Does Child-Made Porn = Child Porn?

by Jordan Yerman | February 20, 2007 at 04:16 pm

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When telecoms aggressively market feature-rich phones to today's youth, they're clearly not thinking far enough outside the box.

The question raised by this case is serious, though. Is porn created by two kids the same as child-porn as we've come to understand it? The court's decision hinges around the "YouTube factor" of mobile video: that, ultimately, this footage will end up on the web to be gazed at by all and sundry. The dissenting opinion states that the hackability of the machines and networks used to transfer the video is beside the point; the Internet is not on trial here.

Also, despite my lurid headline, a sixteen-year-old, whilst still a minor in the eyes of American law, is not a child in the same sense that a ten-year-old is a child.

What do you think?

Combine unsupervised teenagers, digital cameras and e-mail, and, given sufficient time, you'll end up with risque photographs on a computer somewhere.

There's a problem with that: Technically, those images constitute child pornography. That's what 16-year-old Amber and 17-year-old Jeremy, her boyfriend, both residents of the Tallahassee, Fla., area, learned firsthand. (Court documents include only their initials, A.H. and J.G.W., so we're using these pseudonyms to make this story a little easier to read.)

On March 25, 2004, Amber and Jeremy took digital photos of themselves naked and engaged in unspecified "sexual behavior." The two sent the photos from a computer at Amber's house to Jeremy's personal e-mail address. Neither teen showed the photographs to anyone else.

Court records don't say exactly what happened next--perhaps the parents wanted to end the relationship and raised the alarm--but somehow Florida police learned about the photos.

Amber and Jeremy were arrested. Each was charged with producing, directing or promoting a photograph featuring the sexual conduct of a child. Based on the contents of his e-mail account, Jeremy was charged with an extra count of possession of child pornography.

Oh, and I was pointed to this article by boingboing.net.