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Please excuse me if I over-explain, but the gloried history of anti-child-pornography law is just too absurd not to go into.

The big push for anti-CP legislation in the late 70s/early 80s began as a reaction to fears that millions of little boys were being kidnapped by evil gay men and being made into gay sex-slaves, their cute pubescent behinds captured for all the world to see in evil gay porn.

Various anti-CP commissions were conducted by the FBI and other gov't folks (such as the Meese Commission,) which universally found that these claims were pure and utter bullshit. Child pornography has never, ever, anywhere, been a multi-million dollar business, nor even a particularly successful business. (Otherwise folks would've protested against it being made illegal.)

Nevertheless, the crusade against CP continues. It is not enough to outlaw forms of speech which are already illegal to create (it being against the law to rape children in the first place), a new section of 'obscenity' law had to be created just so that the possession of CP could be outlawed.

(Nevermind that the relevant data on the subject suggests that possession of child pornography does not actually lead to an increase in child rape, and may actually reduce it. Compare Japan vs. South Africa.)

Despite the fact that the entire justification for outlawing CP is that it is damaging to children, Congress keeps trying to pass laws which outlaw "CP" which doesn't have any children involved at all--such as lolicon. Just as in a movie where only mechanical animals are slaughtered, "No actual animals were harmed in the making of this movie," so in an animated work, "No actual children were harmed in the making of this cartoon."

This doesn't seem like a hard standard to apply. Does it have real people? Then it's bad. Does it contain something which is not real people? Then it's okay.

Current US law prohibts works of digital pornography in which the people are 'indistinguishable' from actual people. I am fine with this rule; digital technology is not that advanced, and I can understand Congress's concern (given that congress knows jack s**t about how technology works) that someone might try to pass off real CP as digital.

However, Dwight Worley (now there's a guy who's never getting laid if I ever saw one,) was convicted under the 2003 'Protect' law (referenced in the previous paragraph) for receiving both "…twenty obscene Japanese anime cartoons that graphically depicted prepubesecent female children being forced to engage in genital-genital and oral-genital intercourse with adult males." and "…fourteen digital photographs of actual children engaging in sexually explicit conduct." and "…sending and receiving twenty obscene E-mails which graphically described, among other things, parents sexually molesting their own children." (Emphasis mine, quoted from the Wikipedia article.)

Now, I don't care what planet you live on, but cartoons are not by any stretch of the imagination indistinguishable from real life. If you can't distinguish them, I recommend a quick trip to the mental hospital.

Yes, the other stuff he's convicted for, at least the real CP, is actually illegal and he should have been convicted for. BUT, there are no laws against cartoon porn of any sort. And it is a general standard in US criminal law that the thing you're convicted for has to actually be illegal.


So watch your asses, kiddos. Lolicon isn't actually illegal, and it's unconstitutional for Congress to deem it so, but that won't actually stop the government from putting you in prison for it.

I don't find anything wrong with lolicon either.
Not much of a fan of it, but hell. To each their own.

Which is basically completely irrelevant if people are being convicted for owning lolicon.

Which they are.

It's not illegal, but you can still be put in jail for it.

The minute they try to put you in jail for it, you spring a lawsuit on 'em. It isn't illegal, you'll be out, and with some exta cash, if you spent any time in the big house.

Not a bad deal, if you ask me. Lolify me, cap'n.

Winning a suit for malicious prosecution is extremely difficult and in some states pretty much impossible. And that's without even begining to touch on how extremely wrong you are about the effort it would be to defend against an accusation of child pornography. I recommend that you read this article if you think it's a convenient process.

If the system worked the way you think it does, Dwight Whorley would not be in prison right now.

He is.

Criminal prosecution and conviction for possession of child pornography will essentially end your life as you know it in this country.

That 'comic shop' you mentioned has 24,000+ employees (including myself) and makes tens of millions of dollars a year, at least a full million of that on anime pornography, which includes lolicon. I think that doubled with a recent purchase of a major competitor. The local comic shop, Bosco's, does not sell true lolicon (and I don't care because that isn't my thing, let me make that clear. I am a free speech advocate and that alone is why I argue on this), and they did not before the law in question was passed, by the way (and they do sell quite a bit of other H content).

To be exact, it's the Movie Gallery rental store chain (non-franchise), and if you think a corporation that big doesn't have a very large legal team, political contributions for it's interests, etc., you don't know big corporations well enough. They've purchased quite the ton of the content in question after the law was passed (the items I have seen range in copyrights from 2001-06), so obviously they believe they can pull it off (a legal team that large would not fail to notice this law).

I believe this law to be morally wrong (and anti-child pornography laws to be morally right, by the way), questionably constitutional, and being interpreted more widely than the text allows, and I'm willing to bet that it will be challenged at some point here - most likely when a sufficiently high-profile person or company is targeted under it (and given a few companies are in the middle of translating series that have pushing-it loli content from what I've heard, they might be it).

Son of Axeman's statement, however, is indeed inaccurate. Suing directly for malicious prosecution is, exceptionally difficult. This is by design, as they don't want every criminal ever claiming it (see the movie "Find Me Guilty" - funny film BTW - for fine examples of malicious prosecution in a different sense - in particular notice how the main character specifically refuses to take malicious prosecution as an angle - even a non-lawyer with a sixth grade education knows how difficult this would be). Appealing based on the unconstitutionality of the law, especially with assistance from outside groups (the ACLU in particular would be relevent for a free-speech-related case such as this law), would have a better likelihood of success (again by design - the constitution is supposed to be designed to potentially safeguard against unjust laws).

If you believe the Libertarians, it's also possible (though good luck pulling THIS one off) to get a jury to put out a 'refuse to enforce' verdict - meaning that even though the person may be guilty of the law, they refuse to enforce said law due to it's unjust, misapplied, etc. nature, resulting in a verdict equivalent to Not Guilty for the defendant. This one's a confusing one and I'm not going to go into it further since I have not read both sides of the issue - if someone else here wishes to research the idea, that'd be interesting as a line of discussion, though again, unlikely to succeed in the real world - bringing that one up would definately result in extreme jury hanging (since you'd have to get the jury to agree that the laws is, in fact, unjust).