[jstarfish]

> imagine when it’s AI generated, photorealistic rape, snuff, child porn. Illegal or not, if it’s purely virtual law enforcement is going to focus on the subset of crimes which involve actual human victims.

In the US, all of that is already illegal. If you put yourself in a position where what you possess is indistinguishable from the real thing, the courts err on the side of the potential victim.

Law enforcement's priorities are not going to change; they don't distinguish between what's virtual or not. If it looks like CP, you can't point to a producer with valid 2257 documentation and it isn't obviously a cartoon, you're cooked.

[Fjolsvith]

This will change.

The 2257 law follows the legal reasoning that as a porn producer, you have the burden of proving your innocence. You have to show the proof that the person in your image or video is a real, live _adult_ person, and if you cannot, it is assumed that the person is a real, live _child_ person.

A landmark case will come along where a jury will decide that this new technology introduces reasonable doubt into this thinking. When this happens, the _government_ will then have the burden of proving that the person in the video or image is a real, live _child_ person.

[jpatokal]

How does "possession" work when everything's in the cloud and instantly accessible to anyone?

[jstarfish]

If it's in your Dropbox, it's presumed to be yours.

If you upload it to reddit, congratulations, you're no longer a consumer. You're a distributor. New charges apply.

If you just browse, you're sort of safe, but you better hope your browser isn't caching anything to disk. Forensic reconstruction still constitutes possession. But nobody just browses.

[djsumdog]

You're not "sort of safe" if you browse. The US has ISP reporting laws, as does Australia, South Africa, France and others:

http://chartsbin.com/view/q4y

It's a weird situation because in the UK, they simply block the content (no freedom of speech). In the US, we have freedom of speech so ISPs can't block anything. But they do have to report if you visit a site that contains illegal material or transmit it, plain text, through their services.

Child pornography is a strict liability crime to, so intent doesn't matter. Say you download something from /r/gonewild and the girl is 16, but she looks 20 to you. Too bad. You're not in violation of the law and can be put on a sex offender list.

Many people probably have illegal content without even realizing it. That's another reason why encrypting all your devices is so important.

[ceejayoz]

It's going to get very legally interesting when someone puts some child porn into the Ethereum blockchain.