> No. Posession of any data should never be criminal.

Nonsense, if that data is national secrets, if it's child abuse photographs, if it's people's stolen credit card numbers, or any number of other types of data, mere possession is a problem.

> Just like you wouldn't send someone to prison how having a book

I would if it was a book full of child abuse photos.

I'm sorry, what is idiotic for you is common sense in most of the western world, you'll have to do more than call the idea stupid to argue a case like that.

Damn this subject is extremely touchy. I remember recently on the r/dataset subreddit, there was an image set that was essentially a set of pornography images. I remember thinking okay there could be a useful image type classification project in here. Then I started noticing some CLEAR ambiguities in the age of the subjects, I made a post on the thread and was told to basically shut the fuck up and I was making something of nothing.

Apparently I also don't take this shit lightly, because immediately reported that shit. All of this to say, prior to this experience I was under the impression that people should be allowed to study / research datasets of questionable morality / ethics but was completely naive and idealistic around researchers being completely benevolent.

I respect much more the ethical hoops required to study/research this type of material and I think other researchers ought to also respect them.

As for drawings, I agree with you. As for actual pictures, I very much disagree. Child porn serves as a violation of the subject's privacy, and its demand encourages more supply. There's a lot of scientific work on how child porn markets online operate.

There's also the argument that it's hard to prove someone has paid for it (either with money, or with another currency - some online CP forums work by trading images rather than money), so the next best alternative is to illegalise simple possession. Granted, this also runs into some problems; the same justification can be used to illegalise child pornographic drawings, which are frequently used to groom children. Because it's very hard to prove grooming of a victim who has already been groomed, the justification would argue that the next best way to ensure child rapists are caught would be to illegalise possession of the drawings.

Therefore, many countries use the strong probability of second-order effects to illegalise both drawings and photos/videos.

In my view, criminalizing the imagination (any imagination) is a severe misstep in itself, if not morally, then on the basis of most Western societies - the harm principle. Real child porn is not a product of the imagination, it is a documentation of real abuse to victims.

>>Real child porn is not a product of the imagination, it is a documentation of real abuse to victims.

Except that obviously some countries take it too far and people have been convicted for production of child pornography for having a picture of themselves on their own phone(say an 18 year old who took a picture of themselves when they were underage). That's not purely theoretical "this could happen, but probably won't because people apply common sense". That does actually happen in real world. And there is no abuse involved, maybe except for the abuse of he justice system. This wouldn't happen if just simply having a picture wasn't criminal in itself.

>>the justification would argue that the next best way to ensure child rapists are caught would be to illegalise possession of the drawings.

Would it? Because I feel that if any one of us came across child porn accidentally the right solution is to burn the machine down and never ever tell anyone about it, since mere fact of having looked at it(downloaded it to your browser) is a jail sentence in most civilized nations. If it was legal I would have absolutely no problem reporting it the police, which I am sure would help actually catching rapists. Which actually brings me to my next point - as far as I know, as long as minors are not involved, posession of pictures of pretty much any illegal act is not in itself illegal. You can go and google a video of couple guys killing another with a screwdriver - perfectly legal to watch. You can probably go on some snuff websites and watch videos of actual rape - not illegal to watch as far as I know. What's the difference? Because someone might masturbate to one of these but not the others? Now I don't believe that for a second, and it's not like the demand argument doesn't apply here either.