Following up on an earlier BB post today about a UK man who may face jail time for having created synthetic, digital images that depict artificial child figures in sexual situations, Aaron Muszalski / SFSlim says,
Back when I was at Industrial Light + Magic I met an artist who had worked on the 1997 remake of "Lolita". (For the unfamiliar: Originally a novel by Vladimir Nabokov, "Lolita" tells the story of a Humbert Humbert, an older professor who falls obsessively in love with his landlady's 12-year-old daughter.)
The first film adaptation of "Lolita" was directed by Stanley Kubrick in 1962. As a concession to the MPAA, Kubrick raised Lolita's age to fourteen, and largely desexualized her relationship with Humbert. As directed by Adrian Lyne (9 1/2 Weeks, Fatal Attraction), the 1997 version attempted to be truer to the source novel in those respects, and even showed a topless Lolita in the bedroom with Humbert.
This is where my co-worker came in. Since the filmmakers were not legally able to film their underage actress topless in a sexual situation, they filmed her with a beige body stocking with X's of electrical tape where her nipples would have been. They then re-filmed the same scene with a rather busty (but entirely legal) 18-year-old actress. My friend was then given the task of seamlessly tracking and compositing the nekkid 18-year-old bosoms onto the 14-year-old body.
Obviously there's a difference between a professional VFX artist performing such manipulation for the sake of art, and some anonymous perv performing such manipulation for the sake of, er, self-manipulation. But how does one discriminate between these two goals? And more importantly, how does one /legally/ differentiate them? Defining what is and isn't "art" has never been something that the legal system has shown itself to be particularly adept at.
And how does the quality of the representation affect that judgement? If a photograph can be deemed pornographic, is a stick figure rendering of the same scene also pornographic? And if not, at what point between those two poles (symbolic / photo-realistic) does the threshold fall? What about an obviously poor photo composite? Or highly realistic, but entirely synthetic vector art, such has recently been popular on the internets?
Regardless of these quandaries, rest assured that so long as the technology exists to create such imagery, someone, somewhere will be busy creating it.
Previously: UK man faces jail over 'made-up' child porn images
Reader comment:
Blender
says,
It would be worthwhile checking out Brit comedian Chris Morris's 'Brass Eye' special, which satirised British media hysteria surrounding such issues. There's a fantastic scene featuring an interview in an art gallery. The episode was aired on Channel 4 and received record numbers of complaints but also a lot of critical acclaim. Many politicians and media pundits described it as 'shocking' but then later had to admit to having not seen the programme…. Interesting…. Link.
W. Vann Hall says,
Well, my involvement with Spectator may have destroyed my life, health, savings, and sanity, but in the end I *am* glad I had a chance to be associated with it and its parent company, Bold Type, Inc. Over the years Bold Type was a party in two cases that made it to the US Surpreme Court; the first one we lost, but the second — Ashcroft v Free Speech Coalition (00-795) — resulted in the sections of the Child Pornography Prevention Act of 1996 that criminalized 'virtual' child pornography being declared unconstitutional: Link
Tony Sanfilippo says,
Stephen Knox seems a similar case. Stephen was an honors grad in history at Penn State. He was caught with tapes of girls, 10 – 17 in their underpants, not naked. He was charged with possession of child porn when a U.S. District Court ruled that the thigh was a part of the girl’s genitals. The case went to the Supreme Court who refused to hear the case and thus the District decision was upheld. Stephen served seven years in a federal penitentiary. It’s considered the first case where a presumed interpretation of an image is used as a way to define pornography when the image itself isn’t.
The case is noted in this EFF article on child porn: Link.
Connerss says,
In the past, the question about child pornography was always related to the child being involved, and the harm done to the child. Now that these things can be created without harm to a child, I think the question is whether the images increase or decrease the desires of those that are sexually interested in children. Do the images decrease the urge to actually molest children, and thereby give them an oulet (however disgusting) for this problem? Or do they increase the urges? In a free society, in the privacy of your own home, if no one is hurt, can you draw what ever image you want? If beastiality is illegal, do people go to jail for drawing pics of people with horses?
