- Joined
- Jul 6, 2022
We already had a supreme court ruling on this exact question, only a decade or so ago. The answer was no, without a victim you do not have CP, or a crime. Even 100% life like CG. As nauseating as that sounds, it was unquestionably the correct call. It really is a nightmare scenario but the reality of laws and freedom. Just like with guns and shootings.. the price of freedom. Freedom is not a utopia or even pretty sometimes.
Since people are having such a hard time believing this:
The Court concluded that the "CPPA prohibits speech despite its serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value." In particular, it prohibits the visual depiction of teenagers engaged in sexual activity, a "fact of modern society and has been a theme in art and literature throughout the ages." Such depictions include performances of Romeo and Juliet, by William Shakespeare; the 1996 film William Shakespeare's Romeo + Juliet, directed by Baz Luhrmann; and the Academy Award winning movies Traffic and American Beauty. "If these films, or hundreds of others of lesser note that explore those subjects, contain a single graphic depiction of sexual activity within the statutory definition, the possessor of the film would be subject to severe punishment without inquiry into the work's redeeming value. This is inconsistent with an essential First Amendment rule: The artistic merit of a work does not depend on the presence of a single explicit scene."
Thus, the CPPA prohibited speech for a different reason than anti-child pornography laws. Laws prohibiting the distribution and possession of child pornography ban speech because of the manner in which it is produced, regardless of its serious literary or artistic value. But speech prohibited by the CPPA "records no crime and creates no victims by its production." Ferber did not hold that child pornography is "by definition without value", but that it is illegal because of the harm that making and distributing it necessarily inflicts upon children. Ferber expressly allowed virtual child pornography as an alternative that could preserve whatever value child pornography might have while at the same time mitigating the harm caused by making it. The CPPA would eliminate this distinction and punish people for engaging in what had heretofore been a legal alternative.