If you’re swedish, read this. If you’re not, let me summarize. An expert and translator of Manga (animated stuff from Japan) here in Sweden was caught with some animated magazines and images portraying animated 12-13 year old characters in sexual context. So they raided his home and computer and found alot of it. So he was charged with one of the worst accusations – posession of child pornography. The reason was – this was children in sexual context and it didn’t matter that it was animated and thereby without victim, it was the fact that this guy had these in his possession and, supposedly, enjoyed to look at it. And they didn’t care that this was his job. He was found guilty by the first two courts but today the supreme court acquitted him on the grounds that it was animated and could not be confused with the real thing.
And I gotta give credit to the guy for defending this and taking it all the way. And he didn’t hide away or try to cover himself, he publicly admitted to having these things but didn’t agree it was a crime to have them, if anything they should go after the “twisted mind” (his words) that created them.
Two problems with this story:
1) So the state decided to put a man on trial for what he likes to look at? … I mean I would seriously want to give any person who watch child pornography for enjoyment a good beating and yes it’s illegal, but really, if it gives the state that much power to put a person on trial for what he likes to look at, where could that end?
2) This has set a legal precedent for whoever makes these godforsaken images and films to just add a filter in post production to make it look animated and it’d be completely legal to sell in Sweden! Somewhere someone has to decide what constitutes “animated” and where that line is drawn.
I really hope the lawmakers sit down to go through this decision and comes up with some way to handle this. And all I can say is … Lawmakers, tread carefully!
stoff
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