In New Zealand, drawings deserve more justice than humans

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SITUATION D:
- Kevin possesses a movie depicting murder
- a court finds Kevin guilty of possessing a movie depicting murder

Situation D is stupid, like situations A, B, and C.

It's important to understand the context of what I am trying to do.

I am trying to show that the metaphor doesn't work. That isn't the same thing as saying that cartoon child pornography should be illegal. When I say "Situation C makes sense", I don't mean "banning cartoon child pornography is a sensible law". I mean "Situation C does not have an obviously illogical structure like Situations A and B do".

The force behind the metaphor is that "convicting someone of murder who has not committed murder" just plain does not make sense, whether or not you think that cartoons of murder should be illegal. Situation C, the real situation, does not fall into this obviously-wrong category. (And neither does Ancalagon's Situation D.) So the force behind the metaphor is irrelevant.

I am open to the idea that Situations C and D might have problems. But those problems are definitely not the pants-on-head-nonsense problems suggested by the metaphor.

I still think it would be a stupid law and all this stuff is just a witchhunt taken to the extreme because people are scared of sexual predators. They need to go after the actual predators that hurt people, not people who have done nothing wrong besides own a few racy drawings.

I don't even think it is a law where I live, otherwise I don't know how stores were selling it.

Well, this guy was both. Actually, I get the feeling that this whole thing would never have happened if he wasn't previously known as a child molester. They probably wanted something else to pin on him.

Then I can kind of understand it as being extra evidence of the things they already did. In that case it would look bad to the police even if they had a stash of completely legal pictures of kids in underwear that they clipped out of salespapers and catalogs.

How can possessing a -cartoon- (as opposed to a photograph) even be considered a crime? If one purchases a photo of a criminal act he may be enabling the act or rewarding the perp. But a cartoon? ??? Does the cartoon even depict an actual crime? Has that been established?

ruveyn

Simple: Because Parliament says so.

Parliament has the authority to make law. Parliament is free to criminalize expression--whether real or fictional--if that expression falls within a recognized limitation to rights of free expression.

Granted, that's a pretty big "if." But the law is presumed to be valid until a court of competent jurisdiction determines that the law is ultra vires the legislature.

There is a legitimate conversation to be had about where the threshold should lie between material that is protected as free expression and material that is properly prohibited under the obscenity or child pornography limitations on free expression. But I do not believe that the fact that the work is a cartoon and a work of pure imagination is necessarily determinative of the question. It would be in Canada, but New Zealand law may well be different.

Apparently not.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legal_status_of_cartoon_pornography_depicting_minors#Canada

I think we are talking about two slightly different things. You're referring to the definition of child pornography, I am referring to a specific exemption from the prohibition against its possession. I should have been clearer in my original that I was referring to the creator's own works.

The Court certainly found that fictional depictions and works of imagination are child pornography--for the purposes of the Criminal Code's prohibition against trafficking in child pornography.

But the court found two principal exceptions from the definition of child pornography as it relates to possession: the first is for written or visual works created and possessed by the accused for exclusive personal use, and the second relates to "visual recordings created by or depicting the accused that do not depict unlawful sexual activity and are held by the accused exclusively for private use."

So a person who possesses a cartoon, which was created by the possessor, for the possessor's personal use, the prohibition against possession of child pornography would not apply.

I just thought of something. If you can get arrested for possessing underage cartoon sexual content why do they never arrest the people creating it or distributing it? I never hear about people busted for buying/selling adult doujinshi on Ebay for example, despite many of them featuring underage characters. The book store at the mall near me even sold yaoi manga that was 18+ yet many were about boys in high school and some were definitely under 18.

Two reasons:

First, the issue of proof. It's easy to prove that someone possesses something--it's there, on the person's computer, or on their shelf. But it's not easy to prove who they got it from.

Second is the issue of jurisdiction. Even if a country passes a criminal law of extraterritorial effect that, for example, criminalizes sending child pornography into the country, you cannot arrest and prosecute the offender until the person is within your jurisdiction.

Well yeah, but didn't you say that the mere fact that it is a cartoon would be "determinative of the question"? In your example, other factors are essential ingredients, such as who created the cartoon. For all we know, New Zealand law might be identical to Canadian law on this point, since in our case the guy didn't create the cartoon himself.

Hence my later correction. Did you miss the part where I said, "I should have been clearer..."?

I'm happy to leave it alone, but I can't quite believe that you had suddenly started mentally adding in an extra condition that had never been mentioned in the thread. Especially since it makes the comparison to New Zealand law meaningless.

A product of multitasking.

And not to be pedantic, but it doesn't make the comparison to New Zealand law meaningless. It's of no applicability to the instant case, perhaps, but the comparison to the law of general application can be made, nonetheless.