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Child porn panic claims another victim

This isn't even so unusual anymore: high school students exchanging naked pictures of themselves, school administrators concerned, one saves a picture as evidence, the picture isn't actually pornographic even by Loudoun County standards, but OMG HE'S POSSESSING CHILD PORNOGRAPHY!!!!, zero-tolerance, life ruined. Note that Loudoun County is the same place where they had the filtering software lawsuit in 1998; as one of the smarter commentators on the Wired article points out, if you're going to subject children to that kind of repression, what do you expect them to do a few years later when they're young adults? This kind of disaster is inevitable as long as we think it's a good idea to ban the mere possession of speech. Freedom of expression must be absolute. See also my comments from a few years ago on Nymphet and instigation, which I'd been meaning to move to my new site code and now looks like the right time. As I said then, if we treat the normal sexual behaviour of human beings - which absolutely starts at an age well under 18 - as a frightening aberration, then we guarantee that we will be frightened pretty often.

(8 April 2009)

Copyright

Pages about copyright issues (15 March 2009)

Law and politics

Pages about legal and political matters (15 March 2009)

Nova Scotia man convicted of child pornography on shotacon anime possession

Here's a small item (scroll down - the page has several different stories on it) from the Halifax Chronicle Herald about a man in Nova Scotia pleading guilty to child pornography charges for possession of materials that included shotacon anime. I'll post links to better coverage if I find them. It's not a pure banned-anime case, in that he apparently also had materials featuring real children; anime fans often cite "But I don't have any real child porn" as a Get Out Of Jail Free card and this case doesn't directly contradict that. But I don't think any reasonable argument can be made that the Canadian authorities will leave you alone just because you don't have any pictures of real children. I hear that Dwight Whorley's conviction in the USA has been upheld, too - though some appeals still remain - so being in the USA isn't Get Out Of Jail Free card either. The statutes and prosecutors' interpretations thereof in both places are pretty clearly intended to cover purely fictional material.

(21 February 2009)

Which Canadian Supreme Court Justice are you? version 2

Read the following summaries of Supreme Court cases and decide how you would vote on each if you were one of the Justices; then find out which current or recently retired Justice most closely agrees with your opinions. (3 August 2008)

WCSCJAY Discussion Page

This page provides discussion threads for each of the cases in my "Which Canadian Supreme Court Justice are you?" quiz. (31 July 2008)

Trading stamps illegal in Canada

It has come to my attention that "trading stamps" are illegal in Canada, under section 427 of the Criminal Code. The definition of "trading stamps" in section 379 seems to pretty clearly include things like Air Miles. WTF? I'm guessing that this, like the "crime comics" provisions of section 163, is related to something that people were worried about several decades ago and nowadays it's pretty much irrelevant and everyone just ignores it. But we shouldn't have laws like that on the books. If we think points programs are perfectly okay, then we shouldn't have a statute saying they're an offence. As well as throwing the law into ill repute (why should I obey other sections of the Criminal Code when it's obviously full of nonsense?), it's asking for discriminatory selective enforcement (if the police don't like you, and you offer Air Miles, they have a convenient excuse for prosecution). Not a good idea.

On the other hand, I'd be interested to know what the original reasons were for introducing that at all. Most of the reasons I can think of why old-fashioned trading stamps might have been considered contrary to public policy at one time, seem like they would still be fully relevant today. Maybe such things actually should be illegal, and in that case, maybe section 427 should be enforced against retail "points" systems despite the ruckus that would no doubt cause. I certainly think we should do one or the other: repeal it or enforce it, but don't leave it unenforced and stinking up the place.

(29 July 2008)

Payment in Credit

Commentary on a Rebecca Tushnet article on fandom creation. (11 October 2007)

The terrible secret of Livejournal

I'm hearing another round of rumours about Six Apart, the company that runs Livejournal, and its deletion of Livejournal users.  It sounds like they've changed their code to make it less obvious when a user has been deleted (by hiding usernames or something, instead of showing them in strikethrough), and they're continuing to not follow their stated policies of issuing warnings and conducting reviews and so on.  The fandom community is up in arms, and the current situation is seen as an example of Six Apart not sticking to the promises it made last time there was a round of deletions.  I think the time has come for me to reveal the terrible secret of Livejournal - the one big issue behind this situation, that neither side wants to admit even to themselves.  Because of this one big issue, I think that fandom is making unreasonable demands of Livejournal.  This is a sort of open letter or reality check for the fandom community:  you can't expect Six Apart to give you what you're demanding, and you need to recognize why. (9 August 2007)

