HELP
Right. This new Australian law.
I am both confused and frustrated by this stupid law. I have no background in legal issues so most things I try and read go straight over my head. Plus the law applies to a good deal of my website. So, if you have any info or guidance that would help me, please share.
This link has a good overview of what I need to deal with. From what I can tell (or maybe it's just my viewpoint), the PSA holds about 40 or so chan stories that fall into the legal and moral basis of the law (ie. child pornography, or "material that describes or depicts a person under 18 years of age, or who appears to be less than 18, in a manner that would offend a reasonable adult"). I'm moving these fics to another server. However, maybe a third to a half the stories on the PSA fall into the legal basis (ie. children under 18 involved in sexual acts). This "in a manner that would offend a reasonable adult" has got me stumped. Would an adult be offended by reading about two 16 or 17 year olds in a sexual act? Especially seeing as it is completely legally for the two teenagers to perform the act.
Going through some archived fics this weekend, I focused on the cross-gen R and NC-17 stories, and kind of just skipped over the rest. Seeing as the law is to stop child pornography people would be more worried about Snape/Harry or James/Harry than say, Harry/Ron or James/Remus. I found that a lot of fics don't mention ages, though more mention the Hogwarts year. But even this has me confused. For example, if it's a seventh year fic, people can be 18 in their seventh year, I think Ron's, Hermione's and Seamus' birthdays are all before Harry's. Is someone going to go through the HP books and find that Harry would not be 18 in his seventh year, and prosecute? What level of resources are going to be used to police this law? As long as the fic doesn't make reference to the young age of Harry, ie with words like 'youthful', 'child', 'young limbs' etc, I've left it alone. But then I read a fic where Harry was 20 and Snape still called him a child, so...
I found, from reading/skimming a few stories, that people don't really write Harry differently because of his age. I read Luthien's wonderful S/H response to stupid laws, where Harry is 21, and I couldn't really imagine how she (or anyone) would have wrote Harry that differently in that situation, if he was 17. There is this certain perception of Harry that a lot of people write, that I love, that doesn't really change much in the last few years of him being a teenager. I don't know, does that make sense to anyone?
And then there is fanart. Is that an exploitation of children? And how do you judge how old a person looks in a drawing? Granted, some are made to look young, and I am going to move these off the site, but most could have Harry 16 or 20. The link I mentioned above includes photos and morphed photos/pictures of children. Doesn't really mention art though. I think though, just to be safe, I'll be moving all the NC-17 and some of the R art off the site. Cause it's all a bit of a grey area for me.
In terms of the internet, things that stand out to me on this page are:
1. The Commonwealth censorship regime is "complaints based" (so I'm safe if no one complains about me.)
2. (a) material involving child pornography has long been illegal to distribute etc under other Commonwealth and State/Territory laws such as the Crimes Acts (So why all the fuss now?)
3. content hosted outside Australia is treated significantly more favourably than content hosted in Australia. (which makes me feel somewhat better.)
4. it is illegal to possess [material that]... "describes or depicts, in a way that is likely to cause offence to a reasonable adult, a person (whether or not engaged in sexual activity) who is a child under 16 or who looks like a child under 16"." (WTF? It doesn't even have to be sexual? Again there is the 'likely to cause offence' bit..)
But then, from this link again, table 3: Am I a distributor of child pornography? "The distributor of child pornography may or may not have a sexual interest in child pornography. For example, the Western Australian case of R v W (2000) 27 SR (WA) 148 involved a child who was prosecuted for possessing child pornography with the intent to sell it... The content of the web site included images and textual references to child pornography. The court held he was properly convicted." Does it make a difference if it's non-profit and I am not consciously distributing it for child pornography reasons (but may be used as such??)?
People have offered to host the chan material, so my thoughts are: I'll host it elsewhere, on a server not listed under my name (and therefore not linking it to me as an Australia citizen). And I won't link to it from the PSA (apparently linking to illegal material is an offence), but from a friends-locked livejournal that I'll create (which will also be used to distribute the NC-17 password too).
I may think of more stuff that's eating at me after I post this, but I'll edit it in later if that's the case.
Thoughts, opinions and suggestions would be greatly appreciated.
Also: It will still be a few days before PSA goes back up. Lots of little, time-consuming things still need doing. I'm still chasing authors too, so please get back to me if you're archived on the site and haven't already got back to me.
