Forum: OT


Subject: Are some people walking a fine line here?...or am I nutz?

ElectricAardvark opened this issue on Apr 10, 2002 ยท 100 posts


kbade posted Wed, 10 April 2002 at 8:58 PM

The U.S. Supreme Court may have something to say about guidelines. They will probably have a decision by July, so the Justices can go on vacation. But it's not a sure thing...after all, it was Justice Potter Stewart who coined the phrase "I know it when I see it," which fortunately is not the law of the land. I've written about the law in question at length in at least one other thread, and won't rehash the issue here, except to note that LadySilverMage is correct about the law being intended to apply more toward Photoshop-type cut and paste jobs than to Poser renders, though the law would apply to both, as both are CGI. While pure CGI does not involve the use of a minor, they can "appear" to do so under the law under review, as Hiram's quotation shows. However, an "unreal" image seems to fall outside the scope of the law; hackwork (and probably most faerie pics) would be legally protected, even if the Supremes uphold the law. The purpose of the law is to prevent pedophiles from using realistic CGI as a tool to convince their prospective victims that the conduct shown in the "photographs" are acceptable. It is also true that R'osity, as a private entity, is free to have stricter standards than those imposed by law. Of course, they are in the unenviable position of having to balance such concerns against lost membership and business for a site that primarily caters to artists. I would add that one of the better artists here recently had an image removed from the poser gallery, supposedly because the model looked too young, though the image was certainly not pornographic under any reasonable reading of the Supreme Court's decisions in Miller v. California, New York v. Ferber, and their progeny. It did not depict any sexual activity, and the model was not lewdly exhibiting its computer-generated genitals...indeed, it did not display its genitals at all. In fact, the banned image was largely similar to the vast majority of images posted by this same artist, none of which were banned in the gallery when posted...though all of them appear to be gone now (by action of the artist, I would bet). So it would be advisable to develop guidelines...once the Supremes have had a chance to set the minimum. Otherwise, it seems like at least one of the decisions to remove an image here was basically arbitrary.