On 12/8/08, DESLIPPE, MICHAEL CIV DCMA CIV DFAS MICHAEL.DESLIPPE@dfas.mil wrote:
So, certain laws apply without regard to things not in control of the victim. In this case, a minor child was exploited for money. Someone should have protected the child from such a consequence as this.
And arguably someone should have required Daniel Radcliffe to keep his pants on, advised Brooke Shields not to pursue an acting career, and refused to even consider buying Miley Cyrus a cell phone.
You can call it "bad parenting" for sure, but painting any of it as "child porn" would only cheapen the term and hurl a belittling insult at actual victims exploited for actual child porn.
The first amendment of the U.S. constitution guarantees freedom of speech and of the press, and exceptions are not made on a whim. Yes, certain forms of pornography are prohibited, but the underlying moral basis for this isn't that you and I and most other people find them offensive/distasteful, rather because they are presumed to be exploiting the victim of a sex crime.
Surely filming the rape of an adult or the murder of any person would be illegal for similar reasons if done for personal gain (as opposed to catching it on a security camera or an 8-mm Zoomatic[1]) Of course there will always exist really weird people who are turned on by things like that (or for any other thing you can think of) but any attempt to legislate that would border on thought-crime, a territory where the potential for creep[2] is infinitely greater than speech-crime.
In this case, in the country under scrutiny, there are laws about what is and isn't decent. There are mechanisms for making the laws, defining them and prosecuting them. Whatever, you, me or anyone else thinks, in the country of interest, this either is or isn't against the law. If it's against the law, it shouldn't be there. If is isn't against the law be allowed without question. If it is one of those things and someone thinks it ought to be the other, then they should take it through the process used by that country to change their laws.
(In countries which have such a process, that is, but yes...)
I agree, all laws should be tested (to the extent that this can be done without causing actual harm to another human being) and amended or repealed when demonstrated to make no sense. Maybe some court will decide that the image is illegal under U.K. law, or maybe they won't, but it doesn't really matter as Wikipedia need not and should not be manipulated by foreign censorship.
If the cover art instead contained a naked swastika obscured by broken glass the album would have been banned in its country of origin[3], but acceptable in most other places. If the cover art depicted Mohammed in any state of dress obscured by broken glass it would probably be banned in predominantly Islamic countries. If it contained a masturbating nun obscured by broken glass it would (assuming she is an adult) be acceptable in the U.S., the U.K. and Germany but banned in New Zealand[4]. In the PRC the album art could be banned for having one or more colours in common with the flag of Tibet (or for having the same aspect ratio when distributed as a cassette, or for any other cock-and-bull reason, or none at all, seriously).
Some will argue that the English Wikipedia should bend more willingly for the benefit of contributors in English-speaking countries. Frankly I'm not going to buy that because having English an official language is not a guarantor (or prerequisite) of reasonable human rights or censorship laws. Just look at Pakistan, Sierra Leone, Singapore, or the Sudan.
I can almost guarantee that any complaints from these regimes would be file-13'd without a second thought. Is Britain so special? India and Nigeria have more English speakers than Britain. I realise they have a bit more credibility than the other countries I mentioned but would anyone take them seriously if they find some enwiki content to declare illegal? Probably not.
—C.W.
[1] Unless positioned on the grassy knoll, which would suggest conspiracy. [2] As in "instruction creep" not "being creepy", no pun intended. [3] But it would be okay for Germans to view it on the English Wikipedia as it is displayed for the scholarly purpose of informing readers about the album, not to promote Nazism or the album. Still wouldn't appear on the German Wikipedia due to their unrelated rejection of "fair use". [4] Cradle of Filth, 1997.