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

[David Goodman]

The right to privacy is based  explicitly on respecting cultural
taboos of individuals. Ordinary identifiable people should not be
shown in public doing things they reasonably would not like to be seen
doing, except  when the public need for information is great enough to
overcome this. In WP terms, this is the BLP principle of "do no harm"
and it applies as much to images as it does to articles.

There are people to whom this does not apply at all, such as public
figures when the matter is relevant to their notability or otherwise
the proper focus of responsible news coverage, and even private
individuals when the matter is sufficiently important--and this is the
same for images as articles, and for all WP content.  As with BLP, it
applies with special force to children and others  incapable of giving
consent or incapable of being aware that their conduct was being
recorded.

I am not a BLP-expansionist; I  interpret the need for information
fairly liberally, but when that does not apply I have always been on
the strict side of enforcing this with such things as internet memes.

In practice in almost all societies, sexual behavior is regarded as
more private than other things, and it is related to the almost
universal taboo about the display of nude genitals in public in
ordinary situations. Therefore the right to privacy does apply with
special force here.

I think we have an obligation to  remove or obscure the identities for
nude or sexual images of living people who have not explicitly or
implicitly given their consent, or who are unable to give it. I can
imagine situations where the right to public information might
over-ride this, but they would be exceptional. (The hypothetical case
of a nude congressman in front of the Capitol was mentioned somewhere
in these discussions.)  This is to be judged in terms of their
culture, not ours'; we should deal differently with a beach in Sweden
or in Saudi Arabia.

But all of this is irrelevant to the original censorship issue,
because we are not protecting our audience, who can personally or by
proxy protect themselves & have the responsibility for doing so; we
are protecting our subjects, who cannot.

David Goodman, Ph.D, M.L.S.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:DGG