Precedent and Loli

This is a depressing set of news. A guy obsessed about manga got arrested since some of his pictures are basically cartoon child porn. I’m sure I wouldn’t disagree, Japan likes them looking young but I consider it artwork, not flat out child porn. In itself, it is devestating but there are other bits of this story which are just as bad.

Because he couldn’t afford a good lawyer, he decided to plead guilty. With how our legal system works, this is going to effectively set up precedent on manga and young ones to help defend a law that goes too far. There were a lot of organizations that would have defended him, including the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund, ACLU, and others, but he basically… gave up.

And that’s sad, because his giving up will color how manga (and loli and shota) will be viewed for years.

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[quote author=LT link=topic=1132.msg4660#msg4660 date=1251569010] [url=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghost_in_the_Shell:dpm7zzrz]Ghost in the Shell[/url:dpm7zzrz]. I actually like the Stand Alone Complex anime series best, though. [/quote]

It was so sad how those tamo’s ended up at the end. Cute little robots, with neat personalities, all tossed off or shot to hell.

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I don’t think it is a bad rant. Yes, it makes it harder to do their job, but if it gets into place, it will be abused. It’s a balancing act between rights and being pro-active. If you give rights and someone gets hurt, people get all upset. If you are too pro-active, you get Big Brother.

Sadly, they are going after writers. During Bush’s administration, they started going after BDSM websites and arresting/charging the owners. It made me very nervous, since I was right in that domain for my main site and was seriously at risk. I have no doubt Obama is going to change that, I’m really playing the fetish legal lottery when it comes to having a site online as this era as we struggle to enforce our morals on the masses of Internet humanity.

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I think the micromanaging comes from scale. When you have a group of 10 or 20, you can say “be good” and not worry about it. As you get more people, you need to start defining what is “good” and coming up with rules. Hit a thousand and you don’t know everyone, so you have to start making general “rules” to keep things flowing. It gets more complicated at 10k, 100k, and more. At 300 million people, you have to make rules for everyone. “Be good” doesn’t apply anymore, there are simply too many interpretations of “good”.

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Sadly, the guy was convicted for his collection (including the PDF of the conviction). Though, I noticed he wasn’t required to register as a sex offender, which I think is a wonderful thing. But, still, I disagree greatly with the conviction. Mainly because I have a few stories here that are… well, pretty much the same topic.

I worry as a creator. I mean, I’m not going to pull my stuff off the web, but I worry about that day where two men show up at the front door. It scares me and things like this make that fear even sharper. I think I’m creating art, but I don’t know how well I can convince others is art, the time and skill it takes to create stories. But, even if I could defend myself, I would be devastated to find out one of my stories helped convict someone like this.

I can’t do much about it right now. I sent out a letter to my representative and senators, but they won’t do anything about it. You can’t stay elected if you go “well, I think we’ve protected the children enough, let someone enjoy a bit of porn, okay?”

bummed out

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As the original article said, he didn’t really know about the Comic Defense League, ACLU, or other organizations. Or he chose not to use them. There are a lot of people who were unhappy that he went into this alone, instead of using the legal might of organizations dedicated to protecting people like himself.

Actually, that was my original reason for posting this. He didn’t use them and instead went directly to a plea bargain. That made me sad, simply because once it is on the books, we have courts that use that as a foundation for the next one, which will be a bit more serious, then the one after that, etc.

In a way, it is the Prisoner’s Dilemma, but with only one prisoner. If he plea-bargained, he only got a short prison sentence and a pair of felonies on his record. If he didn’t, he could have gotten 15 years in prison for it. But, the other side, the organizations that wanted to help him, end up suffering because he made it just that little bit easier to hurt the next person.