Federal judges don't have a ton of leeway with regards to the sentences they can choose to impose. Not only are there the Sentencing Guidelines which offer specific recommendations based on some relatively heavy math, but sentences are also appealable.
> But one thing I realized when reading about this case is that plenty of people paid by the government did the same thing that Schrank did. Detectives had to look at child porn, so did the prosecutors, and so did the judges.
Yes. But also, social media moderators obviously see a lot of this. And anyone who accidentally saw such in the moments before it was moderated away.
Which means basically all weebs technically deserve these 10 years. Loli stuff isn't well segregated from not-illegal stuff. Like, Gwern has a nice downloadable Danbooru dataset - terabytes of 'data'. But Danbooru content includes...
And even text could be illegal, AFAIK. So you could technically be 'guilty' of that if you, say, use GPT-3 and accidentally or "accidentally' get it to generate an 'adult' story which contains a reference to a child. Or by reading some Harry Potter fanfiction: https://ansuz.sooke.bc.ca/entry/35
"If it makes you moist, there's a good chance that it is pornography under a legal definition."
"A lot of fandom material does and is."
"A lot of fandom material includes children."
"The words "child" and "pornography" do not magically stop having their ordinary meanings when you put them together."
"Canadian law covers mere words. The US law may have some application to words also, though it's less repressive. Both have frightening application to "advocacy" speech, which can include even very innocuous (by fandom standards) discussion of the sexual attractiveness of a fictional character - let alone actual erotic stories about underage characters."
"Harry Potter is a child in the eyes of the law."
"Harry Potter will always be a child in the eyes of Joe and Mary Whitebread, representing the real (not fandom) mainstream who didn't read your 10,000-word explanation of how he grew up to be an adult."
The thing is, this news article provided a list of illegal 'works' the man owned. When I first read the story, years ago, I didn't think much before double-clicking on one of the positions to select the text, right-clicking and "Search Google for..." out of curiosity. Then I realized that I'm technically as guilty because of doing this. I was underage through, so I assume I was safe anyway. But still - that's just ridiculous.
> But one thing I realized when reading about this case is that plenty of people paid by the government did the same thing that Schrank did. Detectives had to look at child porn, so did the prosecutors, and so did the judges.
Yes. But also, social media moderators obviously see a lot of this. And anyone who accidentally saw such in the moments before it was moderated away.
Even fiction can be illegal. https://ansuz.sooke.bc.ca/entry/335
Which means basically all weebs technically deserve these 10 years. Loli stuff isn't well segregated from not-illegal stuff. Like, Gwern has a nice downloadable Danbooru dataset - terabytes of 'data'. But Danbooru content includes...
And even text could be illegal, AFAIK. So you could technically be 'guilty' of that if you, say, use GPT-3 and accidentally or "accidentally' get it to generate an 'adult' story which contains a reference to a child. Or by reading some Harry Potter fanfiction: https://ansuz.sooke.bc.ca/entry/35
"If it makes you moist, there's a good chance that it is pornography under a legal definition."
"A lot of fandom material does and is."
"A lot of fandom material includes children."
"The words "child" and "pornography" do not magically stop having their ordinary meanings when you put them together."
"Canadian law covers mere words. The US law may have some application to words also, though it's less repressive. Both have frightening application to "advocacy" speech, which can include even very innocuous (by fandom standards) discussion of the sexual attractiveness of a fictional character - let alone actual erotic stories about underage characters."
"Harry Potter is a child in the eyes of the law."
"Harry Potter will always be a child in the eyes of Joe and Mary Whitebread, representing the real (not fandom) mainstream who didn't read your 10,000-word explanation of how he grew up to be an adult."
It's bizarre to me that people defend this insanity. Fortunately, for some reason, it's generally not persecuted. Only weird edge cases are, like someone purchasing physical stuff from Japan or someone's laptop being searched on the border. Like in this story: https://www.animenewsnetwork.com/news/2010-02-11/christopher-handley-sentenced-to-6-months-for-obscene-manga
The thing is, this news article provided a list of illegal 'works' the man owned. When I first read the story, years ago, I didn't think much before double-clicking on one of the positions to select the text, right-clicking and "Search Google for..." out of curiosity. Then I realized that I'm technically as guilty because of doing this. I was underage through, so I assume I was safe anyway. But still - that's just ridiculous.