[Foundation-l] Legal requirements for sexual content -- help, please!

[Jussi-Ville Heiskanen]

Jussi-Ville Heiskanen wrote:
> Nathan wrote:
>> On Thu, May 13, 2010 at 10:14 PM, Gregory Maxwell <gmaxwell at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>>   
>>> The obligation to protect people against an invasion of their privacy
>>> is not limited to, or even mostly applicable to sexual images.
>>> Although sexual images are one of several "most important" cases, the
>>> moral imperative to respect the privacy of private individuals exists
>>> everywhere.
>>>
>>> As such, Commons has a specific policy on this:
>>>
>>> http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Photographs_of_identifiable_people#Photographs_taken_in_a_private_place
>>>
>>>     
>>
>>
>> Not much of a policy, in my opinion. A general statement of principle,
>> with no mechanism of enforcement, doesn't have much impact on the
>> state of things. We don't require evidence of release, but we should.
>> And in the case of explicit content, we should require that release
>> even if the photograph is taken in a public place. Topless sunbathing
>> on a beach in Nice is not the same as a worldwide license for
>> unlimited publicity.
>>
>>     
I may have said it before -- and I do apologize if I sound
like a record stuck into repeating the same groove again
and again -- but the issue in cases like that *decidedly*
isn't the "explicitness" of the image, but the _privacy_
_violation_.

It may be that here again the ugly head of my Nordic
liberal values may be rising above the parapet, but I
do not consider a female of the species enjoying the
sun without incurring tan-lines to their upper torso
as remotely "explicit" in any sensible sense of the
word -- any more than I would consider "explicit" an
image of a woman breastfeeding her one year old baby.

Though I do recognize the sentiment that people who
have very few opportunities to see womens breasts in
"the flesh", might feel otherwise. I forget who it was
in relation to a campus ban on shows of affection, that
said "Kissing in public in front of lonely people is like
eating a hamburger in front of people on the point of
starvation." -- or words to that effect.

So to recap, I wouldn't support a selective standard only
applied to "explicit" images, no matter how defined.


Yours,

Jussi-Ville Heiskanen