How long is it going to be before someone steps back and realises that the reason child porn is illegal in the first place is because its creation involves the exploitation of children?
Why won’t somebody think of the children?! =P
You mean, like “in order to protect the children”? Come on! You protect them when you fuck up their life for the rest of it! :roll:
Was doing some hunting about Canadian Customs, and I catch stuff like this:
http://www.icv2.com/articles/news/9602.html
http://elizabethmcclung.blogspot.com/20 … ans-x.html
Note to self: don’t move to Canada.
OMG! CNN is actually proposing that sex laws are too overreaching and need to be modified to fit the times?
http://www.cnn.com/2009/CRIME/04/08/gal … index.html
Wow! That’s so original and unheard of… I mean we eroge fans have only been talking about it for… what… YEARS!? :roll:
You’re telling me, I feel deprived of stuff your wonderful reviews sold me on long ago 
After they almost took my YMK thinking at first it was obscene then giving it back with a scratch I really lost pretty well all faith in shipping into Canada, and to think when I first started ero-gaming I was under the conception USA was stricter on this sort of thing than Canada was.
That obscenity rule is a crock of shit with how they use it half the time :evil:
That was quite good, yes!
Then I clicked on the ‘About’ link and saw that mediawatchuk was founded by Mary Whitehouse. =P
It’s like a double punchline!
The law here states that any written or drawn depiction of people under 18 is considered illegal and child porn. Since the vast majority of eroge happen to be set in high school and come on guys don’t kid yourselves its obvious quite a few of the characters are aged 15-18 and sometimes even 14 or 13 and since certain characters like “Kuu” from haruiro ouse could be considered children even if their age is set to 18 or something doesn’t that make this all illegal?
I mean technically shouldn’t I be going to jail for posessing games like Fortune Arterial etc. I mean i’d like to see the authorities actually play that shit and translate the Japanese and prove that it’s child porn but given that the man in Iowa was arrested for looking at a GaoGaiGar ad I got a feeling that I’m basically going to go to jail for this shit. I never had any problems mail ordering this stuff but it looks like I should quickly destroy the hundreds of dollars worth of eroge I’ve collected over the years because of the questionable legality of it all. I mean I can probably keep the peach princess/jast stuff because of the copout disclaimer for all characters being 18 but this is really disturbing. I had no idea this was illegal.
It’s not lolicon for our standards, but it is for theirs on the basis of the 18 or older stuff. Even though the vast majority of renai games etc are set in high school.
Without having any clue as to where you are, we really can’t comment as to if you are in trouble or not. If you are in the UK, then yes, there currently is an issue. If you are anywhere in the US, then whatever law you are looking at (which I would assume is state or local) won’t hold up in court because of precedent in the SCotUS (for now, and hopefully this never changes). There are currently a couple cases which could impact this issue in the US (which is why this thread was started), but for now it is fairly firm ground. As for Australia, I think I recall something being said about them looking at passing a bill almost identical to the one in the UK.
I’m a Cannuck.
It’s my understanding that Canada and lolicon don’t go together…
Law being referred in that quote, can be found here: http://www.efc.ca/pages/law/cc/cc.163.1.html
JLIST offerings ALWAYS depict people over 18 for a reason. Please take note that statement is a policy to help us.
As for what you can import from Japan… be aware of what you’re importing. Looks like you can get eroge with stuff like DFC, but not lolicon. Still… I’m no lawyer - especially of Canadian law - so I’m no expert on the matter.
I’m not talking about lolicon, most eroge take place with people who are obviously below age 18. Right off the bat, Tsukihime, Fate/Stay Night, Tsuyokiss, Tsuyokiss 2, Kanon, Da Capo, Clannad, Suica, Asukimi, Haruiro Ouse, Tayutama, Flyable Heart, etc etc all basically have some form of high school theme. It’s quite obvious that they are below 18 despite having like double D tits and “lady like” proportions. I have no interest in loli but for all intents and purposes just about any eroge when thought about on technicalities is basically child pornography on the basis of the characters being teenagers. The authorities can arbitrarily decide whether it’s loli or not simply by ripping the CG and claiming any character is below 18 regardless of what is written in Japanese. This is more to do with discrimination against anime nerds and less to do with actual law. Customs, authorities etc consider us all a bunch of depraved creeps and they will use the law to assist them in getting all of us unnecessarily arrested.
