Anyone sharing child pornography is helping these low animals justify their twisted behaviour. And calling them “sick” and “needing help” makes me want to puke. Sometimes you just find BAD people. Excusing everyones bad behaviour by calling it an illness only helps these perpetrators justify their actions internally.

If they wanted to be clever the victim should copyright the video and then can use the ham-fisted copyright laws to go after people just like the RIAA.

Some of us have human feelings. Some of us are capable of empathy. If you were abducted and ass-raped and you knew that there were people sitting around jacking off to images of your torture, some of are capable of understanding that every moment of your life would be hell.

The law doesn’t exist to uphold archetypal aspergoid principles. It exists to prevent and redress harm. And it very specifically takes intent and damages into consideration for that reason.

The RIAA & MPAA need not prove anything about “culture” to use it to increase the scope of damages they can claim for by analogy to this case: if anything, their claims for damages would be stronger as being more direct than this young lady’s: if she succeeds in her claim, they will succeed in adapting it to their cases.

You may mark my words, if you like.

First off, the victim statement you linked to is just heart-rending. That poor girl was broken into pieces, and she can’t put it behind her because the evidence is still on the cloud, even if it’s in parts of said cloud that you have to search a long time for to reach.

Second : for people discussing the economics of child porn, I would suggest Wikileak’s “An Insight Into Child Porn”. It’s an anonymous description of this “business” by a guy who worked in it for years. It’s not very light reading – the guy is a unashamed pedophile himself – but it is very interesting. Wikileak is down atm, but here’s the google-cache version : http://66.102.9.132/search?q=cache:njOqhC_G_MwJ:ljsf.org/wiki/My_life_in_child_porn+wikileak+insight+into+chilp+porn&cd=1&hl=fr&ct=clnk&gl=fr&client=firefox-a. If you read French, there’s an excellent report based on the previous document and written by police officers and computer security specialist on why net-filtering is useless against child porn : http://www.numerama.com/magazine/14977-confession-d-un-pedophile-l-impossible-filtrage-du-web-pdf-disponible.html

Third : The opinion of people who hunt child porn traffickers for a living (authors of the French report) is that hunting “consumers” is next to useless in stopping child porn. You’d have to get to the big guys, and they are not the producers, they’re the distributors. Guys like this girl’s uncle are the smallest fish in the pond ; the business of child porn is exactly that – a business, not done by amateurs.

Fourth : however, I think that child abuse victims deserve all the help they can get. So I’m all for fining the people found with her pictures on their hard disk. Not sure if they deserve to go to jail for it ; they are sick people, and for all we know jacking off to such horrible filth is the only thing stopping them from acting on their fantasy.

Sorry for the long, long rant.

At the very least, civil retribution for criminal wrongdoing should be tied to the criminal case.

Regarding your point no 2. No, there’s lots of room for civil cases. Contract law and the like are all totally civil cases.

Secondly, I’m unclear as to the nature of the “injury” against her. I read the linked statement, and the “injury” seems to be the knowledge that these pictures are out there. Indeed, it is not even the knowledge that specific individuals have seen these pictures that is injurious, but rather the very existence of the pictures, and the possibility that essentially anyone could have seen them. So it is the existence of the pictures that is injurious — which leads us back to the guy that took the pictures again.

Really stretching it, I suppose I could see ground for damages against a downloader if the downloader downloaded the pictures, called up the victim, and then said “I saw your pictures; ooga booga booga”. At least that would be intentional infliction of emotional distress, which is a thing that can be defined under the law. But if the victim is actively seeking out these people — that is, tracking down people who have seen these pictures, so that she can know that a specific individual has seen them, and thus be injured — isn’t she then actively seeking injury? That doesn’t strike me as the kind of thing that should be rewarded.

My point (finally) is this: all “child porn” hysteria aside, this is just another case of an individual trying to get money from someone with deeper pockets than the person that ACTUALLY hurt them. The victim is obviously profoundly injured by her experience, but the person that owes her any sort of restitution for that injury is the person that committed the abuse. The people that downloaded her photos are clearly monsters, and should be punished to the fullest extent of the law, but they did not, by any reasonable definition, INJURE HER. Indeed, she is completely unaware of their existence — until she actively seeks them out for the purpose of extorting money from them.

The teen sex offender situation is on the extreme end of benign sex crimes. The child raper in the OP is at the other end.

I may seem like a cold prick, but I would rather have an objective approach to a situation rather than let my emotions create a legislative hammer which bludgeons everyone equally.

If downloading child porn is a “victimless” crime it shouldn’t be illegal. I submit that it is not, and that this girl is the victim.

Tynam, I would hope you can draw a distinction between a legal market and illegal market…

Certainly the economic factors are different for legal and illegal acts; “risk of getting caught” is one of them. I intended file sharing to be an analogy not an example; clearly paedophiles use methods more restricted than “just put everything on a torrent”. Nevertheless, child porn is traded online, so clearly paedophiles can be willing to do so – despite the clear fact that any online sharing is a large additional risk. Why would they “trust contact with someone who has leaked evidence of their crimes”? Same reason any other criminal trusts an uncertain partner: they value the results more highly than the risk of exposure. (That criminals make this mistake is one of the major reasons they get caught at all.)

