"Leotards and the Law," morphed child porn lawsuit, from Netly

[Declan McCullagh <declan@well.com>]

---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Wed, 13 Aug 1997 08:07:47 -0700 (PDT)
From: Declan McCullagh <declan@well.com>
To: fight-censorship@vorlon.mit.edu
Subject: "Leotards and the Law," morphed child porn lawsuit, from Netly

---

http://pathfinder.com/netly/opinion/0,1042,1287,00.html

The Netly News Network (http://netlynews.com/)
August 13, 1997
   
Leotards And The Law
by Declan McCullagh (declan@well.com)
   
        Take an erotic photo of an adult and alter it in Photoshop to
   look as though he was a minor. Would you be breaking the law? A
   federal judge in San Francisco ruled yesterday you would be, rejecting
   a court challenge to a 1996 law banning computer-generated erotic
   images that "appear" to be of children.
   
        U.S. District Judge Samuel Conti ruled the adult film industry,
   which brought the suit and argued no simulated minors appear in
   movies, shouldn't feel threatened by the law. "Plaintiffs' products do
   not fall into these categories," he said in a 16-page decision that
   upheld the Child Pornography Prevention Act as constitutional.
   Plaintiffs challenged the law as vague and overbroad, saying it
   "criminalizes forms of expression in violation of the First and Fifth
   Amendments."
   
        But Conti skirted the more controversial question: What if
   someone did use Photoshop to synthesize images of half-naked children?
   Would that bit-twiddling violate the First Amendment's guarantees of
   freedom of speech? What about an anthropology professor's
   computer-generated movie of the sex play of South Pacific teens?
   
        "This ruling resolves nothing of consequence," says Eric
   Freedman, a constitutional law professor at Hofstra Law School. "The
   judge never reached the real problems of the statute. That'll have to
   wait for another lawsuit."

[...]