With the exception of Clannad, none of those are set in a highschool, though.
And you quite simply cannot determine the age of a 100% fictional and drawn character from an image. You can’t even determine the age of a real person purely from a photograph, either - you can get a fairly accurate estimate, but it can still be off by up to one or two years, and the ages of 17 and 18 are not very far apart.
Furthermore, some people have growth disorders that cause them to look younger than they actually are. Would you like to be the lawmaker that has to tell a 20 year old that they can’t have sex because they look ‘too young’?
The Iowa fellow plead guilty. Ouch. “Handley faces a maximum of 15 years in prison, a maximum fine of $250,000, and a three-year term of supervised release.” That’s totally insane.
15 years for reading Loli comics? Frank Abagnale was sentenced to 12 years in a federal prison for “passing bad checks worth about $2.5 million in 26 countries over the course of five years”, but apparently there are worse ways to put some ink on paper (in the U.S. at least) :roll: …
Ladies and gentlemen, this is extreme censorship at its highest level. Period.
Reading how the news is phrased on the CBLDF: http://www.cbldf.org/pr/archives/000390.shtml
He did a plea bargain: there was no jury verdict. It seems he didn’t think he could win or he couldn’t afford the costly court battles (because you know it would have been appealed and appealed). I don’t think he’s going to serve that much time/pay that much money.
Since no case was fought in court, no laws have changed… However it does set into motion, law enforcement’s ability to prosecute: they won this case, they’ll feel they can win another.
Yea… the topic of this post has just come true.
Also note that he faced two charges:
#1: possessing obscene visual representations of the sexual abuse of children
#2: mailing obscene material.
The CBLDF was helping with #1… however he could have been found guilty of #2 because of the recent plea bargain in this case:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Sta … Associates
It would appear bad times are head for us… people simply can’t afford to fight these court battles in the current bad economy.
Please note that violent eroge (guro, extreme rape, etc) is effected by the United States v. Extreme Associates case:
http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/09070/954717-100.stm
So it’s becoming more than lolicon…
I’ve already begun saving up money to buy some property in Denmark. 
If the US is taking action against thoughts, who knows what might happen in my much more conservative country. 
Various opinions from experts - some who remained silent, because they didn’t want to hurt the man’s chances:
http://www.mangablog.net/?p=4452
The fight isn’t over… it’s just a question of who has the money and dedication to fight it.
So my initial thoughts appear to be correct. They can’t nail you for the “child” part, so they’re going to go after the “porn” part. Current controlling precedent states that porn can be excluded from protection by the First Amendment. It has said this for a very long time. I think this is bunk, but until the Supreme Court says it is bunk, then you have to be careful.
Laws regarding porn have been getting weakened over and over: as soon as VHS technology made it feasible to mass-produce it, it started being mass produced. People’s attitude towards it will take time to come round to the “it’s harmless” point of view, same as for anything else. Liberalization of attitudes always takes time. It was only fifty years ago that attitudes really started to change at all due to the Kinsey reports and so forth.
This is a side effect of Republicans being in power: Bush announced a few years ago that he was going to ramp up obscenity prosecutions, and he did. So Handley got shafted by the thought police. It’s also a side effect over gay rights. The decision a few years ago that said you can’t convict people for private behavior because it is a violation of privacy was cast as if it were a gay rights decision, but in effect, it creates a right to sexually gratify yourself as you see fit provided all people involved are consenting adults.
There is a sizable lobby of bigots against this that is so powerful they blocked for years an amendment to the hate crime act as “impinging upon free speech” - a law to make it illegal to incite violence against gay people. I have no respect for these people. Those trying to crack down on real kiddie porn, I sympathise with, but I believe they are misguided. Their arguments are incompatible with the First Amendment, and they even appear to be simply wrong (widespread availability of porn appears to correlate strongly to low sex crime statistics).