This leads inevitably to the chilling of free speech in that pretty soon people will be unwilling to run the risk of allowing speech (here, images) which might be illegal because if they err, then they will be criminally liable. Not good. Who, after all, decides what is to be criminal and what is to be legal? currently, the congress/legislatures define that and the courts & juries interpret those laws. this would result in a bureaucracy, a highly political animal, defining it. This, frankly, leads to the thought police. People such as mullahs, Pat Robertson, etc., would be put into place as the b’crats because they would love to seek the post so as to enforce their views upon the citizenry.
You get the same result when you pass laws which forbid advocacy of certain views. To wit, the prosecution and conviction with prison sentence of a journalist who advocated that the holocaust was a hoax. While it is clear that he is completely full of it, (I know this to be true not only from well established history, but also directly from my dad who fought over there….), the next thing will be to forbid the advocacy of gay marriage. These people wish to protect marriage (although it is not clear just how it is under attack)by creating a second class of citizen who is not entitled to the same protections the rest of us enjoy. Lest you doubt this, ask yourself, if interracial marriages would have been permitted by these holier than thou types?
In any event, review the case of the journalist, and ask yourself if that is the type of control over freedom of speech you want here. Because, in the end run, this is a thinly disguised assault not on child pornography, but in reality upon all pornography, and it will eventually play out that way.If this is permitted as a proper method of enforcement/definition of crime, then freedom of speech will go down the tubes in short order.
well, wasn’t that a nice ramble? didn’t address the technical aspect, but sometimes the technical aspect isn;’t the *really* big issue…
