Wow. The Supreme Court today announced that in a 6-3 vote it overturned a ban on virtual child pornography.
The 1996 Child Pornography Prevention Act banned not only digitally altered images of real children (a ban which the Supreme Court upheld), but also forbid the creation of “virtual” child pornography in which no actual child was used.
Pornographers and First Amendment advocates argued that the ban on virtual pornography would make scenes from movies such as “Lolita” or “Traffic” illegal (in fact, the law implied that depicting sexual situations with anyone who looked underage was illegal).
One thing that will be interesting to see is how this affects child pornography prosecutions. We will not have to wait long for a person caught with child pornography to argue that he was told it was virtual child pornography rather than the real thing.
There will also be inevitable lawsuits as virtual child porn becomes commercially more widely available. Can a school fire or reassign a teacher who buys computer generated child porn videos off the Internet? After all, according to the Supreme Court, that material is completely legal for Americans to own.
The Supreme Court made its ruling on the same basis that an Appeals Court had used in overturning the ban — it agreed that the government had failed to show a connection between virtual child pornography and the exploitation of actual children. That seems to me to be a completely unreasonable basis for such a decision — regardless of whether or not the First Amendment can be contorted to allow virtual child porn, it is absurd to claim that such materials will not be used to exploit children. That there is no evidence for such a link as of yet is largely due to the fact that this is a very new area — only in the past decade or so have the tools become widely available for creating this sort of material.
I suspect the Supreme Court will revisit this case sooner rather than later and likely reverse itself after enough evidence accumulates that child molesters and others are in fact using virtual child pornography.
Source:
Supreme Court Rejects Child-Porn Law. Fox News, April 16, 2002.