They might as well go ahead and ban travel to Japan and flag anyone coming back from Japan as a pedo…
heaven forbid they see tentacle porn, or something worse…
That anime girl wouldn’t get you a second look. It’s the drawings of kindergarteners getting sexually assaulted that are the issue here. I don’t know that jail time is the right response, but I don’t think that society needs to accept that sort of “art” in the name of freedom of expression.
Violence against imaginary women in video games harms real women. I think the gamer gate shitstorm proves that. So why should otaku pedos get a free pass just because the children are imaginary?
This is a really tough one to defend, because every argument for defense places the defender in the camp of people whose fantasies are pretty damned creepy.
But this also the perfect exemplar of “think of the children.”
EDIT for clarity: By “defend,” I mean to argue against the conviction.
A 9 month suspended sentence is ridiculous (though I haven’t seen the offending images), but it makes your headline saying he was jailed somewhat misleading.
How do you determine the age of an imaginary cartoon character?
Actually, in Canada that’s precisely what’d get your laptop a second look.
Let’s see… Not sure I can come up with a search term to bring it up that wouldn’t look bad on my subsequent thought-police audit, but I’ll give it a go…
Wikipedia has a list of Cases in their “Child Pornography laws in Canada” article including the Supreme Court decision in R. v. Sharpe that depictions of children count as “persons” under the child porn statutes.
In 2005, a man was jailed for 18 months for importing manga. Probably the nasty stuff.
In 2012, charges were dropped in a similar case (how far we’ve come) of an American whose laptop was searched on entry into Canada in 2010. According to the Comic Book Legal Defence Fund, the only “questionable” image was a parody. The presence of anime-style drawings on the laptop is supposed to be the reason the laptop was subjected to such a lengthy search.
I suppose it’s significant that this isn’t the first time the man has been in trouble:
Six years ago he was prosecuted for having “Tomb Raider-style” computer-generated pictures of fictional children.They were so realistic, a jury convicted him on six counts of making “indecent pseudo-photographs” of children, which he had denied.
But that makes me wonder just what happened to cause police to start sniffing around on his computer six years ago.
The other thing that comes to mind is, what happens if someone creates software that just so happens to make it relatively easy to create similar images (along with millions upon millions of other perfectly innocuous images) ? Will said software suddenly become illegal, or require arbitrary restrictions to be added?
We don’t convict people of crimes for violence against imaginary women in video games, either!
Sexism is bad, but not criminal. The difference is between thought and action.
The rationale used to convict the creep is not for anyone he harmed, but because his private thoughts are a danger to society. Quo vadis?
I have to wonder how well this conviction is going to hold up on appeal. The Judge’s opinion reads like “I found this repulsive, even though I have to admit that nobody was harmed” which is mostly a judgement call. I’m sure what the guy had was the most disgusting horrible porn imaginable, but in the end it’s just drawings.
That’s what he was doing…
Thank you. I’ve updated the story to reflect the fact his sentence was suspended and posted a correction.
Though it still says he was jailed in the first sentence of the article.
Hopefully the courts will now act against all the pretend murder in television and movies.
I’m going to have to rethink my usage of that phrase in this particular thread.
shudders
Thinks. I have somewhere some rather old paperbacks of Mai, The Psychic Girl. In the climactic fight at the end of the final book most of Mai’s clothes are destroyed. Am I risking prosecution by telling you this?
What would be the “right” response for offenses against imaginary persons?
Who decides what art is acceptable?
The government, of course. The same people who decide what of everything is acceptable.
Now, if you’re asking who should decide…
Nine months as a mime in an imaginary box?
