Would it be better if they were dead?

It's hard to take these kinds of rationalizations seriously. Simply, most people in our society find this sort of pornography revolting, and the law, which reflects public outrage, has banned it. We didn't reach that outrage from evidential reasoning. Moral revulsion is an irreducible position, and it's not subject to dispute. Likewise, we've never had a rigorous experiment to test whether murder should be illegal or not. That isn't how laws get made.

The problem with the public outrage however is that is makes any rational discussion almost impossible

When the topic of child porn comes up, emotion takes over and logic goes away.

One of the largest problems with child porn is the actual definition of child porn. To most people when they hear of child porn, they think of a Person under the age of puberty being forced to engage in a sex act with an adult person.

However 2 17 year olds having sex and video taping it is also child porn, they can (and have been) charged with producing, and distributing said child porn

Many many many teens were arrested and convicted before states starting passing exceptions to the law, and many states today it is still illegal for a 17year old person to send a nude photo of themselves to another 17year old person, haven forbid a 17 year and 364 day old person send picture to a 17 year and 366 day year old person....

Yes, a lot of "child porn" charges are deeply stupid. When we talk about child porn rings and websites, we are not talking about those. We are talking about the "raping 8-year-olds" kind.

You believe this to be case because you are conditioned by the FBI to believe this is the case.

Do you know that every image on this server was the "raping 8-year-olds" kind. Did you personally examine every image?

That's really not important though is it. If you're being prosecuted (at least in the UK) for such crimes then the age of the children and the level of the pornography is assessed and taken in to account in your sentencing. If the only image you'd acquired was a nip-slip of a teenager -- or you had a selfie with a same-age partner -- then the sentence would be entirely different to having thousands of images of pre-teen rape. Whilst USA law is often ridiculous it doesn't seem to be that lame that such differentiations aren't being made.

Where are you trying to go with this rhetorical question?

According to US law is there is no difference between those 2 types.

Do you have any sources to back up that assertion?

Did you? No? Then you don't have any more information than I do.

Nobody visits a darknet site called "The Playpen" to trade pics of consenting 17-year-olds. For all you or I know, the site never existed in the first place and the FBI set up the entire thing as a cover to silence dissidents. But that would be a problem with government corruption, not with the definition of child porn.

And whether the associated videos are or aren't watched has no effect on that. Watching them causes no additional harm.

Are you saying that if you were abused in the 80s, you would be fine with people watching footage of it today for kicks?

I think that's unduly reductive. He seems instead to be saying that if you were abused in the 80s, you should just get over the thought of people watching footage of it today for kicks.

Which is an interesting viewpoint, to be sure. I wonder whether he'd say the same to an adult victim of rape whose abuse was videoed and passed around for other people to get off on. That's a pretty close parallel, but it never seems to turn up in discussions like these, and I wonder why that is.

It seems to me that distributing such videos would have far more in common with defamation than with the original abuse. Merely having or watching them... is probably bad and wrong but not something that ought to actually be legally punishable.

That's callous and fairly nonsensical. We don't say to women who are targeted for 'revenge porn' that they should just live with it.

Those women are personally identified so they can suffer real world embarrassment from people they know. Children in child porn are probably far more anonymous and untraceable as adults just from their images.

I think the idea of being imprisoned for viewing a picture on a website is pretty draconian. We would never stand for it if we weren't so obsessed with vilifying sexual deviants.

The argument that consumers fuel the market for producers to abuse children surely fails when there's no payment being made. Perhaps the crime should be limited to paying for it, a bit like why we don't allow payment for organ donation.

> The argument that consumers fuel the market for producers to abuse children surely fails when there's no payment being made.

Does it? In warez rings, new releases are the surest route to high reputation and broad access to content. I don't see an a priori reason why the same might not be true for other sorts of illicit content, including this.

Yes, but we also don't consider it a crime to view said revenge porn.

Jennifer Lawrence declared that everyone who looked at the leaked nudes of her was committing sexual assault against her (or words to that effect). The idea being that by knowingly viewing "private" content without consent is invasive.

I'm not sure you can legislate it, but I found her position far more satisfying than "oh no I should never have taken the pics in the first place what a mistake to think I wouldn't be hacked".

"we", what's your scope there.

Most people would consider it a moral wrong I'd warrant. It's like not a crime only by virtue of being a relatively new thing, and other mitigations like it being difficult to police (is there a point in making crimes you don't police and can't prosecute under).

Revenge porn will to me always be a copyright issue, and being one, it's up to those women (and men) to sue when they find someone violating their copyright.

Half the time the copyright will belong to the abusive ex partner who photographed them. You don't own your own image.