To reply to Loren:

The only legitimate argument against mere possession of child porn I can see is the matter of encouraging it’s creation

I agree completely; this is the only social good that could possibly justify the censorship…

and if the person who created it has already been punished this can hardly be a motive.

…and yet I think you’re wrong here. There are, after all, other cases where incitement (or your local legal equivalent) is a crime in itself. It’s well established that size of sentence is not by itself much of a deterrent; the thought that “I’ll get a longer sentence if I’m caught” will certainly not deter a paedophile from posting the pics. (It didn’t in this case!)

pKp: Thanks for the always-welcome injection of facts into an emotional topic.

I concur that hunting “consumers” is next to useless in stopping child porn, as a matter of policing. But then, this isn’t really a policing issue; it’s a matter of compensation. That it’s not very effective to hunt the consumers is true; it’s not very efficient to hunt lots of types of crime, but that’s no reason to deny compensation in the rare cases where they are caught.

To those who say the individuals with the pictures have done no further harm, because the crime’s already been committed, I say: Can there be any doubt that the set of all people with the pictures, collectively as a group, have done and are doing this girl great harm?
As a group, many of them were complicit in the original offence (after all, they knew and didn’t stop it!)
She gets reminded – repeatedly, month after month – every time they catch one.

I disagree that there’s no causal link between them – they’re using her, personal, pictures, obtained illegally. It would certainly disturb and upset me, and I’m a comparatively confident adult male with enormous ability to defend myself, not an abuse survivor.

To say that no further harm is caused is also to say that reputation has no value. The internet has greatly increased – not decreased – the value of my reputation among total strangers whose actions I’ll never know about.

(A comparison question to help decide where I stand: Say somebody passes naked pictures of me to everyone on this forum, so you can all laugh / jerk off / whatever while you’re reading my posts. I never find out about it. Has any harm been done to me? There’s certainly plenty of room for debate, but I’d say there has. It’s not a great analogy; best I could do off the top of my head. Anyone with a clearer hypothetical, please insert it here.)

“The teen sex offender situation is on the extreme end of benign sex crimes. The child raper in the OP is at the other end.”

should read:

The teen sex offender situation is on the extreme benign end of sex crimes. The child raper in the OP is at the other end.

(Word placement is VERY important)

Simple logic: If consenting adults get paid for participating in adult pornography, then victims of rape in child pornography deserve restitution.

Oh and yeah, blueelm is female fwiw.

Tynam says: Oops, sorry.

To return to the subject:

vivaelamo:

There would seem to be a stronger case that the availability of free material lowers the demand for commercially available material.

This blog is probably one of the worst places in the world to make that claim; second only to EFF HQ! It’s been reasonably established – not least by Cory – that free availability of books or music increases sales; why wouldn’t that be all the more true in such a furtive market? It’s not like they can advertise, after all.

But I shouldn’t speculate, when we can have facts: I believe there are cases of child abusers committing their crimes to order, at the request of paedophiles elsewhere who wanted to see the pics. (The NBC Connecticut link has a paragraph implying that it happened in this case specifically. Anyone who knows the better than I want to chime in on this?)

On the other hand, justice and slippery ethical and distributive slopes set aside, why the hell not- I mean, what else has she got going for her for the forseeable future? She’s in too much pain to provide for herself or flourish or develop – maybey this money will make something easier or better somehow. Maybey that’s a good enough reason- it might make something, anything, better for her.

It is mostly legal (no thanks to the UK) to create and distribute violent pornography, as long as it is consensual. If the consideration is whether there is a causal relationship between masturbating to child porn and raping a child then shouldn’t the same rule hold for non child porn? I don’t see any laws being proposed to compensate adult rape victims for people watching evidence of their ordeals.

The issue is not one of sympathy, it is one of upholding universal standards. Failing to do that abandons reason and risks exacerbating the very problems you seek redress for. Those you describe in prison are the problem, not the porn they were watching; if it were then the BDSM community as well as all sorts of other people who indulge in fantasies are going to be the next targets of a witch hunt.

It reminds me of the story of the drunk driver who caused a fatality, who was ordered to write a check, for one dollar per month, for the rest of his life. Is there anyone here who knows the veracity and the details of that story?

What if we remove the inflammatory nature of the crime? What if it became vogue to ambush a random person on the street, beat them, and then post the video on the internet. I’d wager that those videos would be fairly popular (as exhibit A, I submit “Jackass”). Would a person that downloaded those videos actually owe money to the victim of the beating? Would you say that the victim was a victim of “internet violence”? Does the person watching the video owe money to the victim of the beating — despite the fact that the victim has NO KNOWLEDGE of the watching? Indeed, can you be owed money for a specific act that you are completely unaware of?

What if that was copyrighted material like say music or movies and not illegal child porn?…”

I didn’t need convincing, but the above nails it, IMHO. I suspect that those who question the seeking of damages from the possessors of the stated material have never knowingly known someone who was sexually abused as a child.

Put your sister, daughter, aunt etc. in her shoes and really think about it. It’s something one doesn’t just ‘get over’, it’s with you for life, and in very insidious ways. It’s a no-brainer for me.

I’m more than a little uncomfortable with lawyers in effect collecting royalties on kiddie porn. While evaluating whether a client is worth representing I think many might find it hard to restrain themselves from cutting to the chase and asking “What have I seen you in?”.