Comment Re:Solve Problem by Legalizing Child Pornography (Score 1) 223
I think there needs to be a distinction drawn between footage of actual child molestation, which certainly should be illegal, and those who provide consideration for it should be gaoled, on the one hand, with other types of images which are far less harmful, on the other.
Photos of under-age girls in swimwear taken on a public beach, for example, should be treated like any other image taken in similar circumstances. (Personally, I wouldn't be very likely to find a picture of anybody merely hanging around in bathers pornographic, but other people have different tastes and standards, so let's be as general as is reasonable.) Likewise, the photo of Miley Cyrus discussed elsewhere in this page sounds (without seeing the image) like it would fall inot this category. This approach does get us into a mess when we consider images from countries with lower ages of consent and more relaxed public decency laws, but I would be tempted to say that if the photo was legal to take and publish, it is legal to possess (although there is a question of burden of proof here).
Then we have "sexting" and similar images, which are often self-portraits. Here we should treat the images as we do any other private message of a similar level of intimacy, whatever the age of the person involved, since that seems like the most consistent and logical approach. Certainly no-one should be prosecuted for taking or releasing a picture of himself. Relatedly, the age of consent for pornography should be the same as the age of consent for sex, since you otherwise end up with the silly situation of it being legal to have sex with someone but not to look at a picture of yourself having sex with them.
Lastly, we have the question of images of nude children taken in a private setting. This is the main grey area, both now and under any sane changes to the law, because someone has to decide if the images are pornographic. A good test for that would, IMO, be for the defence to select a group of images previously decided to be non-pornographic, and then to add some of the images to be decided on (selected by the prosecution if we want to use only a sample), split up enough to ensure that it isn't obvious which images are the new ones. The groups of images can then be shown to jurors for unrelated cases (preferably scattered across the jurisdiction), and we ask them to identify which ones are pornographic. If enough choose the new ones (enough to be unlikely to be guesswork), we can proceed with the trial without risking prejudicing the jurors with any other images.
If the images are non-pornographic, they should be restricted exactly as any other images taken in that situation would be.