imagine that you were the head of, say Fedex. The government steps in and says that you need copies of the licenses of every driver you've ever had, and you need to show them now or be shut down. This is not a perfect analogy, of course, but neither is yours. We're talking about companies, not private citizens who can simply run down to get their birth certificates, which in this case may or may not exist having not really been needed before. The product has already been produced and the company relies on it to stay afloat, so to crack down on it now is unfair governmental intrusion for, as I mentioned above, seemingly no good reason.
"You just gotta have proof of age before the millions of men secretly and pathetically masterb8 to your 'artwork.'"
"Secretly and pathetically?" Please, go back to the '50s when people held such naive attitudes and would buy that tripe. Form a commune or something if you don't like that today people don't see sex as shameful and a distinctly masculine pursuit, but keep your laws off private business and out of the personal lives of citizens. Such morality crusades have done nothing but harm to society.
Even if this law was pointed at the people making child porn (which it isn't), passing another law about it doesn't do any good since it is already against the law.
There are already child porn laws on the books, and being enforced, but it doesn't stop it. Making more won't do any good because CRIMINALS DON'T FOLLOW THE LAW!
Your using the same faulty argument that gun control advocates use. If we control the guns, the criminals won't have them...
Although Moment Of Clarity pointed out the majority of your nonsense, I have some things to say too.
“Child porn is more common today with easy child-access to digital technology and millions of websites willing to steal or actually pay for your recordings.
- So here’s a radical idea; if we assume for a second you are correct, why not put a stop to it? Clearly any right thinking individual has a problem with child pornography, so why not find out who is making it, who is abusing children, and arrest them? Try and trace it back to its’ source and put those perverts in jail. But this change to the law is not about doing that at all, just like the Patriot Act is not about being a patriot. All this law will do, if properly enforced, is put some smaller companies out of business that were not doing anything wrong in the first place. When the parent law of this one was introduced the government did nothing to inform companies about it or enforce it. It is hard to support such an ill-conceived law being introduced and then suddenly enforced with impunity. All this is is a right wing crack down on what they consider a ‘sin’ industry that does not deserve fair and just treatment. In a free society things like this should not happen.
”I see it as a license to drive in public = a license to show porn in public.”
- I see it is assuming guilt until innocence is proven, counter to the American way. It would be like the government visiting my business and assuming that everything in my office is stolen unless I can show a receipt for it.
“You just gotta have proof of age before the millions of men secretly and pathetically masterb8 to your 'artwork'”
- This statement is so full of ignorant stereotypes it’s hard to know where to start. Masturbation is a perfectly normal activity enjoyed by men and women of all ages. So to assume that it is okay to attack an entire industry simply because you are prude with some kind of sexual guilt is really not sensible logic. Clearly you have a number of sexual insecurities and immaturity; maybe you should examine your own problems before you talk about this kind of issue.
Ashcroft once forged a proposal that would classify any description or depiction of anyone under 18 as child porn. Under that set of rules Romeo and Juliet would be illegal. This seems to be a more subtle version of that proposal.
Perhaps the RIAA may be behind this. Think about this for every computer that would have a illegal song on it would it not also have a pic or two of porn. What better way to start gathering peoples computers as porn is the more frowned upon and if any particular computer didn't have porn it would most likely have an illegal song or two. They will getchya one way or the other.
I can understand wanting to stamp out child porn. Everyone, including the adult industry wants to do that. No producer wants to find out 6 months later that his starlet had a fake id. If I recall there was a suicide over Traci Lords... (not to mention millions of dollars in stock destroyed) The industry has it's hands tied here. The only recourse they can take after finding out someone has faked their way into mainstream porn underage, is put a blockade on all his/her future, legal work, and destroy his/her illegal stuff. "How nude is nude" The law is written so vague, it leaves it open to interpretation. I've seen claims that just nudity doesn't count. I've also seen claims to the opposite. It is interesting that the "art" sites can feature nude 12 years olds, as "art" without worry of the new law. The Government simply needed to enforce the law that was in place, and find the child pornographers offline, and shut them down. This law is only hurting law abiding citizens. Start writing your congressmen.
From the looks of it, it's the governments continued panic at the digital age. They didn't expect the internet to do what it has done with porn, music,movies, information ect. So now they are trying to scramble to make new laws, without knowing what they are regulating. They are either firing blindly, hoping to hit a child pornographer... Or, the more common theory: The Religious folks, and those with holier than thou morals wish to abolish porn all together. I think it's both, considering some of the comments made that got this law looked at. Things like "Pornographers kidnap children and force them into lesbian sex!". Someone screamed "EVIL OVER THERE!!!" and the government started shooting.
porn must go due to the fact of same-sex problems and civil unrest.it not harsh enough.we need to shut the industry down all the way.its promoting child abuses on many levels.children everywhere need protection right now.dont be afraid u.s go for a ban all the way canada will stand by with you....
- Wow what a brilliant idea. Let’s see that has worked so well with prohibition and the war on drugs, so why not introduce the same level of success to porn.
“porn must go due to the fact of same-sex problems and civil unrest.”
- I’m not sure where you live, although clearly it is a place where punctuation and capitalization are not taught, but I have never seen any civil unrest over porn. Maybe you could point out some news articles about these events.
Also I don’t think that being of the same sex is a problem per se, unless that is just a veiled homophobic reference because you don’t like gay people.
“it not harsh enough.we need to shut the industry down all the way.”
- So you think society would be better if we simply banned anything you deem offensive? The porn industry is a multi billion dollar industry for one simple reason: people like porn. If they didn’t there would be no industry. Your idea of shutting it down would merely push it underground and take away the ability to control it at all.
“its promoting child abuses on many levels.”
- Got any studies on that for us to read? That kind of statement is like saying we should ban the sale of belts, hangers, wooden spoons and hairbrushes, because some people that buy these implements use them to spank children.
“children everywhere need protection right now.”
- Won’t somebody think of the children? Well at least you got one of the main three arguments in that people are so fond of using. All you missed is a reference to Nazis or Hitler and something about a slippery slope.
“dont be afraid u.s go for a ban all the way canada will stand by with you....”
- Well that might just be the green light America was looking for. You know how America hates to do anything without the approval of Canada. So perhaps the Bush administration needs to call up there and see if there are any religious zealots and prudes who agree and then ban all porn with Canada right there supporting us. As soon as that happens all child abuse will magically stop, no one will have sex outside of wedlock, and society will quickly transform into the second Eden. Utopia on Earth once more. If only people would listen to such great ideas and put them into play, the world would be just like Heaven.
Please tell me that was sarcasm. If you are serious then I propose a ban on hockey. Or for that matter all professional sports. I'm sure you've heard f the riots that they can fuel.