The law is not magic

People have the wrong idea about the law. They think it's magic. They think that the law consists entirely of arbitrary rules, technicalities, and loopholes, and that dealing with the law is primarily about getting around the challenges the system creates. The idea that there might be real standards of conduct with a point to them that you're supposed to actually follow instead of getting around, doesn't count for much. I think it's partly the fault of the media, in showing us ten examples of dysfunctional nonsense in the law for every one example of the system actually working as it's meant to, so that we think the dysfunctional nonsense is what it's actually meant to be about. It's also the fault of the legislators, courts, and lawyers, for putting way too much dysfunctional nonsense into the law in the first place. But it's not all dysfunctional nonsense. The law generally does have a point to it, and the system is meant to actually work and to be for real.

(4 August 2007)

On Kodomo no Jikan and instigation

A great deal has already been said about Seven Seas and Kodomo no Jikan/Nymphet. People who want to know about that stuff already do. There is just one thing relating to that mess that I'd like to comment on here; it concerns a point in Jason DeAngelis's first public statement on the subject. He has since retracted some of the statement, but the principle illustrated is more general than just this one incident.

(31 May 2007)

Some thoughts on Google in China

Lots of people are saying a lot of things about Google's recent announcement that they will obey Chinese censorship rules to filter their search results on their Chinese search engine. For a simple and graphic demonstration of the consequences, you can compare the image results for the query "Tiananmen" between regular (U.S.) Google and Google China. There are a few important points that people seem to have made either explicitly or by implication in this discussion, that I'd like to challenge. 新年快乐 to those celebrating the Year of the Dog, by the way.

(28 January 2006)

Edmonton Journal scales new heights of cluelessness on lolicon story

Okay, some time ago I reported on the arrest of a man in Edmonton for attempting to import what would be best described as hard-core lolicon manga (details below). Now, it's being reported (Anime News Network article, Edmonton Sun article) that he's received an 18-month conditional sentence, community service, and a fine.

(22 October 2005)

R. v. Beattie: stories illegal because the kids enjoyed it

This is a frightening decision (PDF here, recommended if you can read it because the quotations aren't properly marked up in the HTML) from the Ontario Court of Appeal in April of 2005. I found out about it while reading contemporaneous Justice Committee evidence (and my comments on that evidence were delayed, because this is more important). You must read this case. I'll say it again, you must read this case, even the disgusting quotes. It's important.

(16 June 2005)

Synthetic Statehood

I recently had occasion to take another look at the Ceejbot blog, run by talk.bizarre alumna C.J. Silverio (and possibly other people, too; the way it's set up isn't 100% clear to me).  Lots of interesting stuff in there, and I think I'll be adding it to my Rippy configuration, but the article that caught my attention today was the link to Terranova's commentary on the WoW Naked Gnome Protest. (3 February 2005)

Colour, social beings, and undecidability

Okay, it's been about two months since I posted my piece about colourful bits, and I really should have posted a follow-up before now, but better late than never.  First of all, here are ten other places that carried the story, in no particular order: (9 August 2004)

What Colour are your bits?

There's a classic adventure game called Paranoia which is set in an extremely repressive Utopian futuristic world run by The Computer, who is Your Friend.  Looking at a recent LawMeme posting and related discussion, it occurred to me that the concept of colour-coded security clearances in Paranoia provides a good metaphor for a lot of copyright and intellectual freedom issues, and it may illuminate why we sometimes have difficulty communicating and understanding the ideologies in these areas. (10 June 2004)

LawMeme covers virtual property

This article from James Grimmelmann in LawMeme is absolutely fascinating, and I recommend you read it carefully.  It's all about the legal and social questions raised by the concept of "property" in online communities, as discussed at the State of Play conference.  We've all been thinking about "intellectual property" in meatspace, but the existence of systems like MMORPGs creates a whole parallel set of "virtual property" issues which are sort of like "intellectual property", sort of not, and interact with intellectual and real property in complicated ways.  Attempts to solve virtual property issues may have consequences for intellectual and real property issues as well. (3 December 2003)

20 exceptions to prove C-20

How the Canadian Government's absurd child pornography law forces courts to unravel arbitrarily complex fictional plots. (25 January 2003)