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Part II



Part II, Is it really a crime to look?

Again, this is something that we've taken as a matter of course. It's institutionalized in our laws, based on the idea that cutting the demand will reduce the supply. This is pretty much right out of the economics book where it says that when demand falls, then suppliers go broke and look for some other product to manufacture. But, will this really work?

There are some other examples we can look at to see. The first is Prohibition in the Roaring Twenties when the US government made alcohol sales illegal. Result: Lots of bootleggers got really rich. Next, the drug war. Result: Lots of drug dealers got really rich. There are thousands of drug consumers and small-time dealers who are now doing time on relatively minor offenses, while the flow of drugs has only organized into a bigger and better business. I submit that the war on child-porn will be the same. Seventeen thousand UK citizens might go to jail for looking at a website, but I predict this will not slow the demand one bit. It will only make the suppliers richer. Asking people to refrain from looking voluntarily might actually reduce the demand, but declaring it illegal only makes everyone more careful of entering their credit card numbers into pay-to-download sites.

So if it's worthless to reduce the demand, what do the restrictions on looking really amount to? Thought control, as Brian May suggested? He wasn't alone. Some of the articles brought this up, too.

So, now to what Pete has actually done. He looked at a picture. Normally this would not be a problem, and even some questionable photos have already been declared okay. If it were Mapplethorpe's picture of the little girl with her dress up, for example, it's already been declared art by a court of law. If it was a video capture of Christina Aguilera at 17, then it's pretty much played on VH1 already. However, Pete has said this website contained some pretty hardcore pics. Let's assume the worst--say Pete actually was charged the subscription price of $29.95 for one month's access. The approved chain of logic is that this encouraged the manufacturer to abuse another child to produce $29.95 of similar pictures, so Pete owes the cosmic balance $29.95. Then he spoke out against child porn in a couple of documented interviews and published "A Different Bomb" which publicized the issue even further. How much are these worth in the cosmic balance?

In other words, what Pete did was illegal, but was it really morally wrong? What if Pete now uses the knowledge he's gained and the publicity he's received to assist in the fight against child abuse and child porn? How will this weigh on the morality scale? Which is more important here, legality or morality?

After having a look at the set-up, I don't much like the way the laws are being framed, interpreted, and enforced on this. I'll have to think a little bit on what might be a better way to go about it.


keets

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