That's interesting. I didn't know that code existed. Do you know of any cases where someone was charged under that statute? I remember discussing it in school, but I could have sworn it wasn't illegal to create or possess. Or maybe I got confused by all of the infamous "art" around John Podesta's home that nobody seemed to care about? lol
Pardon me, I'm just going to do a text dump from wikipedia...
In Richmond, Virginia, in December 2005, Dwight Whorley was
convicted under 18 U.S.C. 1466A for using a Virginia Employment Commission computer to receive "obscene Japanese anime cartoons that graphically depicted prepubescent female children being forced to engage in genital-genital and oral-genital intercourse with adult males".[81][82][83] On December 18, 2008, the Fourth Circuit
Court of Appeals affirmed the conviction, consisting of 20 years imprisonment.[84] The court stated:
Thus, regardless of whether §1466A(a)(1) requires an actual minor, it is nonetheless a valid restriction on obscene speech under Miller, not a restriction on non-obscene pornography of the type permitted by Ferber. We thus find Whorley's as-applied constitutional challenge to §1466A(a)(1) to be without merit.[85]
Whorley appealed to the Supreme Court.[86][87] The request for rehearing was denied on June 15, 2009, and
the petition for his case to be reviewed by the Supreme Court was denied on January 11, 2010.[88]
In October 2008, a 38-year-old Iowa comic collector named Christopher Handley was
prosecuted for possession of explicit lolicon manga. The judge ruled that two parts of the PROTECT Act criminalizing "a visual depiction of any kind, including a drawing, cartoon, sculpture, or painting" were unconstitutional, but
Handley still faced an obscenity charge.[77]
Handley was convicted in May 2009 as the result of entering a guilty plea bargain at the recommendation of his lawyer, under the belief that the jury chosen to judge him would not acquit him of the obscenity charges if they were shown the images in question.[89]
In October 2010, 33-year-old Idaho man Steven Kutzner
entered into a plea agreement concerning images of child characters from the American animated television show The Simpsons engaged in sexual acts.[90][91] The case was originally brought up due to the fact that the German Federal Police identified and reported to U.S. authorities Kutzner's IP address as one where a known file containing actual child pornography was being shared.[92] During the forensic investigation, which uncovered "six hundred and thirty two (632) image files, seventy (70) of which were animated images graphically depicting minors engaging in sex acts", "five-hundred-and-twenty-four (524) pornographic image files, most of which depict what appears to be teenaged females", and "more than eight-thousand files containing images child erotica involving younger children, many of them prepubescent",[92] Kutzner admitted that he had knowingly received photographic child pornography "for at least eight years".
In October 2012, after being reported August 2011 by his wife, a 36-year-old man named Christian Bee in Monett, Missouri
entered a plea bargain to "possession of cartoons depicting child pornography", with the U.S. attorney's office for the Western District of Missouri recommending a 3-year prison sentence without parole. The office in conjunction with the Southwest Missouri Cyber Crimes Task Force argued that the "Incest Comics" on Bee's computer "clearly lack any literary, artistic, political or scientific value". Christian Bee was originally indicted for possession of actual child pornography, but that charge was dropped as part of a plea deal, and was instead charged with possession of the "Incest Comics".[95][96][97][98]