I am both confused and frustrated by this stupid law. I have no background in legal issues so most things I try and read go straight over my head. Plus the law applies to a good deal of my website. So, if you have any info or guidance that would help me, please share.
This link has a good overview of what I need to deal with. From what I can tell (or maybe it's just my viewpoint), the PSA holds about 40 or so chan stories that fall into the legal and moral basis of the law (ie. child pornography, or "material that describes or depicts a person under 18 years of age, or who appears to be less than 18, in a manner that would offend a reasonable adult"). I'm moving these fics to another server. However, maybe a third to a half the stories on the PSA fall into the legal basis (ie. children under 18 involved in sexual acts). This "in a manner that would offend a reasonable adult" has got me stumped. Would an adult be offended by reading about two 16 or 17 year olds in a sexual act? Especially seeing as it is completely legally for the two teenagers to perform the act.
Going through some archived fics this weekend, I focused on the cross-gen R and NC-17 stories, and kind of just skipped over the rest. Seeing as the law is to stop child pornography people would be more worried about Snape/Harry or James/Harry than say, Harry/Ron or James/Remus. I found that a lot of fics don't mention ages, though more mention the Hogwarts year. But even this has me confused. For example, if it's a seventh year fic, people can be 18 in their seventh year, I think Ron's, Hermione's and Seamus' birthdays are all before Harry's. Is someone going to go through the HP books and find that Harry would not be 18 in his seventh year, and prosecute? What level of resources are going to be used to police this law? As long as the fic doesn't make reference to the young age of Harry, ie with words like 'youthful', 'child', 'young limbs' etc, I've left it alone. But then I read a fic where Harry was 20 and Snape still called him a child, so...
I found, from reading/skimming a few stories, that people don't really write Harry differently because of his age. I read Luthien's wonderful S/H response to stupid laws, where Harry is 21, and I couldn't really imagine how she (or anyone) would have wrote Harry that differently in that situation, if he was 17. There is this certain perception of Harry that a lot of people write, that I love, that doesn't really change much in the last few years of him being a teenager. I don't know, does that make sense to anyone?
And then there is fanart. Is that an exploitation of children? And how do you judge how old a person looks in a drawing? Granted, some are made to look young, and I am going to move these off the site, but most could have Harry 16 or 20. The link I mentioned above includes photos and morphed photos/pictures of children. Doesn't really mention art though. I think though, just to be safe, I'll be moving all the NC-17 and some of the R art off the site. Cause it's all a bit of a grey area for me.
In terms of the internet, things that stand out to me on this page are:
1. The Commonwealth censorship regime is "complaints based" (so I'm safe if no one complains about me.)
2. (a) material involving child pornography has long been illegal to distribute etc under other Commonwealth and State/Territory laws such as the Crimes Acts (So why all the fuss now?)
3. content hosted outside Australia is treated significantly more favourably than content hosted in Australia. (which makes me feel somewhat better.)
4. it is illegal to possess [material that]... "describes or depicts, in a way that is likely to cause offence to a reasonable adult, a person (whether or not engaged in sexual activity) who is a child under 16 or who looks like a child under 16"." (WTF? It doesn't even have to be sexual? Again there is the 'likely to cause offence' bit..)
But then, from this link again, table 3: Am I a distributor of child pornography? "The distributor of child pornography may or may not have a sexual interest in child pornography. For example, the Western Australian case of R v W (2000) 27 SR (WA) 148 involved a child who was prosecuted for possessing child pornography with the intent to sell it... The content of the web site included images and textual references to child pornography. The court held he was properly convicted." Does it make a difference if it's non-profit and I am not consciously distributing it for child pornography reasons (but may be used as such??)?
People have offered to host the chan material, so my thoughts are: I'll host it elsewhere, on a server not listed under my name (and therefore not linking it to me as an Australia citizen). And I won't link to it from the PSA (apparently linking to illegal material is an offence), but from a friends-locked livejournal that I'll create (which will also be used to distribute the NC-17 password too).
I may think of more stuff that's eating at me after I post this, but I'll edit it in later if that's the case.
Thoughts, opinions and suggestions would be greatly appreciated.
Also: It will still be a few days before PSA goes back up. Lots of little, time-consuming things still need doing. I'm still chasing authors too, so please get back to me if you're archived on the site and haven't already got back to me.