Attached Link: Wikipedia - Protect Act

> Quote - So, while it may be legal, it's also incredibly stupid to fake child porn.

As I mentioned in an earlier post (and there's a whole lot to read, so there's nothing wrong with missing it), the US Supreme Court never said child porn was legal. They only said that a depiction, that did not involve harming actual children, did not deserve the more draconian punishments that were reserved for laws meant to protect real children from real physical sexual abuse. It's always dangerous to turn a decision 180 degrees and believe that the turn is true. It's akin to "not guilty" prouncements, in criminal cases, being equated to "innocence"--when lack of a guilty verdict only means that there was insufficent evidence to return a guilty verdict. Lack of guilt does not equal innocent. The defendent may still be guilty of a crime, but the court didn't prove it. Similarly, here, the Supreme Court only said that virtual depictions did not belong under the law they struck down. That is very different from saying that such images are legal.

If you look at the Wikipedia link, there's a link to the 2003 Protect Act law that criminalizes virtual child porn. Basically, a new law was created to criminalize virtual child porn rather than try to tack on the virtual stuff to existing child porn laws that the Supreme Court struck down. So far, the Supreme Court has not gone after the new law, probably because it does not have the precedences of the previous law. The previous law was designed to protect children, not computer similations. The new law creates new criminal penalties instead of tacking them onto a different law.

I found this info by doing Google searches, starting with
    law virtual child porn
    adding "amber alert" from the info the first search provided
That got me to the Protect Act which I looked up in Wikipedia for a summarization and a link to the actual text of the law.

It's always better looking up the facts than arguing about emotional things. Although the 2002 Supreme Court decision was old news, so was the 2003 Protect Act that flew under the radar of public perception. Similarly, other laws have had the same lack of public scrutiny and are quietly eroding our choices.